CELEBRATING ITS 70TH BIRTHDAY THIS YEAR, the iconic status of Gone With The Wind is more secure than ever. It stands as a monolith over a diffuse and fragmented media landscape: producer David O.Selznick’s almost-four-hour extravaganza was the jewel in the crown of a kind of studio Film-making we shall never see again. Equally important, the mass audience on which its appeal depended has also gone.

Politically incorrect and racially retrograde, the film has managed at one time or another to offend almost everyone. Its allure, though, is deeper and wider. It’s a movie we loved before we learned not to like or approve of it. Max Steiner’s sweeping score is nothing if not relentless, yet you need to be made of stern stuff to hear the first few chords of Tara’s Theme without getting a slight chill.

But how could a film beset by so many no-nos of movie-making (five directors, 15-plus screenwriters, firings, rewritings, a length and budget that were all but prohibitive) have worked at all? Selznick’s $3.9m blockbuster, winner of 10 Academy awards, was full of contra-dictions: a celebration of caste and class from the New World’s mostdemocratic medium; the portrait of a never-never land whose harmonyand grace depended on the smoothing out of much that was uglyand uncomfortable. This was film-making on a vast and superchargedscale, yet it has an immediacy that few period films can match and,for all its large-canvas amplitude, the movie never loses its focus onthe central characters.

Both the film and the novel by Margaret Mitchell (an instant best-seller in 1936 and in print ever since) have always had the uncanny capacity to appeal to different people at different times; to be converted through the power of identification into “their” struggle.

At the first test screenings in 1939, preview audiences invariably saw it as a Depression fable. (Indeed, when the publisher Macmillan was forced to raise the price of the 1,000-page tome to three dollars, Mitchell was astonished that people would pay such an exorbitant fee for a copy in the midst of the Depression.) But when the film opened in postwar France (the novel and movie having previously been banned by Joseph Goebbels), viewers rapturously embraced it as the story of occupation and survival.

Political prisoners under the genocidal leader Mengistu in 1970s Ethiopia found solace in a contraband copy of the novel that a student activist translated into Amharic. They took heart from the bit of social Darwinism the author put in Ashley’s mouth: that people with brains and courage come through in the end, while those without “gumption” (Mitchell’s favorite word) are “winnowed out.”

Each tribe, each nationality, saw it as their own story of survival, a clash of values between past and present, the victory of civilization over oppression—the oppressors being (fill in the blank) the Nazis in Europe, the dictators in Greece, the Red Terror in Ethiopia, the Yankees in America. American literary critic Leslie Fiedler reported watching it at a left wing film club in Athens, where the whipped-up audience cheered for the Confederates.

“The North gave the South in fantasy the victory they had lost in fact,” wrote the American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Mitchell, who spent hours as a child listening to the war stories of uncles, grandparents and grizzled war veterans, professed not to have realized until she was 10 years old that the South had lost the war.

There was also an emerging sub-group, defined chronologically rather than geographically, with its own language and longings and struggle for independence: female teenagers. For myself and members of that tribe (Southern strain), Gone With The Wind was a kind of anti-deb coming-out party: the book, not on our approved reading lists, was devoured, by aid of flashlight, under the covers at night. By day, we argued the virtues of Rhett versus Ashley as romantic fantasy figures, sensing a whiff of forbidden sexuality, while identifying with Scarlett precisely because she thumbed her nose at all the rules of Christian and womanly behaviour, and was “no lady.”

The movie, ideally cast, didn’t so much obliterate as subsume and streamline the book, gather and intensify its themes in the ravishing tones of newly developed Technicolor—which seemed almost to have been invented for Vivien Leigh’s green eyes. Credit for the movie’s propulsive force lies mainly in the fire and desperation, the strangely interlocking eccentricities, of three people: Selznick, Mitchell and Leigh.

Selznick, the gambler, stayed up all night on bennies (amphetamines) and peanuts. He hired, fired, rewrote, and gave everyone but himself a nervous breakdown. Victor Fleming, the director who was hired to replace George Cukor, finally succumbed to one such “indisposition”, holed up in Santa Monica for a couple of weeks to recuperate and was replaced by journeyman Sam Wood—who then stayed on to direct less consequential scenes.

Leigh’s pent-up frustration at not being given enough time off with her adored Laurence Olivier (plus the beginnings of her own soon-to-be-diagnosed mental illness and tuberculosis) gave her performance a feverish quality that, in perfect consonance with the drama, becomes more and more pronounced as the film progresses. A Hollywood unknown, she showed her Scarlett side when she set out to get the part. Having read the book, and with hardly a backward glance, the actor left husband, child and agent in England and paid her own way to California, where she persuaded Olivier’s agent—Myron Selznick, David’s brother—to introduce her to the producer.

In December 1938, on a Culver City backlot, shooting had begun without a leading lady (1,400 American actors had been interviewed for the role, 400 given readings). Old movie sets (King Kong among them) were to be set on fire to represent the burning of Atlanta. All seven Technicolor cameras were in place, the fire department was at the ready, the doubles for Scarlett and Rhett positioned to flee in a horse-driven cart. An invited guest list of le tout Hollywood was gathered for the spectacle, with the Napoleonic Selznick on a platform. Shooting had already begun when, according to most versions of the story, Myron arrived with the royal couple, Leigh and Olivier. The agent approached his brother and announced, “Here is your Scarlett.” Bewitched by the sight of Leigh’s eyes flashing in the firelight, Selznick could only agree.

She worked 121 days to Clark Gable’s 73. Selznick, unsatisfied with the opening scene in which Scarlett enchants the Tarleton twins on the veranda of Tara, waited until the end of filming to reshoot it. But by then, Leigh looked too old and haggard, so he released her into the arms of her Larry. After a marathon weekend of carnal rejuvenation (her sexual appetite was reportedly immense), Leigh came back for retakes, looking as dewy and virginal as a 17-year-old.

Mitchell, who poured her whole life into the novel, never wrote another book. Like Selznick with his memos, she was highly conscious of her importance and the image she would leave posterity: she wrote thousands and thousands of carefully crafted letters—her second novel, in effect; elaborately seductive thank-you “notes” to critics who became friends.

Scarlett was based on a termagant of a grandmother, but also came out of Mitchell’s own postwar rebelliousness. Her high minded suffragette mother set standards impossible for her non-academic daughter to meet, so Mitchell read pornography and delved into Havelock Ellis. Her mother, like the book’s Ellen O’Hara, died while caring for others (the flu epidemic of 1918), after which her widowed father, something of a sourpuss, became reclusive.

Mitchell began writing the novel (whose heroine was then called Pansy) when an old ankle injury flared up and she was housebound. John Marsh, her second husband, brought her history books and, as editor and cheerleader, encouraged her secret writing. Her first husband, the model for Rhett, had been a no-account bootlegger without Rhett’s charm, a violent man who assaulted Margaret in a fit of jealousy. This she transformed into the story’s marital “rape”, when an enraged and drunken Rhett asserts his husbandly rights—a “punishment” that awakens Scarlett’s sleeping desire. Once a flaming rebel who loved to do sexy Valentino dances and shock the dowagers, Mitchell morphed into a matronly figure, hobbled by orthopedic shoes and wanting only to fit in with the good folks of Atlanta. She refused to have anything to do with the movie, which might prove a source of embarrassment, but she had a spy on the set: Susan Myrick, Southern etiquette expert and friendly informant.

Mitchell's divided mind was the source of Scarlett’s ambiguity as a heroine, and much that is unresolved or contradictory in book and movie. In her transition from rascal scapegrace to good lady, Mitchell did a curious about-face on Rhett. Having created a role that by common consensus only Gable could play, she suddenly wrote to Selznick that “we Southerners” don’t approve of Gable, and would prefer Basil Rathbone, Ronald Colman or Fredric March. (Weren’t three out of four Brits in the lead roles enough?) And this after having written of her swarthy, convention-mocking hero: “The muscles of his big body ripped against his well-tailored clothes.”

In the end, Mitchell sends Rhett back to Charleston and his patrician roots, in what feels like a betrayal. He’s too much of a rogue for that placid, decorous life. This disavowal of the renegade in Rhett, and herself, speaks to the curious detachment in Mitchell’s portrait of Scarlett. Her sister-in-law Melanie was meant to be the heroine of the story, but Scarlett—seductive, scheming and unstoppable—lies, cheats and steals her way to the forefront.

In the film, Hattie McDaniel (Mammy) and Butterfly McQueen (Prissy) brilliantly transcend conventionality. Their performances have outlasted and risen above accusations of cringe-inducing stereotypes that plagued the movie from the beginning, and were particularly fierce in the 60s and 70s. The conversation about race and gender has widened into a more nuanced discussion, and we can appreciate how McDaniel (the first black actor to win an Academy award) gives so much sass and stature to Mammy—she’s the abiding presence who holds Tara together, understanding (and standing up to) Scarlett as no one else does.

Mitchell was a product of her time, a loyal and patriotic Southerner, but she was nevertheless impatient with the glorifying myths the South tells about itself. A ridiculer of the moonlight-and-magnolias school of Southern literature, she has Scarlett resenting the war (selfishly, of course) and other women’s devotion to a “cause [that] didn’t seem sacred to her.”

The switch of directors early on, and all the subsequent controversy, created an ingenious balancing act. After being fired, Cukor, the “woman’s director”, continued to coach Olivia de Havilland (who played Melanie) and Leigh in secret, while Victor Fleming, the “man’s man” trusted by Gable, allowed the actor to relax, even cry, and turn in his most complex screen performance. In what is essentially a passive role, Gable’s virility makes the battle seem more than equal.

Scarlett’s continuing passion for Leslie Howard’s Ashley may be the most baffling element for today’s audiences, most of whom have never seen Pygmalion or The Scarlet Pimpernel. Howard wasn’t at his best in Technicolor—he was too old for Ashley, and he hated playing the role. Still, I’m waiting for a new generation of chick-flick viewers to rediscover Howard’s aloofness, his I’m-not-that-into-you irresistibility.

For her part, Scarlett has left a mixed legacy: shrewd, manipulative and narcissistic, her legatees are celebrity survivors and Sex and the City shopaholics. But the way she chafed against the restraints on her sex still resonates with women who have refused to go docilely into marriage and motherhood. What a waste, Scarlett expostulated, that she should spend her girlhood learning the arts of flirtation and then only use the knowledge for two years, before going into early retirement and drab clothes.

Margaret Mitchell did put away her dancing shoes and turn matron, but Scarlett, through widowhood and wiles, managed to keep her independence and 17 inch waist—and become the shrewdest of businesswomen to boot. As a heroine, she remains in a class by herself, escaping the patented Hollywood penalties for female misbehavior. It is Leigh’s willingness to play the “bitch” (or Fleming’s struggle to make her do so) that gives the movie its anti-romantic toughness. True, there’s something claustrophobic about being locked inside that hard, willful head, but the bravery and self-absorption go together. Is there a more fitting national epic than the story of a heroine who never quite grows up?

Copyright © 2009 by Molly Haskell. Originally appeared in The Guardian. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc.

MOLLY HASKELL author and critic, has written for The New York Times, The Village Voice, New York Magazine, Vogue, Esquire, Town and Country and The New York Observer. She has served on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival, as associate Professor of Film at Barnard and as Adjunct Professor of Film at Columbia University. Her latest book, Frankly, My Dear, is published by Yale University Press.