Gossip Friday: Reviews on Gone with the Wind

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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 family quarrel to us Americans. And family quarrels are best forgotten.

William Shelby

Arlington, Mass.

Well I suppose Mr. Shelby doesn’t subscribe to the old adage “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it”…

Three years’ incessant ballyhoo on the greatness of “Gone with the Wind” has finally broken down the naive immunity of the august Academt who hand out the lion’s share of the 1939 honors to GWTW personnel. And the honors accorded Vivien Leigh for a performance which at the most could be called adequate, in a year which has seen Bette Davis’ “Dark Victory” and “Elizabeth”; Hattie McDaniels’ reward for a job done no better than much of her work in previous years which never got atumble–this in a year which gave us Rosalind Russell in “The Women”. I’ve always thought that Academy awards were given in recognition for GOOD pictures, not BIG pictures, but then, GWTW MUST have been good because the advertisements said it was and who am I to judge?

George W. Marshall

London, Ontario, Canada

Ok, Mr. Marshall–Did you actually SEE GWTW? If you had there is no possible way you can describe Vivien’s performance as just “adequate”! The outrage. More outrageous is the fact that Clark didn’t win Best Actor for his portrayal as Rhett Butler…or am I alone in that opinion?

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