‘Gone with the Wind’: The one movie Michael Caine would watch forever
In a media-saturated world where watching films and television shows become part of our every day, it’s only natural that we latch onto a certain title and become strangely obsessed with the comfort it brings.
Whether you constantly rewatch episodes of your favourite series (I’ve seen Sex and the City more times than I’d like to admit) or find yourself reaching for a childhood classic to put on in the background, the familiarity of certain characters who come to feel like friends, or the nostalgia we associate with the story can make life a little bit more bearable. The stress of work and adult responsibility can weigh down heavily, and sometimes the only guarantee of happiness and comfort can be found in revisiting your old friends, forever immortalised on celluloid for you to hang out with, reliable and unchanging.
Humans naturally gravitate towards familiarity, so it’s no surprise that we all have our go-to title to rewatch, and for Michael Caine, it’s a controversial Hollywood classic. He doesn’t mind that the film is over three hours long, as he could watch it anytime, mesmerised by the sheer scope of the movie’s achievements.
Gone with the Wind, released in 1939, uses the American Civil War as the setting to chronicle various romantic entanglements, and Caine thinks it’s beautiful. “This was the first movie in colour to win a ‘Best Picture’ Oscar and, taking inflation into account, it is still the highest-grossing picture ever. The book, by Margaret Mitchell, was turned down by every major Hollywood studio and picked up in the end by the independent producer David O Selznick,” Caine wrote in The Elephant to Hollywood.
Discussing his evident knowledge of the film’s production, Caine added, “The first director on the movie was a brilliant, gentle and very sensitive man called George Cukor, and although Selznick fired him and replaced him with Victor Fleming, a brusque, tough, action director, neither Vivien Leigh nor Olivia de Havilland liked the change and continued to seek private direction from Cukor.
The veteran also highlighted what earned the film a slap on the wrist, adding, “This was also the film in which Clark Gable said ‘Damn’. It had, of course, been said in a film before, but it caused controversy because Gone with the Wind was so big… I can watch this movie time and time again without tiring of it. It is a timeless classic.”
Gone with the Wind is hot water for more than just its use of the word ‘damn’, however. Since its release, the film has widely been panned for its depiction of marital rape committed by Gable’s Rhett, who forces Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara into bed. It’s indefensible and painfully representative of a time when such acts of sexual abuse were normalised, both on and off screen, and packaged as transcendental romance for the ages, thus making its way into the final cut of a Hollywood epic.
The movie has also been criticised for its racist stereotyping and perpetuation of the ‘Lost Cause’ myth, which has led to it being removed from certain streaming services in recent years. Essentially, there is a lot wrong with Gone with the Wind, but older generations somehow seem able to look past these very troubling issues, which represent a very outdated image of an era of America, but maybe not really that bygone.
These days, the movie certainly isn’t held as highly as it once was, and I’m sure that few young people are sitting down to watch a movie from 1939 that’s over three hours long unless they’re being forced by a family member. It seems that those who grew up with the film, like Caine, are the ones who hold it the closest.
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