Gone with the Wind (1939)

  When I was either in middle school or junior high, my mother made me watch Gone with the Wind.  I thought it was the most boring movie ever made.  It made it worse that nearly every one else I knew held it in high regard.  I thought Scarlett O'Hara was the biggest spoiled brat in cinematic history.

Now, twenty years or so later, it was included in my Warner Bros. Best Picture collection so I thought I'd try it again and see if it was just the callowness of youth that made me dislike it originally.

Nope.  Still sucks.

Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) is a spoiled debutante living on an antebellum plantation called Tara.  Even though she could have her pick of the young men, her rotten little heart is set on her neighbor, Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard).  Ashley, however, has already proposed to his cousin, Melanie (Olivia deHaviland).  Out of spite, Scarlett accepts a proposal from Melanie's brother, Charles (Rand Brooks).  Then the Civil War breaks out and all the young men of the South rush to enlist, except for South Carolinian scoundrel Rhett Butler (Clark Gable).  Widowed at 17, Scarlett moves to Atlanta to live with her sister-in-law and hated enemy, Melanie, right up until General Sherman sacks it.  Danger and privation follow as the South dramatically loses the War of Northern Aggression, but Scarlett is determined not to let anything keep her from the lifestyle she has always been accustomed.

I know the point of this movie was to show how people can rise in times of crisis and how determination and guts will win out over despair, but Scarlett O'Hara will never be anything more than an opportunistic sociopath to me.  She is malicious, calculating, and violent, running roughshod over anyone else's desires in the pursuit of her own.  She makes every other human being around her miserable.  I don't see anything admirable in that.