[Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell's Cautionary Tale to the south.]

1 hour ago, TomJH said:

"Oh, geez, I think I've got a hernia!"

Ok, I gotta have some standards.

[One Tough Movie.]

11 hours ago, Sepiatone said:

I just don't get it.  I first saw this movie on TV when I was 14(1965)  and neither found it difficult nor "impossible" to watch. I do suppose however, there ARE some who might cry every time they hear their bug zappers go "Zzzttt!" .   

Now, if the execution scene in the movie was actual footage of the actual Barbara Graham execution, I might have found it hard to look at.  But knowing it was just an actress in a Hollywood reenactment, it didn't bother me at all. In fact, it helped steel my opposition to the death penalty. 

But personal soap boxing aside, I think it's a very good movie.

Sepiatone

If you are not affected by the movies you watch, why do you watch them?

[Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell's Cautionary Tale to the south.]

8 hours ago, TheCid said:

I just wonder if HBOMax have left it alone, there would not have been all this controversy.

What's wrong with the controversy?  We need it to highlight the wrongs that exist in the movies.  If we don't shine a light on them as glaring flaws, they can work to perpetuate today the racism that has been contested for so long in this country.

[Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell's Cautionary Tale to the south.]

13 hours ago, TheCid said:

No, but the movies depict tobacco use as a good thing.  So a disclaimer or wraparound is necessary.  

The point is if we start requiring disclaimers and wraparounds for one issue, we need to have them for all issues.   Just as we need them for God's Little Acre, Tobacco Road and a multitude of others.

Although the health effects of smoking are serious, they are nowhere near as dire as the pernicious effects of institutionalized racism, which include, but are in no way limited to murder, rape, extortion, coercion, mayhem, theft, and enslavement.  Movies which normalize racist stereotypes are part of a larger cultural make-up which not only tolerate, but encourage the most heinous and brutal treatment of people.  Treatment we are still witnessing today.  You are using a logical fallacy to trivialize and delegitimize valid objections to, and attempts to bring attention to these flaws in movies.

[Movie Rebecca with Joan Fontaine]

According to the TCM Database, it doesn't look like it's scheduled any time soon.  Reference to the movie's page shows no air date under the title:

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/87781/Rebecca/

I believe schedules are posted three months in advance, so nothing will happen until then.  Keep checking this page once a month to see if it's going to be shown.  Or, you could watch it on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ_PBT-1vGA

[One Tough Movie.]

There are movies that pull no punches.  They do a hard take on a hard world.  They face it with set teeth, narrowed eyes, a sneer.  They grab you by the lapels and toss you across the room.  Or they wring you dry.  More than waiting for the oncoming doom, they rush toward it, eager to spit in death's eye.  Of all the movies I know like that, there is none more unrelenting and unforgiving as I Want To Live! (1958).  It's a non-stop frenzied portrait of a woman's spiral into the abyss.  Normally I don't care for these kinds of movies.  The plot commands, turning the characters into pawns.  Here the story grows out of the lead woman's nature, a curious combination of seasoned operator and credulous dupe.  You watch with stunned fascination as she leaps from one desperate situation to another, staying just ahead of the crumbling edge of chaos.  Susan Hayward delivers a blunt-instrument performance, one of her best.  I don't think any other actress could have done the same. 

All the same, it's a movie I find impossible to watch.  I've only seen it all the way through once.  I've tried a few times, but the depiction of her betrayal, by others and by herself is too gut-wrenching, and is capped off with what must be the most harrowing end to any movie.  The universe, not content with playing her for a fool, an object of contempt, will have its last little joke, toying with her maliciously at the moment of her destruction. 

I recorded it.  I watched half of it.  I'll watch the other half.  Not tonight, it's too late.  Tomorrow.

[Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell's Cautionary Tale to the south.]

Eh, what's the use?

[Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell's Cautionary Tale to the south.]

Go ahead.  I'll take any post.

[Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell's Cautionary Tale to the south.]

2 hours ago, Vautrin said:

Mammy, if I ever see you riding one of those cotton burners again, I'll tan your hide.

Sigh.  Anything to keep a thread going, I guess.

[Play to Film or Book to Film]

On 6/16/2020 at 9:03 AM, chaya bat woof woof said:

Saw the movie years ago and it is ironic that Robert Blake was later accused of killing his girlfriend (don't remember the verdict).

He was acquitted.  The prosecution relied on the slimy lowlifes he associated with, that he called friends.  Evidently they were too slimy and lowlife for the jury to convict.  Sheesh!

[Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell's Cautionary Tale to the south.]

3 hours ago, TheCid said:

Where were the disclaimers about the evils of smoking tobacco? 

So the evils of racism and institutional murder are equal to the evils of tobacco smoking. . . .

[Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell's Cautionary Tale to the south.]

 

Dargo said:

I'll feel even BETTER when I see some of the folks around here acknowledge the validity of my little motorcycle movie analogy

Here's a vote for validation!

[NOW THEN LATER]

Night, night.  Sleep tight.

[Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell's Cautionary Tale to the south.]

Hey Dargo!  Feel better?

[Movie - WW2 plane crash and crew were ghosts]

LADY BRACKNELL. This noise is extremely unpleasant. It sounds as if he was having an argument. I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing.

CHASUBLE. [Looking up.] It has stopped now. [The noise is redoubled.]

LADY BRACKNELL. I wish he would arrive at some conclusion.

GWENDOLEN. This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

--The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 3.

[Play to Film or Book to Film]

A blurry copy can be viewed  on YT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riylfh_9ir8

[Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell's Cautionary Tale to the south.]

1 hour ago, TomJH said:

Now it is far from unusual to see commercials featuring mixed race couples. I don't know when that first began but it certainly wouldn't have been the case in the '60s. Would it have been in the '70s or '80s? We obviously have a lot further to go than this in race relations but it's still a healthy sign.

or the 90s, or 2010s

[Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell's Cautionary Tale to the south.]

5 hours ago, speedracer5 said:

Has anyone read the “Gone With the Wind” novel? Is it good? I need something to read after I finally get through “Little Women” (::gag::). Though I was also thinking of reading “Valley of the Dolls.”

Try Uncle Tom's Cabin.

[Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell's Cautionary Tale to the south.]

1 hour ago, TikiSoo said:

Any GWTW thread is better that any obviously baiting one.

Hope you don't think that was my intent.  I assume not.  My disposition is to always oppose and deflate trolls and provocateurs.

I am tired of the standard dialog of Gone/Wind that goes back and forth on the two-dimensional heritage-celebration/racism-promotion spectrum.  This is a good example of how people see what they are looking for and not what is there.

This is not incompatible with poking gentle fun at those who see treating the movie as other than cinematic scripture as striking a blow at the bedrock of civilization.

[Crushing on that newly discovered by you actor/actress who died 10/20/30+ years ago]

Oh, the suspense.  Or, suspension.

[Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell's Cautionary Tale to the south.]

This is here mostly to test how many Gone/Wind threads this site can support.

I've always admired the movie.  Victor Fleming is a good director.  And Viviene Leigh delivered a performance for the ages.  Her achievement made harder, not easier by the role being one of the great characters in literature.   But people in the south mostly looked past her warning of the dangers from obsessing over a dead past that never was.  Scarlett O'Hara symbolizes the south, and what happens to her traces what happens to the south before, during, and after the war.  She is a strong-willed, intelligent, clear-headed person.  She knows what she wants when she sees it, goes after it, and gets it.  Rhett Butler is the man most suited for her, so close to her in intellect, temperament, and savvy.  As a pair they represent the new south, its future, risen from the ashes--or were supposed to be.  But she has a controlling irrational obsession for Ashley Wilkes (the weak enervated end-product of a defunct society) that clouds her judgement, leading to the destruction of her marriage and happiness.  She recognizes this finally, but too late.  But does she learn from this?  No, she only substitutes one irrational obsession with another--that she will get Rhett Butler back.  But he's not coming back.  If someone even hates you maybe there is some passion left, but if they don't give a damn, the ashes are cold, baby.  Scarlett's idea of returning to Tara is another of her controlling irrational obsessions.  Far from being a source of strength, Tara since the end of the war has only been a purgatory of toil and a dead weight.  The city is where her great success was, but she abandons it.  Even if her goal of getting Rhett Butler back is more than just futile self-deception, Tara is the last place to do it from.  He is a man of the city, commerce, industry.  Her return to Tara signals a final retreat into a delusional dream world of passive hopefulness and increasing detachment from reality.  I would not like to see her twenty years after the end of the story.

[Hey! They got away with murder!]

Yes, that ending is shocking, and is an example of an ending that makes an otherwise awful movie worthwhile.

[it has begun]

2 minutes ago, GGGGerald said:

Here's an example:

Years ago, one of the networks produced a mini series on hitler. They couldn't find one sponsor for it.

I doubt they bother showing it again.

Maybe it wasn't any good.

2 minutes ago, GGGGerald said:

Whichever side you're on, you're made to believe the other side runs things. That's exactly what they media wants you to think.

That's why they run the country.

[it has begun]

1 hour ago, NipkowDisc said:

actually I am not a big fan of GWTW but it is very popular with women and some of those women are liberals.

so another brilliantly smart move by the left.

That's why they run this country.

[Hey! They got away with murder!]

42 minutes ago, Dargo said:

In what regard do you mean here, slayton?

Is my memory of The Quiet American's ending incorrect that you know of?  Like I said, my memory of the ending is a bit fuzzy, and so it could be.

Or, did you mean by this that because I said Redgrave goes nutty at the end, one couldn't say he "got away with it"?

OR yet again, did you mean because he doesn't actually pull the trigger on Audie but just sets up his killing, one couldn't say he "committed murder"?

(...just would like a clarification on this, that's all...bet it's probably the last one here, isn't it)

 

Um, well, kinda all of them.