Molly Haskell, Frankly My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)
Reviewed by Eleanor Ringel Cater

Molly Haskell

It's been a solid 70 years since Scarlett O'Hara promised herself she'd think about THAT tomorrow. In the interim, a lot of people have been thinking about Scarlett. There've been sequels, musicals, spoofs, a protest parody, anniversary celebrations, even a museum. And now there's another book — likely the best book ever written about Scarlett, Melanie, Mammy, Rhett and the rest (aside from Margaret Mitchell's little effort).

Celebrated critic and journalist Molly Haskell has taken a long hard look at Gone with the Wind, and the excellent result is Frankly My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited. Though she's lived in New York for decades with her husband, well-known film writer Andrew Sarris, Haskell was born down South, in Richmond, Virginia. And she attended Sweet Briar College, which says volumes to certain Southerners. True, she's been fully Yankee-ized, but as those same Yankees like to say, she still knows from debutante balls and the Junior League. When she explains why a high-spirited Peggy Mitchell wasn't invited to join Atlanta's League, Haskell knows just what sort of pettiness and, at the same time, stinging rejection, were in play. Years later, Peggy enjoyed payback by refusing to attend the big Ball given the League the night before the movie's premiere in Atlanta.

Haskell takes the book's (and the movie's) eternal burden, its hideous racism, as a given. Though she discusses it, you feel she feels it's been dissected quite a lot by others who wished to make it the focus. That's not to say she ignores it. I especially like her writing on Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy, and became the first African-American ever to win an Oscar. She played a lot of Mammy roles throughout the thirties and forties and got a lot of flack for it. But she shut up a lot of her critics when she said, "I would rather make $700 a week playing a maid than be one."

Hattie McDaniel

Still, as Haskell reminds us, none of the black cast was invited to Atlanta for the premiere, and at the Oscars ceremony itself, McDaniel was seated at the back of the room, far away from the main GWTW table.

Other things interest Haskell. For one, the way the contrariness of GWTW's legacy (especially as a movie) sets it apart from other nostalgic classics like Casablanca or The Wizard of Oz. Haskell writes that both those other films are iconic, but in a more manageable way. "There's a consensus about why they're charming... Or art. A common agreement on what's good, bad, silly, and fun. Gone with the Wind, on the other hand, with its much wider spectrum, is both different things to different people and different things to the same person at different times in that person's life. Divisions in thinking — the tension between the primitive and the sophisticated, between political advocacy and apolitical enjoyment, between literary and mass-market tastes — have always been there and even constitute part of its pull."

And then there's Scarlett herself, firmly fixed as our ideal of the Southern Belle in the reflection of Vivien Leigh's flirtatious green eyes. Haskell, who made her reputation back in the '70s with an early feminist critique of the movies called From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, defends Scarlett as a fully realized character. She considers her an American original worthy of standing along side Captain Ahab, Charles Foster Kane or Huck Finn. Scarlett is no rough-and-tumble tomboy like Jo in Little Women or an unattainable blank like Daisy in The Great Gatsby or even a slightly tainted sprite like Holly Golightly/Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's. There's some thing very real about Scarlett, something very grounded, even when she's behaving outlandishly or selfishly. Rhett/Clark Gable can see through her simpering with both eyes closed. In a word, she's complex; perhaps even more complex than she herself - or her creator Peggy Mitchell - even knows.

Margaret Mitchell

Mitchell was a complicated woman, too. There was the, er, misunderstanding with the social belles of Atlanta for dancing too wildly (it's said). She refused to set foot in Hollywood, no matter how many times David O. Selznick asked her. And while most Southerners know she was run down by a cab and killed while crossing Peachtree Street in Atlanta in 1949, very few know what movie she and her husband were going to see.

Haskell knows. It was A Canterbury Tale, a rather sophisticated Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger picture.

It turns out, all these decades later, we still give a damn. Frankly My Dear does what all fine critical books do. It encourages you to take another look - especially at the film. It's exactly what Selznick and company intended it to be: a grand Hollywood illusion of a South that never really was.

This review appeared in a different form in Film Comment.

Eleanor Ringel Cater
© FIPRESCI 2009

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