Adaptation Of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind

The movie “Gone with the Wind”, released in 1939, is considered one of the greatest love stories and even one of the best movies of all time. The story adapted from the novel written by Margaret Mitchell won ten academy awards, became the highest earning film and is still technically the greatest grossing film in the cinema history. Hattie McDaniel even became the first african american oscar winner thanks to this classic of the romantic genre. In a way, “Gone with the Wind” seems like one of the most amazing movies that have ever been released. However if we look at this “masterpiece” with a more objective view, we can see that the movie defended racist opinions and even slavery, using the American Civil War as a cover up to denigrate the …show more content…
This title card presents the situation as if the North was a cold blooded invader which started a war to destroy the southern culture. 74 years after the abolition of slavery, “Gone with the wind” gives a questionable opinion on slavery presenting a society “of Master[s] and of slave[s]” as a wonderland, and even adds a nostalgic tone while describing the fall of this civilization. Of course the movie is an adaptation of the novel written by Margaret Mitchell who understood and shared to some extent the vision of the confederacy: she was told by a family that witnessed the civil war from the confederate side how “amazing” the old South used to be. We could say that the movie adapted the novelist’s book and thus, complied with her vision of the past but the director had the authority to share others messages using Mitchell’s work. If he decided to direct the movie following the book’s perspective, it’s because he had the same opinion as the …show more content…
“Gone with the Wind” would be a completely different movie it were to be released in 2015. The story could still take place in the South during the civil war but the director would tend to stay neutral about this war: instead of showing confederate soldiers dying under bullets of Union soldiers, a modern director would show soldiers dying under bullets of other soldiers. The main reason for this change of perspective is that the public will never take the side of the confederate since our society has defined every man equal to one another (Universal Declaration of Human Rights).This allowed everyone to have access to great responsibility. Thus, stating that african american has to be the properties of white americans as the confederacy wanted it to be, doesn’t make sense as the US president himself is an african