?Gone with the Wind? should go the way of the Confederate flag | New York Post

 

I believe some have mentioned slippery slope. I guess that we should now just blot out large portions of our nations history from public view because it may be uncomfortable for some to see?

I smell a book burning on the horizon.

I smell a book burning on the horizon.

 

There were burnings of a different sort during my formative years.

Yeah, but those are expensive now!

What a joke

I mean... fine... if you want. It's impossible to watch that movie in the 21st century and see its politics as anything other than almost laughably backwards, but that movie is a classic for a lot of reasons. Despite being full of dumb white dudes, it features independently-thinking women (surely a rarity in the entertainment of the 1930s) and Hattie McDaniel is an absolute LEGEND.

 

What the author conveniently leaves is any of the numerous taped or written statements from academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs in which she discusses her own conflicted relationship with the film. She's talked about how her mother wouldn't let her watch it when she was younger because of the content but when she watched as a grown woman, she was blown away by Hattie McDaniel and how good her character and her role were. The days of openly praising it as a masterpiece are probably over, but we should never forget about that film if only for Hattie McDaniel's groundbreaking performance.

The slope's getting slipperier

As bad in racial stereotype and Southern apologetics as "Gone with the Wind" is, it holds nothing to "Birth of a Nation" by DW Griffith. A film that was so pro-Klan in it's interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction yet hailed as a masterpiece of living history by then sitting President Woodrow Wilson.

I may be the only human never to have seen GWTW. Don't think I ever will.

I may be the only other human besides woodsrider never to have seen GWTW. Don't think I ever will.

 

I fixed that for you.

I may be the only human never to have seen GWTW. Don't think I ever will.

 

Actually I Am in that boat too. Have never seen a minute of it.

I've never seen any of it either, outside of the much played "Frankly my dear" scene.

As bad in racial stereotype and Southern apologetics as "Gone with the Wind" is, it holds nothing to "Birth of a Nation" by DW Griffith. A film that was so pro-Klan in it's interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction yet hailed as a masterpiece of living history by then sitting President Woodrow Wilson.

 

I believe that is because it was actually a recruitment film for the Klan and had an original title of The Clansman

I would venture to say that way more people under 50 have not seen the film than those that have. Just an uneducated guess.

I believe that is because it was actually a recruitment film for the Klan and had an original title of The Clansman

 

Wasn't a recruitment film, just an adaptation of a novel called "The Clansman". That view of history was still pretty popular at the time and was less outside the mainstream than many would think.

 

Still, it caused riots in some major northern cities and New York City even censored it. It's still banned in parts of Europe.

 

Griffith apologized profusely for the nature of the film and even made his next film "Intolerance", an extravagant spectacle depicting intolerance throughout human history, as part of his personal atonement.