If You're Craving 'Gone With the Wind,' Watch the Real Thing

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"Greatness? Ha! If that great philosopher, Socrates, were living today, he'd be reduced to sitting on a cracker barrel, chewing tobacco. That's what America does for greatness."

Professor Stiles (Nigel Patrick)

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When I first saw "Raintree County," which premiered on this day in 1957, my first reaction was that it must have been intended as a Northern version of "Gone With the Wind."

I had read nothing about the movie before I saw it, but after I did I read comments from film critics that showed I wasn't the only one who perceived it that way. I have no doubt that MGM saw it that way, too. But that isn't how things worked out.

It wasn't the award–winning blockbuster that had been envisioned. In fact the movie was a failure at the box office, and it was widely panned by critics. Elizabeth Taylor was nominated for Best Actress, and the movie was nominated for Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design and Best Original Score, but all those awards went to other nominees.

The funny thing is that I know some people who really like "Raintree County." I guess it is true what they say. There really is no accounting for taste (or the lack thereof).

People often forget that film critics merely express their opinions — and opinions are not statements of fact.

In this case, though, I tend to agree with most in their negative assessments.

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I suppose if you were going to select a couple, you couldn't pick an odder one than Montgomery Clift and Taylor (who were actually pretty good friends in real life). Clift's character, a Yankee abolitionist, and Taylor's character, a self–absorbed Southerner, met before the Civil War broke out.

In its best opposites–attract mode, the story showed how Clift and Taylor were drawn together. Eva Marie Saint, who played a girl–next–door type, probably should have been Clift's bride — but that would be in an ideal world. And the pre–Civil War world they occupied was far from ideal.

The coupling was far from ideal as well. A friend of mine once observed, "Montgomery Clift went to bed with Scarlett O'Hara and woke up with Blanche DuBois." That should tell you everything you need to know about the volatile nature of the relationship.

The lead characters were really the only ones that were given any kind of in–depth examination. The supporting talents were mishandled. Lee Marvin wasn't suited for the kind of comedic role in which he was cast, and Agnes Moorehead was given very little with which to work. Rod Taylor was reasonably convincing albeit in a small part.

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The odd thing about "Raintree County" was that, while it was set against the backdrop of the Civil War, more attention was given to Clift's character and his quest to find the meaning of life than to the far more significant events that were unfolding around him.

Clift, by the way, was nearly killed when he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed his car into a telephone pole after leaving a dinner party at Elizabeth Taylor's home. Summoned from the party Taylor rushed to Clift's side and removed a tooth that was lodged in his tongue. If Taylor had not done that, Clift might have choked to death.

As it was, Clift suffered several injuries, including a broken jaw and nose, that required reconstructive surgery. His matinee idol looks were never the same again. In fact, they weren't even the same from scene to scene. If you watch closely, you can see differences in his profile — and, in closer shots, his nose and chin.

The cinematographer tried to work around it and did a generally good job. But the damage was too extensive to cover completely.

On a Road in the Twilight Zone

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"This road is the afterwards of the Civil War. It began at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and ended at a place called Appomattox. It's littered with the residue of broken battles and shattered dreams."

Opening narration

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As the episode of the Twilight Zone began on this night in 1961, viewers saw a lonely country road with Civil War–era soldiers marching along, most with visible wounds and/or bandages. They marched in silence past a house where sat a solitary woman (Joanne Linville) in a rocking chair.

One soldier, played by James Gregory, stopped and asked the woman for a drink of water. She said he could have one, and they struck up a conversation.

And as the soldier sat under a tree and strummed the guitar he carried with him, the woman recalled the start of the war and the men's boasts that they would vanquish the Yanks in a month.

The women had cheered the men as they left on their mission, she lamented, believing they would soon return. "How wrong we were," she said, confessing that her own husband had been killed in the war.

So many of the soldiers on both sides did not go home — not alive, anyway.

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She carried many things within her — anger, mostly, over her husband's death and the devastation of her home — but she also carried some sort of unnamed "fever."

Her anger led her to promise the soldier that if a Yankee ever walked by her home, she would take an old shotgun she had inside her house, aim it at him and fire after telling him he could consider it the final shot of the Civil War.

(Note: I've studied a lot of history in my life, and while I don't claim to be an authority on the subject I really don't think Civil War was a phrase that was in use at that time — at least not very much. Most people in the North, both civilian and soldiers, seem to have called it the "Great Rebellion," and the Southern equivalent seems to have been "War of Northern Aggression.")

Shortly thereafter, a Yankee soldier came riding by. He was obscured in the shadows, but the Confederate soldier was sure he had seen the Yankee before. And then he remembered. When he had been wounded on a battlefield, the Yankee soldier had stopped his bleeding.

The Confederate started to introduce the Yankee to the lady of the house, but then he saw that she had emerged from the house with the shotgun in her hands. She aimed it at the Yankee, and it appeared she was intent upon fulfilling her pledge. The Confederate tried to stop her, but she fired, anyway.

And the Yankee didn't move. Didn't slump over. Didn't fall. He just sat astride his horse as if nothing had happened.

"I couldn't have missed you," the dumbfounded woman said.

And then the Confederate soldier remembered something else from that battlefield encounter. A shell had exploded overhead, and he had believed the Yankee had been killed that day.

Turned out, he had been right.

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The Confederate soldier came to a conclusion.

The road that passed by that house had been filled with soldiers from both sides, all going in the same direction, some helping each other along the way. Then, during the night, they stopped coming.

"There's something at the end of that road," the soldier told the woman, "and I'm going to find out what it is."

The soldier had a good idea what was at the end of that road — and his suspicion was confirmed when the woman's husband, believed to be dead, came walking along the road. The woman ran to embrace him. He told her that they were both dead — he had been killed in battle, and she had died of a fever.

She resisted the idea, but she watched as her husband proceeded down the road.

And along came Abraham Lincoln, who told her he was the last man on the road, "the last casualty of the Civil War."

(In fact, Lincoln was not the last casualty of the war. After Lee surrendered to Grant and Lincoln was assassinated, there were still skirmishes for awhile. A little more poetic license, I suppose. Lincoln's assassination has always served as a convenient conclusion for the Civil War — even though it wasn't.)

It was one of those Twilight Zone episodes in which each viewer had to draw his or her own conclusion about the point of the story. Sometimes the moral of a Twilight Zone story, as it were, was clear; other times not so much.

And while the moral of this story may be clear to others, it has not always been clear to me. I'm not sure it ever was.

After her encounter with Lincoln, the woman went running after her husband, who was walking down the road.

Perhaps the moral was acceptance of the inevitable.

John Wayne's Defining Role

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"Figure a man's only good for one oath at a time; I took mine to the Confederate States of America."

Ethan (John Wayne)

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Sixty years ago today, "The Searchers" premiered on America's movie screens. Its hero, played by John Wayne, was unabashedly racist. He was a middle–aged veteran of the Civil War, a former Confederate soldier who returned to West Texas a few years after the end of the war, presumably with the intention of forming a partnership with his brother.

When I say the character was racist, those who haven't seen "The Searchers" might presume from what they have read so far in this article that the character was anti–black. But he wasn't. He was anti–Indian.

See, in the story, Indians raided a neighbor's homestead and stole some cattle. Wayne and some others went in search of the Indians to retrieve the cattle, but it turned out that the theft was simply a ruse to get the men away. When the men returned, Wayne's brother's home was in flames. His brother, his brother's wife and their son were killed. Their two daughters had been kidnapped.

So Wayne and his nephew (Jeffrey Hunter) embarked on a search.

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The search went on for five years. Early on, the body of the oldest daughter was found brutally murdered and, presumably, sexually assaulted. The search went on for the youngest daughter, who had been 8 years old at the time of her abduction. No one knew what had become of her.

They finally found out. She was with the chief of a company of Comanche. She was played by a young Natalie Wood, 17 in real life and one year removed from her Oscar–nominated performance in "Rebel Without a Cause." Seventeen is a bit older than Wood's character would have been. Kidnapped at the age of 8, discovered five years later.

I saw it a few years ago after having gone several years without seeing it, and I remember thinking that Wood looked really young in the early part of the movie, much younger than she should have been. It wasn't until later that I realized that the young version was Natalie's younger sister, Lana Wood, who would have been about 9 when the movie was made.

Natalie played the role briefly at the end when Wayne found her in the Comanche camp. She said she was now a Comanche and didn't wish to return with him. Wayne would have preferred to see her dead and pulled his gun on her, but Hunter shielded her.

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I had to wonder, as I watched it a few years ago, if "The Searchers" would have been a success in the theaters today. Wayne's racism certainly would have been a lightning rod for criticism, but, like Captain Ahab, there was a kind of beauty in his character, driven by an obsession that seems ugly without its redemptive qualities.

What are those redemptive qualities? Well, the character stood for principles like devotion and loyalty, but he was driven by the desire for revenge. He was a complicated character, worthy of Shakespeare.

It was a gritty story; the American Film Institute ranked it #12 all time — and #1 among the westerns. High praise.

It was pretty successful at the box office, too, but it received no Academy Award nominations. That surprised me when I heard that for the first time. I wasn't really surprised that Natalie Wood wasn't nominated. Her part was pivotal, but her screen time was brief. She did far more to deserve that nomination for "Rebel Without a Cause."

But the failure to nominate Wayne was a big mistake on the part of the Academy.

I once read a Roger Ebert column about the movie, and I recall that he said Wayne's character was the most compelling character Wayne and director John Ford ever created together. And that is certainly saying something, given how many times they made movies together.

It also happens to be true.

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John Wayne's fans will point to all sorts of movies and roles that they will tell you defined the Duke — but it is hard to imagine either a John Wayne movie or role that could be said to have defined him better than "The Searchers."

Burning Down the House

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"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

Rhett Butler (Clark Gable)

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(1939 is widely regarded as the greatest year ever for the motion picture. Ten movies were nominated for Best Picture that year, and today I take a look at the ninth of those 10 movies to hit the theaters.)

That is the greatest movie quote of all time, according to the American Film Institute, and it is hard to argue with that conclusion.

AFI had some great quotes on that list — "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse," "I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore," "Go ahead, make my day" — but Clark Gable got the nod for the greatest quote.

As I say, it's hard to argue with. But it isn't the only memorable line in "Gone With the Wind," which premiered on this day in 1939. Of course, that almost goes without saying. The movie is darn near four hours long. There had to be at least one more memorable line in there, right? In fact, Scarlett (Vivien Leigh) had several. I'll bet one or two leap to mind with virtually no effort.

Overall, AFI ranked "Gone With the Wind" sixth — behind some other movies with memorable quotes.

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But, in the history of movies, few could match "Gone With the Wind" for both memorable lines and iconic images.

Like the burning of Atlanta.

I remember an episode of M*A*S*H in which Hawkeye had been trying unsuccessfully to seduce a nurse with whom he had, apparently, had a previous relationship, and the nurse was taking a "been there, done that" approach.

"'Gone With the Wind' is a great movie, Hawkeye," I remember her saying to him, "but after you've seen 'em burn Atlanta several times, it's not so hot anymore."

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See, I disagree with that. Great line for a sitcom, but, in reality, it doesn't hold up. At least, not for me. I think "Gone With the Wind" is great moviemaking, especially given the technological constraints of that time, and it never gets old for me.

"Gone With the Wind" is great storytelling, too, even if there are some historical inaccuracies. In the realm of fiction, one is permitted certain liberties, and "Gone With the Wind" has never, to my knowledge, been marketed as nonfiction.

No one ever pretended that Rhett and Scarlett really existed. But people who were like them — or mostly like them — did exist in the Old South, and Rhett and Scarlett represented them. Good fiction makes it possible to do that plausibly, and much of "Gone With the Wind" was, indeed, good fiction. But some of it was not.

I have always been impressed with the way "Gone With the Wind" presented the pre–war arrogance of the South juxtaposed against the post–war South, humbled by loss. Wow, what a contrast.

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For the Southerners who survived the war, it must have been astonishing to experience the reversal of fortune at every level of Southern society. Not every Southerner was a slave owner, of course. That was something that only those with land and money could afford; then as now, not everyone had land and money.

So, while, yes, it is true that "Gone With the Wind" was historically inaccurate at times, it was spot–on accurate at others. Some historians may tell you that does a disservice to the story of the Civil War.

I don't agree with that. To teach, it is often necessary to put a little jam on the bread.

A Hot War Story, a Cold Love Story

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"All this while I've been packing ice around my heart. How will I make it melt?"

Nicole Kidman

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"Cold Mountain," the Civil War drama that premiered 10 years ago today, is the kind of movie that can be frustrating.

It tries to tell a couple of stories at once. That's fine with me. I guess I was a weird kid. While most of my peers seemed to hate reading and went to sometimes extraordinary lengths to avoid it, I was the kind of kid who liked to read so much that I gravitated to lengthy books. My logic, I suppose, was that the longer the book, the more there was to enjoy.

As a teenager, I was reading books by James Michener, who was not only wordy but also tended to weave several stories into one. When it is done well, I have found it to be a rewarding reading experience. Consequently, the more the better. Same thing goes for movie plots, I guess.

But you can run into trouble trying to tell two stories at once.

As a war story, "Cold Mountain" did a good job of portraying the brutality and cruelty of war within the context of its times (as "Saving Private Ryan" did with World War II). The problem, though, is that director Anthony Minghella's movie also wanted to be a romance, and that is a tricky assignment.

It isn't impossible to achieve. It just requires a rather delicate balancing act. It was sufficiently thoughtful in its handling of war and the suffering it brought to not only the soldiers but the civilians as well.

But I didn't feel that it worked as a love story, mainly because the leads (Nicole Kidman and Jude Law) didn't really seem to have much genuine affection for each other. And that really was too bad because, above all else, I think, "Cold Mountain" was meant to be a love story. But it was aptly named because, all evidence to the contrary, Kidman and Law just didn't have much mutual chemistry.

At one point, for example, Law deserted during the war and made a beeline for home. Was he driven by a burning, insatiable desire to be with Kidman? Not so you could tell.

Near the end of the movie, Law spoke to Kidman of his desire to be with her, but the words were flat without any tangible evidence of his love for her. All the audience got was a few voiceovers by Kidman reciting the letters she sent to him. Law's character never spoke of wishing to be with Kidman, and audiences never heard his thoughts so who was to know what went through his mind?

It was only when he spoke of those thoughts near the end of the movie that viewers got a glimpse into his motivation. Even Kidman seemed bewildered. "We barely knew each other," she said.

I liked Renee Zellweger's performance as the earthy Ruby who helps Kidman's Ada run her farm, and I liked what Dana Rowader wrote about it for AllMovie.com: Zellweger's performance, Rowader wrote, "may be considered by some as hamming it up or chewing the scenery; however, her character injects life into the film where it would otherwise have fallen horribly flat."

I'm not sure I agree with the notion that the movie "would ... have fallen horribly flat." I suppose that is a matter of opinion.

Apparently, the Oscar voters liked Zellweger's performance, though. They rewarded it with the statuette for Best Supporting Actress.

Rowader suggests, though, that performances by Zellweger and others "upstage the two leads." And I'm willing to concede there may be something to that.

There really is no question that the supporting cast had a lot of interesting characters (and intriguing choices to play them).

There was Donald Sutherland as Kidman's minister father, a generally wise and upstanding man — and, on the flip side of the religious coin, there was Philip Seymour Hoffman as an amoral preacher.

There was Natalie Portman as the war widow forced to raise a child on her own who sought comfort in the arms of a stranger (Law, trying to get home).

Portman's performance may have been the best of the bunch, even in what was a relatively small role. The audience didn't need to know the details of her suffering. They could see it in her face, in her eyes, and they could hear it in her voice.

They saw an example of her suffering when Union soldiers seeking food occupied her dwelling, tied her to a post outside and left her crying infant on the cold ground. It occurred to me as I watched that Portman's character must have thought she was cursed.

Perhaps she did.

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Based on what I know of the Civil War, it seems to me that anyone who survived it must have thought he/she was cursed. As far as I could see, there really were no winners in a conflict that claimed so much blood and so much property.

As I say, as a war story, "Cold Mountain" was a strong statement.

But, as a love story, I have to admit that it left me cold.

A Real History Lesson

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Twenty years ago today, I was baffled by the timing of the debut of "Gettysburg."

1993 was a good year for the movie to come out. You see, as a student of American history, I knew that the actual battle occurred 130 years earlier — in July of 1863 — and the famous address that Abraham Lincoln gave at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery was in November of that year.

But the movie made its debut in October, which has no connection to the Battle of Gettysburg at all.

That's quibbling, I suppose, because, other than the timing of the release of the movie, I have few complaints about it. I was already familiar with the story of that three–day battle, and the movie was faithful to the events.

I've been studying American history nearly all my life. I don't remember now whether I gravitated to a study of history on my own or if someone influential in my life introduced me to it and encouraged my interest in it. Maybe it was the stories of heroism and valor that drew me to history.

There were plenty of those at Gettysburg.

Over the years, I have grown excited about the release of a movie that was about some dramatic time in history, but most of the time I have been disappointed. For whatever reason, many filmmakers seem to feel a need to embellish stories that need no embellishment.

Not so with director Ronald Maxwell's "Gettysburg." That was a wise decision. The Battle of Gettysburg needed nothing added to it. It was the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War. There was plenty of drama to be found in that fact.

But it was once you went beneath the surface that you found the real drama, and Maxwell touched all the right buttons.

The film focused on the most noteworthy figures from that battle — Robert E. Lee (played by Martin Sheen), James Longstreet (Tom Berenger), Joshua Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels) — whose individual stories told the bigger story of the battle.

I remember when I first saw this movie — on cable — and decided, after I had seen it, to give a tape of it to Mom for Christmas. After she saw it, she asked me if the Chamberlain character had really existed, and I told her he had.

Chamberlain was a college professor from Maine whose unorthodox battle strategies produced an astonishing Union victory on Little Round Top — and may well have altered the course of both the battle and the war.

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I'll never forget the look on Mom's face when I explained to her that the Chamberlain story, as presented in "Gettysburg," was absolutely true. None of it was made up.

Mom probably heard the story of Chamberlain and his bayonet charge on the second day of the battle, but it slipped her mind. She knew about Pickett's Charge, of course. Everyone — or nearly everyone — has read about that in their history books.

But the odds against Pickett's Charge were quite long — the Union had captured the high ground much earlier in the battle, and the Confederates who executed the charge had to cross an open field for more than a mile. They were sitting ducks for a barrage of Union fire. By the time of the charge, the outcome was already known.

It was different the day before at Little Round Top. The Union held the high ground then, too, but it was reeling from some setbacks, and the Confederates had a real opportunity to succeed with a flanking maneuver. Chamberlain's troops held off the Confederates as long as possible, then, with ammunition running low, Chamberlain ordered the charge.

As I say, had it not been for Chamberlain, the battle and the war might have been lost, and history would have been changed.

"Gettysburg" was the kind of historical movie I'd like to see more frequently — a good, solid history lesson delivered by a top–notch cast and a director who understands that the story alone is worth the price of admission.

Gone With the Wind Turns 75

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"When a Southerner took the trouble to pack a trunk and travel twenty miles for a visit, the visit was seldom of shorter duration than a month, usually much longer. Southerners were as enthusiastic visitors as they were hosts, and there was nothing unusual in relatives coming to spend the Christmas holidays and remaining until July."

Margaret Mitchell
"Gone With the Wind"

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Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel "Gone With the Wind" was first published 75 years ago in May.

I was a teenager when the movie that was based on the novel was first shown on network television. It was the highest–rated program in TV history (it has been surpassed a few times since then), and I remember watching it in a special two–night presentation.

Shortly thereafter, I read the book.

My friend Phyllis, who died last summer (and of whom I have written in this blog and in my current events blog), introduced me to the book — and, because of her, I bought a paperback copy.

It really was a wonderful story. When you got right down to it, it was about a spoiled Southern girl who was hopelessly in love with a married man. I grew up in the South, and I knew many girls like her. In my experience, it was a timeless tale that could be told against the backdrop of the Civil War or the civil rights movement.

I had known for a long time that Phyllis loved the movie — but I always thought that was because she loved Clark Gable. I don't know why it never occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, Phyllis loved the book first — and her affection for the movie and Clark Gable came next.

I never asked her about that so I'll probably never know which came first, and it really doesn't matter. It's a great book, rich with details about life in the South and a period in American history that no one now living (and, for the most part, no one living when the book was published in 1936, either) can recall.

I still have that paperback copy. In fact, I'm looking at it right now. I've been thumbing through it, and it's in remarkably good shape, considering all the moves it has survived — and that is certainly appropriate.

Wherever I have lived in my adult life, that book has been with me. I will always be grateful to Phyllis for introducing me to it.

(I remember showing her my copy the day after I bought it. We were sitting in some class together, and I handed it to her. She thumbed through it, smiled, said something to me that I have forgotten and handed the book back to me.

(Whatever DNA she might have left on that book is probably long gone, but I'd be willing to bet that her fingerprints can still be found on it.)

If you've seen the movie, you know the story. There are just so many details in the book that couldn't be worked into the movie — even though the movie was nearly four hours long.

Conversations are more extensive in the book than they are in the movie, and the reader gets the opportunity to dive more deeply into the characters' thoughts and motivations.

And the burning of Atlanta, as vivid as it is in the movie, seems to go on endlessly in the book, recapturing what must have been the absolute terror of the people of that time and place.

Slavery is part of the story's backdrop, but it isn't really what the book is about — just as it wasn't what the war was about at first. However, the book did have a tendency to present the slaves as being considerably more content with their lot in life than I would have expected.

That led to an interesting point about the social hierarchy that existed in the slave population. There was, as a British writer who visited the South a few years before the outbreak of the war noted, a difference between slaves who were house servants and slaves who were field hands. The "most important distinction," he wrote, was that the house servants were "comparatively well off."

Consequently, it was realistic when Mitchell's book suggested that the house servants at Tara were loyal and remained with Scarlett even after they had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation — whereas the field hands did not hesitate to leave when they could.

Mitchell was criticized for some things. She was accused of sugar–coating the activities of the Ku Klux Klan and of penning a racist portrayal of black Americans of that time.

But people who focus on those things miss the point of the story. It isn't about the Klan. It isn't about slavery. It isn't even about a spoiled Southern girl who is fixated on a married man.

It's about survival, as Mitchell herself said.

"What makes some people come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong and brave, go under?" she asked. "It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don't. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those that go under? I only know that survivors used to call that quality 'gumption.' So I wrote about people who had gumption and people who didn't."

That quality was summed up in Scarlett's final line in both the book and the movie: "After all, tomorrow is another day."