Okay, wow. This is not a good movie. How is it bad? Let me count the ways:

  1. So obviously the famous way in which it’s bad is that it is explicitly pro-Confederate. And like not just in the “faded antebellum glory” way, though there’s a boatload of that, but also going on to talk about how awful “Carpetbaggers” were, and basically showing as a scene of horror the idea of giving former enslaved people the vote, or “40 acres and a mule” or anything. It’s not the full-on Klan propaganda of Birth of a Nation, but it is deeply in denial about basically any topic even vaguely adjacent to race, the nature of a slave-holding society and the Civil War and Reconstruction.

  2. But it’s also bad in terms of its characters. Scarlett O’Hara is a horrible, horrible person. Just relentlessly and continuously throughout the whole movie, she’s awful. Early on, I was convinced that the movie was deliberately portraying her as awful so that it could show how she grew and matured in the war, and turned from a callow, selfish person into someone decent and loving or whatever. But no! She stays terrible! Like, she destroys multiple people’s lives over the course of decades (nearly including her saintly best friend) because she has an unrequited crush on a dude since she was a teenager for no good reason even. I legitimately don’t know if the movie knows how awful she is, and is just rolling with an antihero, or if we’re supposed to find her relateable and like her. It’s super-weird.

    Rhett Butler at least is a regular ol’ Han Solo type at first, the dashing rogue who says he’s just in it for himself, but deep down cares about the Rebels’ cause and loves the woman he’s dashing off caustic one-liners at. (Okay, wow, now that I’ve written that sentence, given the years those movies came out, I feel like Han Solo is written explicitly as a Rhett Butler type, which huh.) But since Scarlett is no Leia, and there’s no Luke to play foil, his heart of gold ends up tarnishing, and by the end of the movie, he’s completely dominated by his cynicism, selfishness, and cruelty.

  3. It’s so fucking long. Seriously, 3:40. Nearly four hours. This is LOTR EE time, and all for a movie whose plot boils down to almost nothing. It’s absurdly understuffed and sloppy. There are probably like four points earlier in the movie that you could cut it off and turn it into a better movie, while also shaving an hour or two off the runtime. I really wonder how a movie this flaccid and overlong got made back in the day.

  4. The plot is absurdly shaggy. What’s it about? It’s not about anything that you’d think. It’s not about her trying to save her plantation home. It’s not about the Civil War. It’s not about her romance with Rhett Butler. It’s literally just this series of “and then this happened” events, most of which are melodramatic af. There are two (2) instances of characters dying instantly after being thrown by a horse in ways that were unintentionally hilarious (we were both like “lol, watch them be dead now” and then the movie crash-cut to a gravestone, and we cracked up), Scarlett gets married three (3) times, her husbands die conveniently two (2) times. Most of the movie is actually about her being married to Rhett Butler and them being increasingly unhappy because she’s consistently terrible (and he’s increasingly terrible).

  5. There’s nothing especially noteworthy about it from a craft perspective. It isn’t interestingly shot (with the exception of one much-cited shot that shows rows and rows of wounded soldiers as the camera continues to pull out further and further), it doesn’t have an amazing soundtrack, there’s nothing grittily realistic about it or stunningly beautiful or anything. The only line anyone remembers from the script is Gable’s final sendoff as he fucks out of the movie (perhaps memorable because it echoes the audience’s feelings about the characters?). It’s all just this replacement-level extruded-studio-product drama. It doesn’t even really evoke the alleged charms of the Old South — it tries to call them out in textover narration, but it’s totally doing a tell-don’t-show thing.

All in all, with the AFI list being what it is — a list of movies that are significant and historically important, moreso than actually good — this needs to be on the list. It is, after all, the single highest-grossing movie of all time if you adjust for inflation. But it’s not an accident that it doesn’t make lists that are more focused on being good movies.

If you want the counterpoint to the above, Ebert’s 1998 review talks about Scarlett as a feminist hero, and while I can understand that reading, I don’t think it works, because she’s just so terrible in ways that have nothing to do with subverting traditionally feminine roles. Like, if you wanted to commit to the feminist reading, you could say that Scarlett was warped by the broken society that shaped her into the stunted and malevolent creature she becomes, turning her understandable desires for independence and sexual gratification into crabbed, shadowy things.

But obviously that’s not what the movie is intentionally doing, and while I think that kind of feminist analysis can tease out important ideas from the film, they’re ones that the creators of the movie probably weren’t even aware of, and might disavow.

So yeah, not a good movie, but obviously and inarguably one of huge historical cultural importance. Recommended if — and only if! — you want to spend nearly four hours ingesting a movie that’s insipid where it’s not offensive, to get that context.