AndyM108

Someone might note that four of the Robert Ryan* movies today have war-related themes: Post-war Nazi underground (Berlin Express); Troop betrayal by an officer (Act of Violence); military justice (Crossfire); and vigilante acts against a Nisei soldier (Bad Day at Black Rock). "War movies" don't have to be about battles, and in fact in many or even most of the best ones battle scenes aren't the focus of the film. *Himself a WW2 veteran

Good summary, selimsa. Scarlett and Rhett are of course the two redeeming characters who took what otherwise would have been a hopelessly sentimental piece of drivel and made it into a movie to remember. I've never cared that much for Vivien Leigh, but her performance in GWTW fully deserved that Oscar.

I'm well acquainted with Frank Owsley's works, and also with his association with the agrarian movement centered around the "I'll Take My Stand" crowd. Let's just say that while I can appreciate his (and their) lament for the lost folkways of the region as factories replaced farms, his views on blacks, which I won't quote here unless asked, make it hard for me to see him as anything much beyond one more defender of our American caste system. At best he was a romantic and at worst he shared much of the Ku Kluxers' views about white supremacy. I'm sure you're well familiar with those words which I'm referring to. And of course we know that most plantation overseers were themselves slaves. Which proves absolutely nothing, since there were always others to keep them in line in case they showed the slightest hint of weakening.

No, Margaret Mitchell was not personally responsible for the soft focus view of the Confederacy that appears in GWTW. She was simply regur- gitating the Lost Cause nonsense that she and a lot of southerners were exposed to while growing up. I should have made it clearer that the book was where that view came from and it was not something added by Hollywood. Okay, I'd agree with that, though the movie popularized the message of the benevolent plantation to a degree than even the bestselling book never could have. In a back-handed way, you do have to hand it to the southern planters, getting the average person to fight and support a war whose purpose was to preserve that peculiar institution that they got little advantage from. Well, when you're the fire hydrant of the underdog, you still need to think there's someone who's beneath you. In this case it was the slaves who filled that role for the non-slaveholding whites of the South. The plantation owners weren't the first ruling class able to find a clueless set of allies, and they were hardly the last; it's game that gets played over and over, with only the identities of the scapegoats being changed. Say what one will about the African part of the slave trade, at least they likely didn't hypocritically blather on about all men being created equal and liberty like the Founding Slaveocrats did. Not that we know of, but I'm sure they probably found some other high-minded justification for their actions. There's always a "reason".

In the Civil War, how many of the rebel soldiers fighting and dying on the battlefields do you think actually owned any slaves? Most likely it was mostly officers, government officials and most anyone else who would never pick up a musket or charge into a battle who were the slaveowners. The crux of the fighting was done by sharecroppers and other farmers who were dirt poor and really had nothing to gain and not much to lose otherwise. Like most wars. And yet the descendants of those non-slaveowners were often the fiercest defenders of the orthodox southern view of slavery and its aftermath. They didn't have to own slaves to defend the institution and despise the slaves much more than the slaves' owners. The fact remains that GWTW depicted plantation live in a benevolent (and false) light. As for Lee, Eisenhower also maintained a warm relationship with Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov long after the US-Soviet alliance had been transformed into that of bitter adversaries. As you note, military leaders often have a professional respect for their enemy counterparts that I suspect is based on a reading of their underlying character. Even though objectively Lee was a traitor, I can't really be too surprised that Eisenhower might see him in a broader picture. BTW if you want an example of what Hollywood can do with a war movie when it tries to get "inside" the enemy soldier, there's Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima, the counterpart to Flags of Our Fathers. Back-to-back, you can't find a better pair of American-made war films.

I have found myself watching MOVIES almost as much as TCM because they show studio era movies I have never seen or movies I haven't seen in a long time. They have the Fox 20th Century films TCM doesn't have. AND: MOVIES shows way more repeats than TCM. So once I have got my fix on those Fox films, I'm sure I turn to them less and less. The Fox Movie Channel still shows commercially uninterrupted classic Fox films between 3:00 am and 3:00 pm. I've managed to see and capture close to 100 gems by keeping on top of their schedule over the past four years, even if that schedule is nearly all repeats. ------------------------------------------- *In between movies TCM does advertise DVD box sets like for say John Wayne and Paul Newman so is that really commercial-free?* Of course it is. What matters is that TCM doesn't advertise those box sets in the middle of the movie. PBS does the same thing with its corporate sponsors' announcements before and after the show begins. ------------------------------------------- Occasionally, PBS will air uninterrupted classic films. Some channels do this once a week - depends on your locale. True, but I don't think PBS has ever shown a single classic movie that I haven't seen dozens of times on TCM. Their selection is strictly AFI Top 100, and usually more like Top 50. It's got about as much surprise and variety as the old Top 40 AM radio, even less than the TCM "Essentials".

Any movie channel that interrupts a film for even *one* commercial is a complete non-starter in my book. TCM is the only non-premium cable movie channel that remains 100% commercial-free. I can live with commercials, but only after the movie has run uninterrupted.

I'm sure many people who lived in the south at the same time as Mitchell heard similar stories and imbibed the Lost Cause mythology. Faulkner was her contemporary and he likely heard many of the things she did. So it is Mitchell herself who is responsible for the rose-colored view of the Confederacy that appears in the movie. No, neither Margaret Mitchell nor MGM was solely responsible for the sentimentalized view of slavery that was prevalent in the South of 1939. But Mitchell wrote the book and MGM made the movie. Without the Nazi movement, the Nuremberg defendants wouldn't have likely opened concentration camps and started WW2 on their own, either. Does that mean that they should have received some sort of a "I was only following the zeitgeist" pass? William Faulkner was also a product of his times, and at one unfortunate moment in the late 1950's he proclaimed that he'd give his life to defend Mississippi against the U.S. Army. And yet somehow he managed to write a book ( Intruder in the Dust ) that portrayed the leading African American character (Lucas Beauchamp, played by Juano Hernandez in the movie) as a fully developed human being, and MGM somehow managed to keep that portrayal intact during the film version. Writers don't have to be captives of their region's mythology in order to depict life as it really is. And of course Georgia in the 1930s was still a segregated society, so it's not surprising that the African-American actors were treated the way they were. Your point there being what?

*No question about that, as has been repeatedly brought out in the Henry Louis Gates documentary series that's been showing for the past few weeks on PBS.* I watched it the other night and was surprised that fact was admitted as an indisputable fact. Refreshing. Glad to see you caught that PBS show, but it's been quite a while since any serious historian, including Henry Louis Gates, has tried to minimize the existence of native African slave brokers.

*Do you think those textbooks had no influence on the millions of people who read them? And do you really think that Southerners, in particular, had even a clue as to what slavery was really like? If they did, they sure never expressed it in public - - - - in public it was "We always treated 'our' slaves well" and "They were better off on the plantation than they would have been in Africa", as if slavery had been some sort of act of Christian benevolence.* There were Northern newspapers at that time that agreed with your comment one hundred percent. Sure, and so did some Copperhead politicians. I've never tried to claim that the North as a whole was particularly enlightened. Remember the black chiefs of Africa who enjoyed handsome profits enslaving their fellow Africans who had no thought of Christ at all. No question about that, as has been repeatedly brought out in the Henry Louis Gates documentary series that's been showing for the past few weeks on PBS. But that indisputable point was scarcely any consolation to the slaves. If you were captured and sold into slavery by a white person, would you feel any better than if you'd been captured and sold by an African or an Asian? I doubt it.

And I see they are still showing early 30's films. Don't they have any other more recent films? Leo, all you ever do is complain about everything. In 1000 posts I can't remember a single time where you went out of your way to find anything good about a network you obviously must watch on a regular basis. Here's a thought: To celebrate your 1000 post milestone, why don't you make up a list of about 1000 movies you'd like to see? If nothing else, it'd take your mind off complaining for a few days.

It doesn't take much more than a quick glance at Wiki to find these paragraphs: *While "the South" exists as a geographical region of the United States, it is also said to exist as "a place of the imagination" of writers.[44] An image of "the South" was fixed in Mitchell's imagination when at six years old her mother took her on a buggy tour through ruined plantations and "Sherman's sentinels",[45] the brick and stone chimneys that remained after William Tecumseh Sherman's "March and torch" through Georgia.[46] Mitchell would later recall what her mother had said to her:* *She talked about the world those people had lived in, such a secure world, and how it had exploded beneath them. And she told me that my world was going to explode under me, someday, and God help me if I didn't have some weapon to meet the new world.[45]* *From an imagination cultivated in her youth, Margaret Mitchell's defensive weapon would become her writing.[45]* *Mitchell said she heard Civil War stories from her relatives when she was growing up:* *On Sunday afternoons when we went calling on the older generation of relatives, those who had been active in the Sixties, I sat on the bony knees of veterans and the fat slippery laps of great aunts and heard them talk.[47]* *On summer vacations, she visited her maternal great-aunts, Mary Ellen ("Mamie") Fitzgerald and Sarah ("Sis") Fitzgerald, who still lived at her great-grandparents' plantation home in Jonesboro.[48] Mamie had been twenty-one years old and Sis was thirteen when the Civil War began.[49]....* *Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Gone with the Wind is that people worldwide would incorrectly think it was the true story of the Old South and how it was changed by the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The film version of the novel "amplified this effect".[150] Scholars of the period have written in recent years about the negative effects the novel has had on race relations by its resurrection of Lost Cause mythology.[151]*

*And do you really think it was purely coincidental that Atlanta staged a three day lovefest for the Old Confederacy to coincide with the premiere? Please.* My point exactly, Andy. ATLANTA staged the lovefest. NOT MGM. And certainly not the movie! Yes, but MGM staged the movie that was the *basis* for the lovefest. Do you think that lovefest would've occurred if the movie had been presented from the Northern point of view, or if it had portrayed slavery as it actually was? Look, propaganda only works when the people you're trying to influence don't know all the facts. You use it to try to influence them with YOUR version of "the truth". Doesn't actually need to be true, and often isn't. But by the time this movie came out, we all KNEW the truth. I don't think too many people, if any at all, came out of a viewing of GWTW thinking, "Gee. Maybe the South WAS right!" Are you kidding? Have you ever read any of the textbooks of 1939 and what they had to say about slavery and Reconstruction? I'm not just talking about Southern textbooks, either. They were almost completely told from the point of view that the Civil War was a "tragedy" that was largely brought about by northern abolitionists, and followed by a reign of black and carpetbagger-run terror and corruption. Do you think those textbooks had no influence on the millions of people who read them? And do you really think that Southerners, in particular, had even a clue as to what slavery was really like? If they did, they sure never expressed it in public - - - - in public it was "We always treated 'our' slaves well" and "They were better off on the plantation than they would have been in Africa", as if slavery had been some sort of act of Christian benevolence. Even today, there is residual resentment towards how the Civil War turned out. There are still nitwits who "proudly" display the rebel flag. I consider it to be akin to flying a NAZI flag. But nonetheless, as far as the MOVIE goes, it's the CHARACTERS in both book and movie who "glorify" the Old South, NOT the movie itself, nor the studio. I guess I'm not getting the distinction you're making between the characters and the movie itself. What is a movie without its characters?

Yeah, when it comes to identifying with heroes, pretty much everything except the person's underlying character is irrelevant to me. This evening's upcoming screening of Sergeant Rutledge, for example, with Woody Strode being a case in point, while at the same time it's hard not to identify in some ways with Gable's Rhett Butler in GWTW, even though we know he's a black market gunrunner for the Confederacy. What often determines whom we identify with is what we bring to the picture, since in many ways, movies are one big Rorschach test.

*There are quite a few movies that I'm looking forwarrd to seeing, especially the following:* *THE SEARCH (1948)* I always kind of rag on Hollywood movies with war themes, as they've always seemed to focus solely on American soldiers and give particular short shrift to the civilians who were caught up in the crossfire. But The Search . . . . God, what a beautiful film. Montgomery Clift was perfect, Aline MacMahon was exactly as I'd imagined her to be in real life, and the two foreign actors, Ivan Jandl and Jarmila Novotna, played their parts as if they'd been rehearsing them during the war itself. Throw in that it was filmed amidst the ruins of Germany, and it conveys a sense of realism that you almost never see from MGM. *THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964)* Another anomalous favorite of mine, as I usually can't stand musicals. But this one is so, well, different, and so utterly captivating in its sheer improbability (every line is sung, rather than spoken) that it just charmed me out of my seat. I can hardly wait to see these two again.

Years later, in the late 1980s, I photographed the beauty queens of a small town Southern high school, which was integrated about 50-50, black and white. For the annual photos that year, all the beauty queens (4 black and 4 white) dressed up in fancy hoop skirts and had their photos taken on the steps of an old Greek Revival style mansion that looked like a big wealthy Civil War era Southern plantation house. Dang! The black girls looked great and they looked right at home on those steps and in those photos, and they loved having their photos taken there, and they loved dressing up in those dresses too! True story: My first real college GF was one of the first five black undergraduates admitted to Duke. This was in 1963, and we met during a civil rights demonstration in Durham, when we were paired as a couple for testing newly integrated restaurants. We lasted together for about a semester, and discussed anything and everything under the Sun, including our favorite books and movies. And what was her favorite book? Gone With The Wind. She said she'd read it at least five times. I'm sure that only reason she didn't say that GWTW was also her favorite movie was that at the time it hadn't been released for many years. But the last time I talked to her, which was in 1969, she said she'd seen it several times upon its 1968 re-release. And loved it. I only wish I'd been able to see it with her so that we could have begun a new discussion, but she passed away in 1998 and I never saw her again.

That was my second time for Patterns, and I agree completely with your take. In fact from The Hucksters through Executive Suite through Patterns through The Power and the Prize (the movie on now), this has been as good an afternoon as I've seen here in a long time. Not a clinker in the entire carload. With different twists, all four films deal with the corporate life and the fight to retain some sort of human values within it, and every one of them is played well by a fine cast. *Gable / Kerr / Gardner / Arnold,* then Holden / Allyson / Stanwyck / March / Calhern / Pidgeon / Douglas / Holm, then *Heflin / Sloane / Begley / Straight,* and finally Taylor / Mueller / Ives / Astor / Coburn / Hardwicke. What's really nice about these movies is that even though all four of them have well known stars in the leads, these films let them display their skills as actors, not as pretty faces or action figures. I hope people here have had a chance to catch them.

There's a lot for me to address here. First, about Scarlett's personality. Exasperating and scheming but fascinating, and she did what she felt she had to do. And with this turnip as her witness, she never went hungry again. I've got no complaints against Scarlett as long as she sticks to the celluloid. I'm not sure what your in-laws have to do with Scarlett. And I see we're dealing once again with that phrase "glorifying". I don't see where this movie "glorifies" the South at all. As far as the premier goes, it appeared the SOUTH was "glorifying" itself more than anything else. And the three day affair was more like MGM glorifying the MOVIE, NOT the South. Or are you implying that simply making a movie about Adolf Hitler somehow "glorifies" him? When all it actually might do is simply tell a story? Oh, for God's sake. The movie begins with a depiction of a slave plantation as if it were the Royal Court of Princess Grace of Monaco, complete with thousand dollar dresses. It treats plantation life, slavery and all, as if it's a humane way of living, indeed even a rather pleasant one, until interrupted by war and "carpetbaggers." No, it's not as thoroughly nasty and racist as Birth of a Nation, and in fact there's no intentional racism in it at all. But if it doesn't glorify the Confederate Army per se, it tells its tale solely from the point of view of the slaveholders and former slaveholders, the class which the Confederacy was defending. It tells this tale rather magnificently well, from the acting to the screenplay to the beautiful cinematography, but isn't that what good propaganda is supposed to do? And do you really think it was purely coincidental that Atlanta staged a three day lovefest for the Old Confederacy to coincide with the premiere? Please.

I remember reading they had Civil War Veterans (the few that were left) at the festivities also.......(the Confederate side I mean! LOL) Here's just a brief excerpt from that rather fascinating link: " *Ann Rutherford was a very busy woman today, greeting Confederate Civil War veterans at the Old Soldiers Home on Confederate Avenue near Grant Park,* lunching with Kay Kyser (host of this evening's gala event) and a group of the Junior Chamber, then returning to Candler Field to meet the plane bringing in Clark Gable and his wife, Carole Lombard. Although Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier were famous, it was Gable and Lombard who were by far the most popular. The motorcade followed a pre-planned routed down Peachtree Street where thousands of fans could see the stars. "Thursday night was the "Gone With The Wind" Ball, an event hosted by the Junior Chamber of Commerce. The guest list was truly remarkable, representing an eclectic group of Americans...as long as you were a Hollywood celebrity, a southern politician or wealthy. A sampling of the list includes: Capt. Eddie Rickenbaker - who had conveniently scheduled an Eastern Air Lines shareholders meeting around the premiere Many members of the Rich family, owners of Rich's department stores William Paley, radio pioneer Georgia historian and artist Wilbur Kurtz, who served as technical director Laura Hope Crews (Aunt Pittypat, a favorite of the Atlanta crowd) " *Noticeably absent were Hattie McDaniel (Mammy) and Butterfly McQueen (Prissy), black actresses with major roles who were not welcome in the white side of the segregated Atlanta society. Noticeably present was a young Martin Luther King, Jr., who sang in a "negro boys choir" from his father's church, Ebenezer Baptist.* "

There's an "Ignore Member" function, but what we need is a way to remove a thread from the "General Discussions" list. Every day, two positions on the first page get hijacked by this same spammer who simply changes his identity and comes back the next day. How long does this have to go on before the tech people devise a way to prevent this sort of clutter?

Would you call James Dean an icon, a legend or neither? I'd call him both, even though I OD'd on those three movies of his about a decade ago. He's an icon because of his eternal Rebel look, which never got old because Dean never got old. He's a legend because of a perfect storm: - - - Handsome but also "cute" and decidedly unthreatening - - - Women imagine either mothering him or reforming him, or maybe just riding on the back of his motorcycle - - - Sensitive, misunderstood adolescent - - - Died young; died glamorously, and in a sports car, yet - - - Made only three films that showed both his talent and aroused speculation of What Might Have Been - - - Rumors of being bisexual but not confirmed as such, giving him kind of the best of both worlds I always loved the way that in Giant, both Dean and Liz Taylor played characters *much* older than they were in real life. Both of them were in their early 20's during the filming, but Dean played a grizzled coot in his late 30's/early 40's, while Liz played a grandmother. And both did a pretty good job at it.

GWTW never made the claim it was based on pure historical fact, nor a documentary, therefore the "soap opera" schtick works OK because people then were suckers for romantic "slop". This was NOT the only movie back then guilty of it. Sure, but how many other movies accompanied their premieres with *three full days* of festivities centered around the Civil War, featuring (among other events) a "Civil War Ball" to which only the white members of the cast were invited? HOW can it be "Confederate propaganda" when there WAS no Confederacy at the time it was filmed? Propaganda only works when it's CURRENT. The Confederacy was 70 years gone at the time.+ So if a movie were to be made today that glorified Hitler, that wouldn't qualify as Nazi propaganda? I doubt, even in 1939, the movie stirred any sympathy towards the South's situation during the civil war. It all was just a backdrop for the story, which could have taken place at any time. Just read the full story of that Atlanta premiere on the link below and see if you still believe that statement. Here it is: http://www.aboutnorthgeorgia.com/ang/Atlanta_Premiere_of_Gone_With_The_Wind Again, you can have a movie that's great on "its own terms" and still be a total joke when it comes to representing the basic nature of the institutions it was depicting. That's GWTW in a nutshell.

*GWTW has always been a shamelessly lying piece of Confederate propaganda in the form of one of the more entertaining and best made films of all time. Contradictions exist everywhere, and this is merely one of them. You just have to suppress everything you know about the reality of slavery for 233 minutes to appreciate the movie on its own terms.* The fact remains that since this movie was made 75 years ago, it can only be judged against the standards of those times. And by those standards it was an excellent film. By today's standards, most of the fare on TCM seems quaint, dated and campy. Even the dramas. But taken with consideration of what else there was AT THE TIME, many of those movies were outstanding. And many seem to hold up over time basically due to exceptional performances by the cast, or photography that still looks revelutionary. But everybody's heads were in a far different place, and if you don't get YOUR head in there, your going to overlook the magic. Curious, but how could you read what I wrote and think that I don't recognize the "magic" of GWTW? Why can't it be both magical *AND* a lying piece of Confederate propaganda at the same time? The "magic" part refers to GWTW's outstanding cinematic qualities, which I fully acknowledge and appreciate, while the "lying" part refers to a depiction of slavery that totally omits any references to the underside of that ignoble institution. And of course those "standards of those times" were the standards of (some, probably most) white folks only, so to call them the "standards of those times" without any qualification kind of begs the question of *whose* standards we're talking about. Look, two of the most beautiful melodies ever composed were used for Deutscheland, Deutscheland Uber Alles and the Soviet National Anthem. Why does everything have to come wrapped in a Neat And Tidy ribbon?

This should really be combined with the February schedule, as it's just the final days of Oscar month.

As always, "31 Days" probably looks a lot more enticing to most TCM newcomers than it does to many of us who've been around a few years and have seen just about every last one of the selections, often more than once. Five years ago I would've circled half the movies on the schedule, but at a first quick glance the only true highlight I see is the second showing of the Jeanne Eagels version of The Letter. Too bad it's slotted for 6:15 AM, but that's what alarm clocks and / or DVD recorders are for. Along these lines, you know what would be great? If TCM could somehow highlight all of its premieres. Was there a single one of these in this "31 Days" schedule? None that I could see of any interest.