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Gone With The Wind (1939) 
Director: Victor Fleming
Run Time: 239 Minutes
Age Recommendations: 12 and up
Main Characters: Scarlett O’Hara, Ashley Wilkes, Melanie Hamilton, Rhett Butler, and Mammy.
Plot: "Gone With the Wind" begins with a lavish party at the Tara Plantation in the state of Georgia. After being attended to by her Mammy for the party, Scarlett ventures out into the party to the attention of several would-be suitors, but she has her eyes only on Ashley. However, to Scarlett's consternation, Ashley has already consented to marry a distant cousin from the north, Melanie Hamilton. With the sudden announcement that the Civil War has started and that many of the young men are going off to fight (including Ashley), Scarlett makes the rash decision of marrying her first inappropriate suitor Charles Hamilton after she unexpectedly meets Rhett Butler. Never actually having loved Charles, Scarlett regrets having to be in mourning after he is killed in the war, which isn't going well for the South. While staying with her Aunt Pittypat Hamilton in Atlanta, Scarlett begrudgingly does her Confederate duty of helping to tend to the wounded. In one of the most compelling parts of the film, Scarlett is torn between fleeing Atlanta, helping to tend to wounded Confederate troops or helping the pregnant Melanie. Begrudgingly, Scarlett helps Melanie deliver the baby with the assistance of Prissy before fleeing the burning Atlanta with the much-needed, but undesirable, help of Rhett Butler. The life of starvation, poverty and carpetbaggers that Scarlett and everyone else at Tara face immediately after the war hardens Scarlett greatly. She vows that “as God as my witness, I shall never go hungry again.” Scarlett sets her family and servants to picking the cotton fields. She also kills a Union deserter who threatens her during a burglary, and finds gold coins in his haversack, enough to sustain her family and servants for a short time. With the defeat of the Confederacy and war's end, Ashley returns from being a prisoner of war. The dispirited Ashley finds he is of little help to Tara, and when Scarlett begs him to run away with her, he confesses his desire for her and kisses her passionately, but says he cannot leave Melanie. Gerald O'Hara dies after he is thrown from his horse while chasing a Yankee carpetbagger, the former overseer of his plantation who now wants to buy Tara, off his property. Scarlett is left to care for the family, and realizes she cannot pay the taxes on Tara. Knowing that Rhett is in Atlanta and believing he is still rich, she has Mammy make an elaborate gown for her from her mother’s drapes. However, upon her visit, Rhett tells her his foreign bank accounts have been blocked, and that her attempt to get his money has been in vain. However, as she departs, she encounters her sister’s fiancé, the middle-aged Frank Kennedy, who now owns a successful general store and lumber mill. Soon Scarlett is Mrs. Frank Kennedy. She becomes a hardheaded businesswoman, willing to trade with the despised Yankee carpetbaggers and use convict laborers in her mill. When Ashley is about to take a job offer with a bank in the north, Scarlett preys on his weakness by weeping that she needs him to help run the mill; pressured by the sympathetic Melanie, he relents. One day, after Scarlett is attacked while driving alone through a nearby shantytown, Frank, Ashley, and others make a night raid on the shantytown. Ashley is wounded in a melee with Union troops, and Frank is killed. With Frank’s funeral barely over, Rhett visits Scarlett and proposes marriage. Scarlett is aghast at his poor taste, but takes him up on his offer. After a honeymoon in New Orleans, Rhett promises to restore Tara, while Scarlett builds the biggest and most crassly opulent mansion in Atlanta. The two have a daughter, Bonnie. Rhett adores her as a less spoiled version of her mother, and does everything to win the good opinion of Atlanta society for his daughter’s sake. Scarlett, still pining for Ashley and chagrined at the ruin of her figure, lets Rhett know that she wants no more children and that they will no longer share a bed. In anger, he kicks open the door that separates their bedrooms to show her that he will decide that. Rhett decides to takes Bonnie on an extended trip to London. When Rhett returns with Bonnie, Scarlett is delighted to see him however he rebuffs her attempts at reconciliation. Rhett remarks at how she looks different and Scarlett then resentfully tells him that she is pregnant again. Hurt, Rhett tells her "cheer up. Maybe you'll have an 'accident,'" Enraged, Scarlett lunges at him, falls down the stairs and suffers a miscarriage. As Scarlett recovers, and Rhett attempts reconciliation, while young Bonnie, as impulsive as her grandfather, dies in a fall from her pony when she attempts to jump a fence. Scarlett and Rhett are devastated and exchange recriminations over her death, with Rhett keeping vigil over his daughter's body for three days, refusing to let her be taken away for burial. Melanie visits to comfort them, and convinces Rhett to allow Bonnie to be laid to rest, but then collapses in labor from a pregnancy she was warned could kill her. On her deathbed, she asks Scarlett to look after Ashley for her, as Scarlett had looked after her for Ashley. With her dying breath, Melanie also tells Scarlett to be kind to Rhett, that he loves her. Outside, Ashley collapses in tears, helpless without his wife. Only then does Scarlett realize that she never could have meant anything to him, and that she had loved something that never really existed. She runs home to find Rhett packing to leave her, saying it is too late to salvage their marriage. She begs him not to leave, telling him she realizes now that she had loved him all along, that she never really loved Ashley. Rhett tells her that as long as there was Bonnie, whom he could spoil and love unconditionally, as he wished he could with Scarlett, there was a chance that they could have been happy, but now that chance was gone. As Rhett walks out the door, she begs him, "Rhett, if you go, where shall I go? What shall I do?" He answers, “ Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. ” and walks away into the fog. She sits on her stairs and weeps in despair, "What is there that matters?" She then recalls the voices of her father Gerald, Ashley and Rhett, all of whom remind her that her strength comes from Tara itself. Hope lights Scarlett's face: "Tara! Home. I'll go home, and I'll think of some way to get him back! After all, tomorrow is another day!"
Theme: Anybody will do what they have to do for those that they love.
Good Points:
- The scenery is rich and vivid.
- The movie’s score is outstanding and timeless.
- The characters are well developed and eternal.
- Scarlett and Rhett are dripping with chemistry.
- Famous one-liners.
Downfalls:
- Numerous inaccuracies to the history of the civil war.
- Prissy was loud and annoying.
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