Nobody Cares About the 75th Anniversary of Gone with the Wind
LatestTerrible news if you’re all dressed up in your drapes with nowhere to go: It’s the 75th anniversary of the premiere of Gone with the Wind, and there’s little fuss being raised besides a flurry of think pieces. Thank God.
The Washington Post tracked down one of the last surviving cast members, 82-year-old Mickey Kuhn, who played Beau Wilkes. He reports there’s not much happening this year: “A good many of the people in charge, they have no earthly idea what ‘Gone With the Wind’ was.” Warner Brothers sent him a Blu-Ray but “They don’t have anything planned. We thought perhaps Ted Turner might have something planned, but he didn’t.”
Given that Gone with the Wind is, for all its immense glamour, is a mouldering pile of racist Lost Cause nonsense, this is probably for the best. Before you challenge this claim, please sit down and watch some clips on YouTube. Literally any portrayal of an African American will do, but I’ve always found the character of “Pork” especially dismaying. Oh, and that scene where Ashley gets shot? Yeah, the book makes clear that Scarlett’s husband Frank was literally riding with the KKK to “clean out” that shanty town. They ditched that little detail from the movie, but once you know that the postwar South was crawling with paramilitary outfits dedicated to repressing newly freed slaves which paved the way for Jim Crow, well, it doesn’t exactly fix the scene, now does it?