It's easy to enjoy, but only if you close one eye to the race issue. The view of the slaves is the southern fantasy that they were better off owned than free. The best case for this view could no doubt be made for a house slave like Mammy, and I think that there must have been relatively well-treated slaves who did identify with their masters (who were in a sense entrusted to their, the slaves', care). Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1845 autobiography, with a mixture of sympathy for the situation and disgust at the result, about slaves who identified with their masters and would fight with each other over whose was richest, smartest, most of a man, etc. As Douglass points out, it is in a sense only human to identify with what is one's own, and if you can accept that then you can say that Mammy is a well-drawn character. Of course, the character, and the actress, are limited by the bounds of deference that make African-American characters in old Hollywood movies so cringingly subhuman--asexual and with less self-assertion and anger than would be normal in a house pet--and by the patronizing attitude toward them that the moviemakers seem to share with the characters. (Most noticeable when Rhett makes Mammy show him the red taffeta petticoat he gave her.)

At the same time, however, the movie simply ignores Mammy's status as chattel; in the world of the movie it's a non-issue. Mammy has more in common with the perennial character of the devoted servant (a word that derives etymologically from the Latin verb related to "servus" meaning "slave"), such as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, than with the representative slave appropriate to an abstract discussion of the "peculiar institution." McDaniel's performance shrewdly suggests the extent of authority a trusted house slave could have assumed in a non-abusive household. Given the social and aesthetic limitations of the studio system in the '30s, and of producer David O. Selznick's taste, I believe in her as Mammy.

Prissy remains opaque to me, however--is she meant to be retarded? More likely her problem is that the movie is too invested in plantation-darky humor; you know that from the little "quittin' time" exchange between two field slaves. It shares this failing with a far greater work, Huckleberry Finn, which is programmatically anti-racist, an odd mixture of attitudes that Arnold Rampersad has written about perceptively. Gone With the Wind is divided enough in its depiction of race that it includes Mammy in a group of three disreputable or despised figures--Rhett, Mammy, and Belle Watling--who are excluded from the plantation romance and yet have more practical honor than anyone else. But the movie will not stand as a rounded, or even particularly sensitive, depiction of African-American experience in the South, despite Selznick's intention not to dishonor the race. (See Leonard J. Leff's interesting Atlantic article from December 1999 about the political pressures on Selznick over the race issue; see also Gavin Lambert's two-part Atlantic article from 1973 about the making of the movie more generally.) About the best you can say is that the movie is not, at any rate, programmatically racist, as The Birth of a Nation is, which makes a point of showing the infantile unfitness of blacks to serve in Congress.