The Scarlett-Rhett love story is thus full of friction, like the Streisand-Redford love story in The Way We Were. But Streisand and Redford's characters are wrong for each other. What holds them together is how much she wants him, how she feels validated by his attention. (Probably nobody but Streisand could play this masochistic role and hold her own as a star. In fact, the masochism serves as a channel for her powerhouse emotionalism.) Scarlett and Rhett are right for each other, it's just that she won't admit it because it doesn't fit with her idea of what she should be, in public anyway.

As Scarlett Vivien Leigh has the ideal ability to tailor every gesture, every delivery, for the audience she's playing to. Leigh also has wonderful skill at showing Scarlett's moments of inattention when she thinks her audience isn't worth much effort, perhaps most amusingly in the scene when Charles Hamilton proposes to her while she's despondently watching for Ashley before he goes off to war, when she says in a manner so convictionless it's could almost be facetious, "I'll cry into my pillow every night." Scarlett can flirt while sleepwalking. Leigh's evident technique is perfect for this headstrong young woman who is trapped improvising an ill-fitting role as the scenery goes up in flames around her.

The movie is famous for its production values, but aside from the design, and the hectic scenes of the siege of Atlanta, which benefit from the effects you can get only from using extensive sets packed with well-directed extras, the moviemaking can't compare technically to such other large-scale works about war and social upheaval as Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915), Visconti's The Leopard (1963), Bertolucci's 1900 (Novecento; 1976), or the Taviani Brothers' Night of the Shooting Stars (La Notte di San Lorenzo; 1982). (The Visconti and Taviani pictures also have scripts of an imaginative subtlety Mitchell's material can't approach.) The alertly put together scene in which the women wait for the men to come back from cleaning up the shantytown after Scarlett has been attacked is the standout. All the same, it's not as if its effect on audiences were based only on sumptuous sets and costumes.

The work may be at bottom a low-grade historical novel, but the point-of-view of a defeated people gives it a basis in genuine feeling that holds all the characters and incidents and historical details together--the entire movie has stayed vividly in memory since I first saw it as a child. (By comparison, Titanic, with thousands of souls on board, managed to come up with only two and two-half characters, and the only thing that has stuck in my head is the technological fact that the ship broke in two before sinking to the bottom.) But watching Gone With the Wind as an adult I have also noticed clever aspects that went by me as a kid. In the first part of the movie, for instance, much of the exposition is given to Mammy, but you don't experience it as boring background info because Hattie McDaniel delivers it all as irascible mumbling. The last part of the movie lacks the measured flow of the rest and there are other movieish mistakes. The burning of Atlanta, for instance, suffers because they resort to the cheap suspense of whether the horse will get past the explosives before they go off, as if a historic catastrophe weren't interesting enough by itself. But these mistakes don't throw you out of the movie.