Blu-ray Review HTF BLU-RAY REVIEW: GONE WITH THE WIND 70th ANNIVERSARY ULTIMATE COLLECTOR'S EDITION (1 Viewer)

[Paul_Scott]

Everytime I sit down to watch some or all of this, I'm always struck by how funny this movie is. The humor is sometimes caustic, often cynical and deadpan, but very rarely lowbrow and for me it effectively subverts most of the obvious melodramatic elements.
And yet this is something that I rarely hear new viewers mention. It seems like they have been conditioned to expect a 4 hour 'chick flick' and that's really all they get from it, besides a few scenes of old movie spectacle here and there.
Also next to Casablanca, this has to be one of the most quotable films I've ever seen.

 

[CraigF]

^ That is in fact what I liked the most. I tried to put myself into the thought-position of both the era of the story, and also of the movie. I found it quite pleasantly subversive. I totally missed that when I originally saw this (much younger), thought it way too girly/melodramatic back then.

 

[Rob_Ray]

I love Rhett's humorous contempt of Ashley Wilkes. Leslie Howard is hopelessly old-fashioned in his portrayal with body movements and dialogue ("Can't we go away and forget we ever said these things!") that went out with silent films. Then Rhett pops up laughing and mocks the entire scene by saying "He doesn't strike me as half good enough for a woman of your -- what was it? -- your "passion for living"?! He's commenting on how corny the whole thing plays which helps mitigate the corniness.

Films prior to WWII always had humor, no matter how overall serious the story was. It was known as "comedy relief" and it disappeared from serious films with the realism that took hold after the war. In the 1960s, "Doctor Zhivago" was considered that decade's answer to "GWTW" but there's hardly a humorous moment in that entire saga.

 

[MatthewA]

Quote:Originally Posted by TonyD

Scarlett O Hara must have been the least sympathetic heroin I have ever seen in such an important movie. All she did was whine and cry the entire film.
More like Pathetic.


Between Scarlett's hissy fits, she still managed to wrack up three husbands, a profitable lumber business, and a substantial fortune.

 

[Mike Frezon]

Some women just know what they're doing.

 

[TonyD]

Originally Posted by MatthewA


Between Scarlett's hissy fits, she still managed to wrack up three husbands, a profitable lumber business, and a substantial fortune.

yeah how did that happen, what was she doing behind closed doors.
The Lumber Business, didn't she practically steal that from....

her friend when she told the Kennedy guy his fiance was cheating on him.

 

[Mike Frezon]

Originally Posted by TonyD




yeah how did that happen, what was she doing behind closed doors.

That's a whole different movie...

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

Did anyone manage to snag the $12.99 Blu of this at Target on Black Friday? My suspicion is there were never many copies available anyway (beyond the normal stock of the $34 version), and the ad was just added bait to draw people to the store. By the time I wandered in after the mad rush was gone (around 9 a.m.), there wasn't even a empty bin sticker left. Guess I'll go with the UK BD release of the no-frills version.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Originally Posted by Hollywoodaholic

Did anyone manage to snag the $12.99 Blu of this at Target on Black Friday? My suspicion is there were never many copies available anyway (beyond the normal stock of the $34 version), and the ad was just added bait to draw people to the store. By the time I wandered in after the mad rush was gone (around 9 a.m.), there wasn't even a empty bin sticker left. Guess I'll go with the UK BD release of the no-frills version.

It probably varies a lot from store to store, area to area.

My wife dropped by the nearby Target during her supermarket run around mid-afternoon, and she snagged a copy of the 1-disc GwtW BD w/out much problem it seems -- she also apparently snagged their last copy of the 3-disc WoOz BD too for the same $12.99 price.

_Man_

 

[Paul Penna]

Originally Posted by Hollywoodaholic

Did anyone manage to snag the $12.99 Blu of this at Target on Black Friday? My suspicion is there were never many copies available anyway (beyond the normal stock of the $34 version), and the ad was just added bait to draw people to the store. By the time I wandered in after the mad rush was gone (around 9 a.m.), there wasn't even a empty bin sticker left. Guess I'll go with the UK BD release of the no-frills version.

There were still scads of GWTWs at 8AM at my local Target, but the Ozs were gone already.

 

[Mike Frezon]

Originally Posted by Hollywoodaholic /forum/thread/295049/htf-blu-ray-re...ary-ultimate-collector-s-edition#post_3632571

 

[Paul Penna]

Originally Posted by Mike Frezon ">[/url]




I did. And I didn't even get to my Target until 11:30 this morning. But I think I really lucked out because there was no $12.99 sticker on the shelf for the title. For some reason, they weren't flying out the store when people thought they were $39.99 a pop.

 

[Brian W.]

Originally Posted by Hollywoodaholic

Did anyone manage to snag the $12.99 Blu of this at Target on Black Friday? My suspicion is there were never many copies available anyway (beyond the normal stock of the $34 version), and the ad was just added bait to draw people to the store. By the time I wandered in after the mad rush was gone (around 9 a.m.), there wasn't even a empty bin sticker left. Guess I'll go with the UK BD release of the no-frills version.

I got the last copy at the Burbank store at about 9:00 p.m. I already had the box set, but I love the cover of the one-disc version, and I'm also tired of opening up that big velvet box and digging out the DVD, so for $12.99 I thought I'd get it.

 

[Rick Thompson]

Quoting Rob Ray:

"That's always been the movie's biggest flaw. The section of the story covering the war and the south's defeat is so compelling that Selznick and his writers spend more screen time covering the first half of the book to the detriment of the second. The second half of the book's historical background deals with the politics of Reconstruction which Hollywood wisely didn't want to touch. That left them with just the marital woes of the Butlers and the story's historical sweep with all those Ben Hecht titles are gone with the wind as well."

"GWTW" is NOT about the Civil War; the Civil War is the backdrop. A quote from William Goldman's "Adventures in the Screen Trade" applies directly (Goldman, for those new to this, is a screenwriter with two Oscars -- "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "All the President's Men"). Said Goldman:

----------

"You think 'Gone With the Wind' couldn't have been 'Mandingo'? The creators of the Mitchell classic made some genuinely remarkable decisions. Here's one, for example. 'Gone With the Wind' centers around the time of the Civil War. Well, one thing that movies have always done well is action. Big battle scenes. Great hordes of soldiers doing and dying, cannons blasting away.

"Well, there isn't a whole lot of that in the movie. Some, sure, but it would have been easy, even logical to add in twenty minutes, say, of surefire battle stuff and cut twenty minutes of Scarlett and Rhett. But they didn't. What did they cling to in 'Gone With the Wind'?

"Scarlett and Rhett."

----------

In other words, GWTW is about Scarlett and Rhett. They're what's special about the book, not the Civil War. You want the Civil War, call Ken Burns.

 

[David_B_K]

Originally Posted by Rick Thompson

"You think 'Gone With the Wind' couldn't have been 'Mandingo'? The creators of the Mitchell classic made some genuinely remarkable decisions. Here's one, for example. 'Gone With the Wind' centers around the time of the Civil War. Well, one thing that movies have always done well is action. Big battle scenes. Great hordes of soldiers doing and dying, cannons blasting away.

"Well, there isn't a whole lot of that in the movie. Some, sure, but it would have been easy, even logical to add in twenty minutes, say, of surefire battle stuff and cut twenty minutes of Scarlett and Rhett. But they didn't. What did they cling to in 'Gone With the Wind'?

"Scarlett and Rhett."

----------

In other words, GWTW is about Scarlett and Rhett. They're what's special about the book, not the Civil War. You want the Civil War, call Ken Burns.

Hmm..I really cannot agree with Goldman's glib assertion that GWTW is not about the Civil War. Just because there are no battles does not mean it is not about the war. It is very much about the dying out of a way of life and a culture which culminates in the Civil War experience. Scarlett, for all her apparent selfishness, has schoolgirl ideas of romance and noble gentlemen; which is part of why she loves Ashley. She loves the idea of Ashley more than the real thing. The notion of Ashley being a "gentleman" and Rhett nothing more than a cynical adventurer drives much of the story, and this is related to the aristocratic plantation world of the Old South and its sudden cessation after the war. No, the film is not about the battles of the Civil War, but the causes and effects of the Civil War are very much a part of the story. Likewise, an authentic Civil War battle movie may miss some of the particulars of class and lifestyle that is in a story like GWTW.

GWTW could be set in a different time, but it would have to be one with a similar class situation with the backdrop of a dying way of life. Mrs Miniver does not contain battle scenes either, but it is very much a WWII story. I suppose you can take any plot from any story and movie it to a different time (e.g. Emma and Clueless), but something important of the original is always lost when this is done.

 

[Rob_Ray]

The novel GWTW is about how the death of a civilization affects its inhabitants. The Civil War is what Hitchcock would call the MacGuffin, the catalyst that motivates the immediate story we really care about. The Scarletts and Rhetts of the world, those who have the instinct for survival at any cost, survive, and the Ashley and Melanies who retain their honor and self-respect are winnowed away. The movie retains this idea until the last hour when, for several necessary reasons, it shifts into pure melodrama. The last third of the book deals with how Scarlett’s thirst for wealth and security was impacted by the politics of Reconstruction and how she manipulated the new social structure for her own selfish ends. But since this meant dealing with the racial, social and regional prejudices brought to the fore by the Yankee occupation, Selznick wisely wasn’t going to go there any more than he had to with Frank Kennedy’s story. And since the movie was already three hours along by this point, when Scarlett and Rhett marry, all the focus was placed on them and all further historical context was jettisoned. Gone are characters such as Will Benteen who represent the new agricultural South. The first three hours of the movie’s version of the story could only take place in 1860s Georgia. The last hour could take place anywhere. The frequent use of title cards to set the historical backstory abruptly stops. That’s the movie’s structural flaw I spoke of in my earlier post, but it’s one that really couldn’t be addressed without having a movie that was over five hours long. GWTW is one of my favorite movies, but I always thought it was a shame that the final segments play like soap opera. It’s a very compelling soap opera, but it’s not the vast canvas of the earlier sequences. It would be hard to make the movie any better than it is, but the fact remains, Margaret Mitchell’s immediate story was retained to the end but the historical backdrop was overlooked in the final hour due to time and the fact that in the final analysis, it is indeed Scarlett and Rhett’s story and not the Old South’s.

It's an observation more than a criticism, but as with most movie adapations taken from literature, if you want the full story, read the book.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

Originally Posted by Hollywoodaholic /forum/thread/295049/htf-blu-ray-re...ary-ultimate-collector-s-edition#post_3632571

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Very glad I (or rather, my wife) picked up the 1-disc version from Target for $12.99.

Will be passing on our old, never-watched DVD of it to my mother-in-law -- it's apparently her favorite film of all time according to my wife.

_Man_

 

I saw Gone With the Wind on the big screen this past weekend and kept track of the cropped shots. I thought I would post a definitive list for future reference:

 

1. The opening shot of Tara

2. The shot of Scarlett running down the driveway

3. The cows coming down the hill at quitting time which leads into

4. Slaves returning to the quarters at dusk which leads into

5. Gerald riding his horse home through the fields and creek

6. The pullback shot of Gerald and Scarlett under the oak tree

7. The sign of Twelve Oaks before the BBQ which leads into

8. The carriages coming down the driveway at Twelve Oaks

9. The shot of Scarlett in the hallway at Twelve Oaks, calling to Ashley to enter the library with her

10.Master shot of the cowshed after Scarlett talks to Dr. Meade

11.Scarlett entering the garden during the "As God is my Witness" scene (masking didn't seem as severe)

12. Pullback of same scene leading into intermission

13. Melanie running down the hill in Part 2 when she sees the "soldier" coming to Tara.

14.The final pullback shot of Scarlett under the oak tree at Tara.

 

I'm pretty sure that's it!

 

[Adam_S]

I noticed the cropping when I last saw the movie in 35mm. why are some shots cropped?