‘Gone With the Wind’ Hits No. 1 on Amazon Best-Sellers Chart After HBO Max Drops Movie (cinema, film)
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GWTW is probably one of my favorite movies of all time. The book is my favorite book of all time. Yes, it's all about the south's lost cause. You can still meet older people who live in the south, with family history stretching for generations, who inherited the mixed emotions of that era. You don't see that too much any more with younger southerners who are more global and feel less connected. Margaret Mitchell was quite the character and I hope that history is included with any extra DVD material.
I disagree about TCM. It's become rather a cult with the artsy college student crowd.
Grease, the movie version, is like watching a bunch of 1970s people dressing up 50ish style for Halloween. When they watered down the original theatrical production to make the movie for tweens, any vestige of authenticity of the 1950s went out the window too. A truly awful movie that gets turned back into a musical to be performed by middle school students every year. Grease, both the musical and the movie were made during the 1970s, during a 1950s cultural revival which included American Graffiti, Happy Days, and Sha Na Na.
I can't see it as censorship; they chose to take it out of the rotation at a sensitive time. Movies about certain kinds of violence have been back-roomed when real examples occur.
They should condemn Mark Twain then. Twain's family owned slaves. Tom Sawyer's family owned slaves. Huck Finn was racist. Voila.
They should stop trying to cover up how good things used to be!!!
No one's covering up anything. There's a time to stop promoting/celebrating "things" when an uninformed audience might take away an inappropriate message.
Of course, Gone With The Wind was filmed under the onerous censorship in place at the time: the Hays Code.
The Code was based on three overriding principles:
Quote:
*No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.
*Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.
*Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.
It was enforced through distribution - since film distributors adhered to the Code, while it was possible to produce films that did not adhere, one could not get them distributed. It wasn't a case of one outlet choosing not to carry a film. If a film didn't comply, you just weren't ever going to see it, period.
The Code in detail was much more specific. For example, profanity was forbidden, and many examples were given. No woman was to be called an 'alley cat'. Also, 'cripes' and 'nerts' were prohibited. Also, until 1939 the forbidden words included 'damn'. But along came Gone With The Wind, and Rhett Butler's "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!", and the Code was amended - just weeks before the film's release - to allow 'damn' in certain limited usages.
Of interesting note is the fact that the slavery depicted in Gone With The Wind did not run afoul of the Hays Code because the slaves were black. The Code expressly forbade the depiction of white slavery, but black slavery was fine.
The long list of things that were not allowed is interesting reading. It shows how afraid authorities (the Code was enacted by the industry to head off government-imposed censorship) of the populace being exposed to many ideas.
O But along came Gone With The Wind, and Rhett Butler's "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!", and the Code was amended - just weeks before the film's release - to allow 'damn' in certain limited usages.
And, I believe, with the payment of a fine, some $5,000. That may be a legend.
The history of the Hayes code (and pre-Code movies) is endlessly fascinating. One of the last movies affected by it was The Bad Seed (1956), in which a thoroughly evil little girl causes Damien-like mayhem and eventually drives her mother to suicide, skipping gaily off into the sunset and a future of more evil. Except, whoops, the Hayes office said no-no-no, nooo... and a pasted-together ending has the mother surviving her suicide attempt and the girl vaporized by a bolt of lightning. Justice and sensibility served.
Whether or not someone liked the movie has absolutely nothing to do with this. It's all about Mob Rule.
Never cave into an angry, disruptive mob. The placating never ends because it's never enough according to the mob.
I don't think they should have dropped the movie. I don't think that publisher should have pulled Woody Allen's book either.
It was still a bad movie.
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