Word: rhett
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Starring Joanne Whalley-Kilmer in the title role, Timothy Dalton as Rhett Butler and 2,000 extras, Scarlett is a prodigal $45 million production -- the most expensive mini-series ever made. Rights to the book cost a record $9 million; history professors were marshaled to advise on the proper period china and silverware. And CBS, hoping that the show will help carry it to first place in the November Nielsen sweeps, is promoting the epic accordingly. In addition to launching a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign, aimed largely at young women, the network will hold online computer discussions and offer...
...book did, the TV movie whisks us along on Scarlett O'Hara's unsuspenseful journey to self-actualization. As it happens, this requires stops in no fewer than 53 locations. Scarlett moves about from Atlanta to Charleston, from Savannah to Ireland, chasing Rhett, making a fortune in real estate, succoring rebel peasants and raising a child. Predictably a postfeminist heroine, she is self-sufficient and sexually assertive yet at the same time sweetly vulnerable. Ultimately, she gets her man, all the while remaining kind, politically concerned and mesmerizingly thin...
...performance in the 1989 film Scandal, Whalley-Kilmer brings an unnecessary sophistication to a role that requires her to do little more than kiss in midsentence and appear alternately tortured and feisty. In fact, many cast members -- including Sir John Gielgud (Scarlett's grandfather) and Julie Harris (Rhett's mother) -- seem wasted on a story without much of a plot and a script devoid of sharp dialogue. Dalton is a sufficiently handsome Rhett, although he lacks the intelligence and wit of Gone With the Wind's Clark Gable. What's more, Dalton is not given resonant lines like the movie...
Scarlett the telefilm is slightly more salacious than Scarlett the tome but ultimately no more compelling or fun. Margaret Mitchell's estate stipulated that a sequel to her 1936 novel not contain any explicit sex. The TV producers, spared this constraint, show Scarlett and Rhett disrobing each other frantically in a fisherman's hut. Moreover, the character of Lord Fenton (Sean Bean), with whom Scarlett has an affair, is given far more prominence than he enjoyed in the book. He is a secret rapist-murderer who beats Scarlett when she dismisses him. "I am not accustomed to sudden onsets...
...Rhett Jones, professor of history and Afro-American studies at Brown, said that because there are not that many professors of Afro-American studies in the pipeline of academia, all the universities end up shuffling the same top people around...