I have seen tiny slices of GWTW but it never interested me.

In regards to Civil War and slave history movies, I've seen Roots, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Twelve Years a Slave, Mandingo, Django and Cold Mountain.

Thanks for the thread, WestCoastLib.

and I can remember almost LOLing at the stereotypical way that the various characters in it were portrayed (especially the slaves).

It was so effing amateurish it was almost funny.

I might watch it again, just for shits and giggles.

narcissistic as all hell.
That movie has to be judged in context of the period it was written and filmed.

There is another movie of the same era, called The Little Foxes, with Bette Davis, a more hardened schemer.
Lots of the movies of that period were selling messages to the audiences.

I took the book and the movie, years ago and the few times I have seen it since, for escapism, and not all that seriously, except for the fact they have now passed into cultural history.

Pure propaganda.

speech written for Wallace was , "Segregation, now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

Asa Earl Carter

No doubt Clint Eastwood could care less.

It was every bit as senseless and thuggish as anything that's taken place in the Balkans. By the end of the war the fighting had little to do with the larger war and was more based on blood feuds and endless cycles of retaliation. The Confederates had their Quantrills and Bloody Bill Andersons; the Union had men like Jim Lane, who was equally brutal. The Confederates burned Lawrence, KS. The Union side imprisoned women and children, and drove civilian noncombatants out of 9 counties in NW Missouri with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The Outlaw Josey Wales was fiction, and all fiction is exaggerated. But it was not without elements of the truth.

Pure propaganda for the secessionists. Plus the racism is disgusting.

Destroying their food stores, their houses, their fields, their roads ... That was okay. "Hard war," nearly "total war", with civilian infrastructure gratuitously destroyed to destroy morale was fine.

Evacuating Atlanta, driving everybody out into the countryside, was a fine thing. Pol Pot would be proud. He wanted to humiliate every secessionist possible, and figured the worse the terror the faster the war would end. He wanted fear and dread. He got it. In destroying food, in burning towns, it's unclear that he wasn't responsible for a lot of civilian deaths. But he's a good guy because he didn't order civilians rounded up and shot.

He wasn't an abolitionist; he believed blacks were inferior. But he followed orders and did his job. He was the mirror image of Lee, who was a long-term abolitionist and considered slavery evil. But who also followed orders and did his job. Sherman originated the "40 acres and a mule" business, but only for a small set of freed slaves, as a field command; his order was revoked and, to be honest, never fully carried out. But it produced a nice myth that many still sort of cling to.

Following orders included continuation of targeting civilians to demoralize them and their husbands/sons who were fighting during the Indian Wars after the Civil War. The goal was to make the areas safe for American settlers and make the Indians less willing to resist assimilation, to crush and destroy any Indian opposition.

Welcome to a real war hero. He preserved the Union; he was a monster. The moral judgement of Sherman, like so many others, doesn't follow the nice black/white yes/no binary thinking that we need to impose on the era for modern political and ideological purposes. Sorry 'bout that.

um.....no.

Talk about slaughter, humiliation, and destroying morale...

You're supposed to admire her perseverance through adversity, but not the means by which she reaches her ends, or how greedy, conniving, hard and uncharitable she is. I think in some respects she is meant to represent the south deluding itself that it will rise again.

I agree. She is unlikable, at least in the novel, and is the main character. If the novel was meant to be KKK propaganda, why would the main character be so hard to relate to? I agree with your characterization.

For the era.

She evolved from a silly child to a strong boned (though still self absorbed) woman.

However her evolution was from sheltered, strong-willed, self-centered child to hardened, strong-willed, self-centered woman. She was a spoiled child, but that's not the same as being a silly child. Scarlett was always calculating and dead serious about everything she did, even as she was adept at wearing a charming Southern belle mask.

She never learns an ounce of empathy though.

I'm a man, but I consider myself very supportive of minority and women's issues. i'm a minority myself and have only daughters.

And, if I try real hard to overlook 90% of her actions, I can see a glimmer of female empowerment in her storyline. But it's so overshadowed by everything else she does, that it's pretty much lost. It's a bit like the actress that played "Mammy" being the first black women to win an Academy Award. Not even 1 step forward and 2 back. More like 1 forward and 20 back.

Whatever power she aquires she gets by the result of crushing other women, so its hard to take her empowerment as anything approaching femanism. Hell Scarlette is visibly satisfied after being raped in the movie along with everything else she does.

But If there is anything redeeming about her, it is that...and only that.

It is a different story altogether and I won't let the cat out of the bag. You'll have to read the entire 1,000 pg. book to get the true story which will take you a couple of weeks to do but, well worth it to get the proper perspective on this book and what it was really all about.

Hint: Rhett Butler played almost a minor role in the book FYI.

I've heard it's more nuanced (most books are) and we get a lot of internal dialogue that touches more on some of the characters thoughts on issues like slavery. And I'm interestef to read that and get a more complete view.

However, I also understand it to at it's core still be mostly confederate propaganda that propetuates that idea of the "Old South" as a fairy tale land with plantation families as the aristocracy that took care of their slaves who were happy for it.

like Scarlett. I liked Melanie. She reminded me of myself at the time, in all her doormattedness, when no other literary character did. Which come to think of it is no surprise that there are not too many literary heroes who are complete pushovers. I totally missed that the characters of GWTW one night started the KKK. I missed a lot those days. Never seen it since.

Although that's the way Scarlett saw her. I think Melanie had an inner strength that Scarlett completely lacked, she was kind to everyone, even the town prostitute, even wounded Yankees because she wanted to think that somewhere up north there was a Yankee woman who might be being kind to her husband who was a POW. And yet, she didn't shirk her responsibility to protect her family when she killed the Yankee who was threatening to rape Scarlett. And she also didn't complain when she had to give birth during a bombing raid and subsequent evacuation of her hometown as a war refugee. Melanie was the strongest damn character in the book, in my opinion.

I've always thought her loyalty to Scarlett was another aspect of her strength, but perhaps Melanie was meant to represent the South deluding itself, with such fierce loyalty to such an obvious lost cause. Hmmm. Food for thought.

I watched it a few years ago and was really disturbed by the content and the whole "slaves were better off than freed" undercurrent. And Scarlett? Yes, really awful.

I was left really confused as well.

but I read the book, which may have been more nuanced, I don't know. Scarlett was kind of an anti-heroine, really, although she was the protagonist.

that I have NEVER watched that movie. It has been
on TV many times, but I could not stand to watch it
after five minutes. It really was awful.

Also, just like "The Closer" - I could not watch it because
of the distracting southern accent.

Most of my knowledge of it comes from this

(I was a senior in high school at the time) went to see it as a field trip.

And this wasn't even in the south!

Times change--as does perspective.