G.W.T.W F.T.W.!!!

Hello all!  I hope all is well and good in the lives of my fellow Bloggonians this fine morning.  I've been getting more and more slack lately about keeping up with my little blog, things are fine in my world, just got lots going on and crazy work hours make it hard to keep up with the days.  I looked at my last post and realized that it was ten days ago, I couldn't believe that many days had passed so quickly!!

We are T-minus 8 weeks and counting on the arrival of baby Ila and we've been making preparations for that and moving our oldest into his new room and making room for the baby and what-not.  It's been eight years since we  had our youngest and this is almost going to be like starting from scratch!  We've got two older siblings now though that can help, so this should be a piece of cake.

The topic I want to ramble about today is one that is near and dear to my heart.  It won't win me any points on my "man" card, and I've been given a hard time by some of my friends and peers over the years about it.  The fact that I believe "Gone With the Wind" is the greatest movie ever to hit the silver screen!

Although I have mentioned "Gone With the Wind" on a couple of occasions, I have avoided seriously discussing it on my blog because I thought, and still think,  I wouldn't be able to do this epic tale justice with my babbling about it.  Nonetheless I'm going to give it a shot.

"Gone With the Wind" is based on the book with the same title by Margaret Mitchell, which sadly I've never read in it's entirety.  I attempted once when I was young, but it was just too overwhelming for my age, I mean, for real, the paper back version has almost 1,000 pages and the hardback is well over 1,000.  That's just too much for a 13-14 year old boy to tackle at one time.

The movie, however was a different story.  I can't really remember how old I was the first time I saw it, but they used to play it on regular television every so often a couple of times a year when I was a kid.  I recall sitting glued to the screen for the entirety of the approximately four hours of cinematic wonder.  I talked my brother-in-law into watching it once and he has a severe issue with his attention span, to put it mildly, but he watched it from beginning  to end and didn't get up once except during the intermission when we had to change video tapes.

The story begins in Georgia in 1861, pre-Civil War, or as we Southerners like to say sometimes, "the War of Northern Aggression", and illustrates the Old South for better or worse in all its former glory, and takes us through the horrors of war and the pain of defeat and all that comes along with it, and then finally the Reconstruction, and the sacrifices and turmoils endured by the characters to try to get back on their feet. I personally think that this is one of the most accurate historical depictions of that era on film then or now.  The Civil War was barely 70 years past when this movie was being made and a lot of history hadn't been manipulated and misrepresented as it often is these days.

So many genres are represented in this movie, and are intermingled to perfection to keep you entertained throughout no matter what your liking.  There's definitely drama, some romance, plenty of action, even touches of comedy to lighten the story from time-to-time.  A little something for everyone, as I like to say, and put together in a story that moves along flawlessly from the beginning where Scarlett O'Hara toys with two suitors on her porch and gets fussed at by Mammy for not having "no more manners than a field hand", to the ending scene where Scarlett realized she's lost Rhett Butler possibly for good and after breaking down, pulls her self together and says "...I'll think of some way to get him back.  After all, tomorrow is another day."

Now, I know my macho-manliness is being scrutinized right about now, but if you are a dude and you haven't seen this movie, you are missing one of the greatest cinematic achievements of it's time, quite possibley ever.  You have to remember, the movie was released in 1939 and over 4 million dollars were spent making it, which was an unheard of amount at that time.  Some of the scenes where Sherman is taking Atlanta, and the make shift hospital on the rail road tracks in Atlanta when the camera pans out to an ocean of wounded and dying Confederate soldiers, it just makes you appreciate the amount of extras alone that it took to shoot scenes like that.  There are several good action scenes to appease the manly side of any red-blooded male.  The scenes where Scarlett, Rhett, Melanie and Prissy flee Atlanta, another where Scarlett gets attacked in a shanty town, and one of my favorites when Scarlett defends Tara from a straggling Union soldier there to pillage the remains of the plantation. There are others, but those come to mind the quickest for me.

For anyone who appreciates a comical relief in a drama, this one has plenty stashed here and there during the whole movie.  From Rhetts first meeting with Scarlett in the parlor after she threw a vase and smashed it in a tantrum, or Mammy's constant nagging, one of my favorite examples being when she tells Scarlett that she doesn't need to go to Atlanta where Ashley Wilkes is going to be coming home and her "waiting there for him, just like a spider!!"   Hilarious! Then there's  Aunt Pitty Patt and her fainting spells every time Scarlett  does something scandalous, or Mammy again when Rhett Butler gives her the fancy red petticoat, and of course the line immortalized by Prissy when Melanie Hamilton is about to give birth..."Lawzy, we gonna' have to have a doctor, I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin babies" and then says " I don't know what would make me tell such a lie", classic!

Basically the heroine, Scarlett, overcomes tragedy, loss of epic proportions, (I would mention ALL of her losses, but I'm afraid someone may decide to watch it that hasn't seen it and I would be a "spoiler"), the destruction of her entire way of life, and despite all of her character flaws of which there are a few, she never lets herself be defeated.  She always manages to pick herself up and by any means necessary get her life back in order. You always hear people say "it's a tale of the triumph of the human spirit", well this is indeed the case here.  The spirit is nearly broken on several occasions but it always triumphs in the end.  This is certainly something that everyone can get some inspiration from in these tough times.

I hope that folks don't take anything out of context and assume that I approve of slavery and all that crap, it's just a part of our history that we can't ignore and can learn from.  As George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember their past are condemned to repeat it". I'll leave you with this bit of scripting that scrolled up on the beginning of the movie after the credits right before the first scene, that I've always liked:

There was a land of
Cavaliers and Cotton Fields
called the Old South...
Here in this pretty world
Gallantry took its last bow...
Here was the last ever to
be seen of Knights and their
Ladies Fair, of Master and of
Slave.
Look for it only in books,
for it is no more than a
dream remembered.
A Civilization gone with
the wind...



As an added bonus here's roughly 6 minutes of the opening scenes that I found on Google search to lure you in...hehehe!!

Gone With The Wind (1939) -- movie clip part 1 | Facebook