Word: winded
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...most astonishing revelation about Gone With the Wind is how exquisitely it is shot. The transfer to wide screen (very well handled by MGM's technicians) only confirms the realization that the film could have been made yesterday. The technical brilliance of its camerawork extends from ravishingly beautiful moving shots to the subtler effects of lighting and camera placement. Carefully controlled backlighting enables several crucial scenes to be played substantially in darkness, a dramatic effect rarely associated with Hollywood high baroque...
...audacity of visual technique fits perfectly with the straight-forwardness of the narrative style. The unflinching sincerity of director and writer (Sidney Howard, with assisst from Ben Hecht and Scott Fitzgerald) transcends Margaret Mitchell's soap opera, giving Gone With the Wind the truly epic quality of the best films of John Ford. At the very least, it depicts the passage of time better than any other picture I've seen; we share with the characters the memory of scenes as if they had occurred 15 years before. Our sense of history is reinforced by the obvious visual deterioration from...
From producer David O. Selznick's overall conception to the small details of costume and set decoration, Gone With the Wind has an innate grace, an elegance and dignity that has disappeared from movie-making. Even the rapid succession of disasters in the final 20 minutes--Scarlett's miscarriage, her daughter's fatal accident, Rhett's madness and Melanie's death--gains complete plausibility from the nuances of performnace and the stylistic subtlety of direction...
...flawless supporting cast, Hattie McDaniel as Mammy gives a performance of star quality. Although a master of comic technique, she never sacrifices her role to the easy laugh; the development of her character through the years is the rock on which Gone With the Wind is built. Indeed, all the Negroes (even Butterfly McQueen, with the immortal "Lawsy, Miz Scahlet, Ah don' know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies!") are so carefully individualized as characters that it is absurd to label them stereotypes or criticize the film for racial naivete...
Whether there actually was, as the Prologue states, "a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields" is irrelevant. Gone With the Wind convinces us that there was, and like the Iliad, becomes as much a part of the national heritage as the story it tells...