I had heard about Gone with The Wind all my life and I knew it was incredibly racist. It finally came on basic cable and I decided to see what all the fuss was about.
I found myself watching and liking a movie I knew was complete and utter bullshit.
Well, as a movie, it’s a good movie. Great directing, incredible acting (for the era), with a dynamic and well paced story. It holds up in technical terms despite the shifts in style and performance that have happened over the years.
If you hum really hard during the racist parts, you could still call it one of the greats. And it isn’t like it’s “birth of a nation” bad in that regard. There’s way worse movies out there from the era, and the era before that was horrible on average.
Even wilder. Look at the Sean Connery James Bond movies. The smoking and drinking are the least offensive things. Back in the day, Bond was considered suitable to be sold as a kids’ toy.
So part of the reason for the toys is actually a bit of interesting cultural shifting. Basically back then there wasn’t really a separation between adult and kids media unless it was explicitly pornography, so a lot of things we see now as for kids or for adults still had broad appeal in mind.
This shifted through the 60s, 70s, and then solidified some time in the 80s. It’s why Star wars a New Hope has dismemberment while being rated PG, same thing with Indiana Jones.
You can also see this when watching films from the 50s and 60s as they were really designed to cover a variety of genres at once. Has a little romance sub-plot for mom, action sequences for little Tommy and some cool cars/gadgets for dad. Y’know because everything had to be stereotyped to hell and back. But it is jarring seeing how much of variety films old movies really were
While the reasoning for why that is the case is kinda meh, I wish that was done more often nowadays. Sadly it seems like the media that inherited that tendency was video games, which while I love my vidya it does make it harder to backwards push it into film.
As a side note. The MPAA ratings system came out in 1968. Any movie made before that was automatically “G” rated if it had been shown in theaters. So if you showed “Goldfinger” in a theater it would be “G.” But movies get rated differently if it’s VHS/DVD; so when the movie went on sale it was PG, then PG-13.
The book was written by a Jewish guy named Norman Spinrad. In the foreword we learn that in 1922 Adolph Hitler went to America and became a science fiction illustrator and, after his English improved, a writer. This is his final and most popular novel, a tale of a young man who was exiled from his homeland and finally returns to find it under the control of a mysterious cabal of mind readers…
[off topic?]
I had heard about Gone with The Wind all my life and I knew it was incredibly racist. It finally came on basic cable and I decided to see what all the fuss was about.
I found myself watching and liking a movie I knew was complete and utter bullshit.
Well, as a movie, it’s a good movie. Great directing, incredible acting (for the era), with a dynamic and well paced story. It holds up in technical terms despite the shifts in style and performance that have happened over the years.
If you hum really hard during the racist parts, you could still call it one of the greats. And it isn’t like it’s “birth of a nation” bad in that regard. There’s way worse movies out there from the era, and the era before that was horrible on average.
[nsfw]
Watch an Peter O’Toole movie, ‘The Stunt Man.’ Great movie; funny, scary, exciting, romantic, plus a bunch of great plot twists.
There’s a scene where a kinda schubby screen writer talks about how he paid $1,000.00 to fly to Guatemala to have sex with a 14 year old virgin.
That line was considered only mildly off-color when the movie came out.
Holy crap. That would not go over well any more
Even wilder. Look at the Sean Connery James Bond movies. The smoking and drinking are the least offensive things. Back in the day, Bond was considered suitable to be sold as a kids’ toy.
https://www.liveauctioneers.com/price-result/lot-of-james-bond-collectibles/
Also, Sean Connery was open about about beating women. He saw nothing wrong with it if he felt it was “corrective” of behavior, like a dog.
So part of the reason for the toys is actually a bit of interesting cultural shifting. Basically back then there wasn’t really a separation between adult and kids media unless it was explicitly pornography, so a lot of things we see now as for kids or for adults still had broad appeal in mind.
This shifted through the 60s, 70s, and then solidified some time in the 80s. It’s why Star wars a New Hope has dismemberment while being rated PG, same thing with Indiana Jones.
You can also see this when watching films from the 50s and 60s as they were really designed to cover a variety of genres at once. Has a little romance sub-plot for mom, action sequences for little Tommy and some cool cars/gadgets for dad. Y’know because everything had to be stereotyped to hell and back. But it is jarring seeing how much of variety films old movies really were
While the reasoning for why that is the case is kinda meh, I wish that was done more often nowadays. Sadly it seems like the media that inherited that tendency was video games, which while I love my vidya it does make it harder to backwards push it into film.
As a side note. The MPAA ratings system came out in 1968. Any movie made before that was automatically “G” rated if it had been shown in theaters. So if you showed “Goldfinger” in a theater it would be “G.” But movies get rated differently if it’s VHS/DVD; so when the movie went on sale it was PG, then PG-13.
That’s art for ya.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-iron-dream-norman-spinrad/7751155?ean=9781490439457&next=t
[nsfw, Nazi flag]
The book was written by a Jewish guy named Norman Spinrad. In the foreword we learn that in 1922 Adolph Hitler went to America and became a science fiction illustrator and, after his English improved, a writer. This is his final and most popular novel, a tale of a young man who was exiled from his homeland and finally returns to find it under the control of a mysterious cabal of mind readers…