Gone In 60 Seconds Film

[Vinnie Frevert]

Asa point of comparison, the remake cost roughly 200 times as much to make in real dollars. It highlights something that has been much on my mind these last few years: psychotronic film has gone mainstream.

Gone in 60 Seconds was created by HB Halicki. He was the son of a towing company family who started his own in southern California. He did some work in and around the independent film scene before he decided to make the film.

You can get Gone in 60 Seconds on DVD but the Blu-ray and combo DVD/Blu-ray are both cheaper. The single Blu-ray comes with some interviews. The combo comes with more including a commentary with cinematographer Jack Vacek and editor Leighton. The film is also on Amazon Prime.

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The Unenthusiastic Critic is an occasional series in which I convince my highly reluctant girlfriend N. to finally watch movies that nearly every other person on the planet has already seen. Today, we present the conclusion to our look at David O. Selznick's Oscar-winning production of Gone with the Wind (1939). You can read Part One, covering the first half of this extremely long movie, here.

In his review of Gone with the Wind in the December 20, 1939 edition of the New York Times, critic Frank S. Nugent called the film "a handsome, scrupulous and unstinting version of the 1,037-page novel, matching it almost scene for scene with a literalness that not even Shakespeare or Dickens were accorded in Hollywood."

I think Mr. Nugent meant that as a compliment, but, sweet Jesus, how that scrupulosity does try the patience of anyone who doesn't happen to think that Margaret Mitchell's crotch-crusher of a potboiler deserves to be in the same sentence with Shakespeare and Dickens. N. said in Part One of this post that one mark of great movie-making is the ability to edit, and I concur: no film adaptation is best served by such unimaginative devotion to its source material.

It's in the second half of the film that Gone with the Wind's rigorous fidelity to Mitchell's novel becomes most punishing, as the focus shifts from the intermittently exciting drama of wartime to the tepid domestic melodrama of reconstruction. Part Two of Gone with the Wind oftenfeels like a strained and stretched-out sequel to Part One, a repetitive milking of characters and storylines that could have been dealt with more effectively and more satisfyingly in two hours rather than four. (If Mitchell did this within her own novel, I can only imagine how much worse this over-staying-of-welcome gets with Alexandra Ripley's estate-authorized sequel Scarlett, published in 1991 and filmed as a television mini-series in 1994.)

Me: Well, I mean, people in theaters would have been pissing during this part, right? It's a nineteen-hour movie: people needed to get up and piss. So let's pretend that's what we're doing, and skip this part.

Some title cards set the stage: "SHERMAN!" reads one (and the fiery backdrops subtly inform us that we are supposed to read this precisely as we would read a card that said "SATAN!"). We learn how "the Great Invader" marched through Georgia, leaving a path of destruction, and how "Tara had survived to face the hell and famine of defeat."

A few scenes later, the personification of their torment arrives in the form of a deserter from the Northern army. The film's sympathies are firmly with the South, so of course this representative of the North is a sub-human troll looking to loot and rape and defile the sanctity of Tara with his vile Yankee presence. When he approaches Scarlett with obviously evil intentions, she shoots him right in the face.

As I said above, history in Gone with the Wind is being written by the losers, so Yankees do not come across well in this story. In addition to the Rapey Hobbit that Scarlett dispatches, we see carpetbaggers spill into Georgia in the wake of Lee's surrender, among them the odious Mr. Wilkerson (Victor Jory).

Meanwhile, Scarlett has fallen $300 behind on the taxes on Tara, and is in danger of losing the property. White-Trash Wilkerson shows up with his White-Trash Wife, offering to buy the place, and Scarlett orders them off the property. As they're driving away, Scarlett's crazy father jumps on a horse to give chase and yell at the Yankee scum, but is thrown from the animal and killed. My girlfriend is understandably devastated by this turn.

Scarlett has a new plan to come up with the back taxes: she's going to get it from her old friend Rhett Butler. But to seduce him, she needs to look good, and to get the money from him she needs to look like she doesn't need the money, so she pulls down the curtains so Mammy can make her a new dress.

(Long before I ever saw Gone with the Wind, I knew this plot development from The Carol Burnett Show: perhaps the reason I dislike Vivien Leigh so much is that Burnett is still the definitive Scarlett to me.)

However, that was in Part One, when Scarlett was just an over-eager debutante: in Part Two, I have absolutely no compunctions about calling her a whore, since she spends much of the second half of the film attempting to categorically whore herself. It starts with Rhett Butler, whom Scarlett finds living large in a Union Army jail cell. Dressed in her fine drape dress, she flirts and teases and coquettes her way around the cell, acting like she doesn't have a care in the world, until Rhett notices from her rough hands that she's been working "like a field hand."

(A side-note: out of curiosity, I checked the comparable quote from the novel, and of course there Rhett does not say Scarlett has been working "like a field hand": he says she's been working "like a nigger." The novel Gone with the Wind uses the word liberally, and originally Selznick had intended to use it in the movie, but caved in to censors, activists, and the objections of his own black actors, including McDaniel and McQueen. [For a good discussion of this issue, see Leonard J. Leff's article "Gone with the Wind and Hollywood's Racial Politics" in The Atlantic here.] As that article mentions, Butterfly McQueen objected to the word "because it seemed so authentic." To me, the very authenticity McQueen objected to is what is sorely missing from Gone with the Wind, and Selznick's attempts at political correctness now have the unfortunate effect of contributing to the overall feeling that the film is revisionist history, trying to soften the experience of blacks in the Civil War South and sanitize the unforgivable racism of the novel.)

Scarlett begs Rhett for the $300 to save her plantation, offering him her earrings and the mortgage on Tara as collateral; when he refuses, she offers him herself. "You haven't forgotten I'm not a marrying man?" he asks her, and she replies no, she hasn't forgotten. Rhett, to his eternal credit, informs Scarlett that she's not worth $300. Leaving the jail, Scarlett passes Rhett's friend Belle Watling going in: the juxtapositioning is clear, but at least Belle is an honest whore.

Her first sucker being too smart to fall for her act, Scarlett turns her sights on the dumbest man in Georgia: her sister's fiancee, Frank Kennedy. Frank, she discovers, has started a moderately successful hardware store, with a side business in lumber, and that's good enough for Scarlett: she quickly ensnares him, telling him that Suellen has another beau. When next we see them, Scarlett is writing a check for her taxes, signing it "Scarlett O'Hara Kennedy."

Now a woman of means, Scarlett sets Ashley up in Frank's lumber business: he doesn't want to accept her help, but she manipulates Melanie into making him accept the job. He and Scarlett differ, however, on labor practices: he wants to hire "free darkies," but now that they would have to pay black men, Scarlett says they're too expensive. She leases convicts instead, and puts a tyrannical overseer in place to keep them in line.

To get into this discussion we can look at the scenes where Scarlett is attacked while driving her buggy alone through a shantytown. She is assaulted by two men, one white and one black: the black man holds her horse, while the evil white man comes after Scarlett, obviously intending to rape her. She is saved by her former slave Big Sam.

I'm going to pause here for a note about Big Sam, and all the slaves of Tara who remain loyal to Scarlett, because this is a good example of what I mean about the film retaining the racist attitudes of the book while eschewing the overtly racist language. In the book, for example, Big Sam seems to think freedom is the worst thing that ever happened to him: "Ah done had nuff freedom," he tells Scarlett, after returning from up north. "Ah wants somebody ter feed me good vittles reg'lar, and tell me whut ter do an' whut not ter do, an' look affer me w'en Ah gits sick."

It was the large number of outrages on women and the ever-present fear for the safety of their wives and daughters that drove Southern men to cold and trembling fury and caused the Ku Klux Klan to spring up overnight. The North wanted every member of the Ku Klux hunted down and hanged, because they had dared take the punishment of crime into their own hands at a time when the ordinary processes of law and order had been overthrown by the invaders. Here was the astonishing spectacle of half a nation attempting, at the point of bayonet, to force upon the other half the rule of negroes, many of them scarcely one generation out of the African jungles.

Scarlett is surprised to discover that her men are in the Klan. "Of course, Mr. Kennedy is in the Klan and Ashley, too, and all the men we know," she is told. "They are men, aren't they? And white men and Southerners."

Rhett brings Ashley home, playing drunk, and to fool the Yankees they concoct a story about how they've all been at Belle Watling's place. In truth, however, Ashley has been shot in the raid on the shantytown, and Scarlett is horrified. No mention is made, however, of Frank Kennedy.

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