Films
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Gossip Friday: Reviews on Gone with the Wind
Today starts the festivities in Marietta, GA celebrating the 70th anniversary of “Gone with the Wind”. I will be there all day and all day on Saturday as well and you know I will report back next week with details and pictures! Keeping with “Gone with the Wind” as a theme, here are two letters from June 1940 to the editor of a fan magazine: I have just seen “Gone with the Wind” and like thousands of others I thought it was grand entertainment. But unlike thousands of others, I think the picture, like the book, should have never been created. Why? Because the picture revives the Civil War, a…
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Visiting Miss Mitchell
Clark, Margaret Mitchell and Vivien Leigh in Atlanta for the premiere of Gone with the Wind, 1939 This past weekend I ventured into downtown Atlanta to Oakland Cemetary, where, among many others, Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell is buried. A beautiful, peaceful cemetary dating from the 1850’s (the earliest “death date” my companion and I saw was 1861), it contains many Georgia luminaries as well as the graves of 6,900 Confederate soliders. It is estimated to hold the remains of 70,000 people, which includes some 20,000 that are laying in unmarked graves in a large field on one side of the cemetary. We wandered around for a few hours, pointing…
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Some “Melodrama” in Public Enemies (2009)
I recently saw the new Johnny Depp film, Public Enemies, about notorious bank robber John Dillinger. Dillinger was famously gunned down by FBI agents in front of the Biograph Theater in Chicago, after seeing Gable’s film Manhattan Melodrama. He was set up by friend of his, Romanian prostitute Anna Sage, who was facing deportation and volunteered to hand him over to the feds in exchange for her visa. She told the FBI they would be at the movies that evening and wore an orange (later misidentified as red) dress to alert them to him. It has long been a part of movie folklore that Myrna Loy was Dillinger’s favorite actress…