When She Was Bad

Margaret Mitchell was skittish both about the decline of the South and about the end of slavery: Ashley's perfunctory speech about emancipating "the darkies" is post hoc lip service, while Scarlett would consider freeing Mammy only if she saw it as downsizing. The movie certainly didn't improve on Mitchell's slapdash polemic. These days its racial politics look so absurd that it's all one can do not to heckle or hoot at (credited) screenwriter Sidney Howard's daffy idea of slave-speak, of which Butterfly McQueen clearly bore the brunt as Prissy, the hand-flapping, clueless maid who don't know nothin' about birthin' babies.

For all the grandeur of its scale, no one of sound mind will remember Gone With the Wind for its incisive social commentary. The movie's infinite life will forever be driven by a love story that never happens, a tragedy that afflicts Rhett more than it does Scarlett. Of the two women he loves most - Scarlett and his daughter, Bonnie Blue - only one loves him back, and then not for long. Like many compulsive flirts, Miz Scarlett, who has the soul if not the luggage of a carpetbagger, is interested in sex only insofar as it's good for business. When Scarlett finally gets with the program, yawning and stretching in post-nookie bliss the morning after Rhett sweeps her upstairs for a good ravishing, it's too late. By then, he famously doesn't give a damn, and in the end, as that dreadful TV sequel to Gone With the Wind indicated, neither does Scarlett. Her heart belongs to Tara.