Gone With The Wind Debuts!

70 years ago today, Gone with the Wind made its debut in Atlanta, Georgia. Of course, for those fans of Hollywood's Golden Age like myself, 1939 stands out as a remarkable year indeed. Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, The Women, Drums Along The Mohawk to name a few.

Gone with the Wind can be identified as one of the immortal pieces of literary works of the 20th Century. Margaret Mitchell's famous work has chronicled the love and hate relationship between the two main characters in the novel, Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler. There is hardly any more mesmeric fictitious heroine like Scarlett and the highs and lows of her relationship with Rhett, a man of somewhat dubious character who have held the interest of many successive generations.

Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler had a tempestuous relationship. Their violent love life was interspersed with certain tenderness, but the period of relative calm always ended in tragedy.

And unfortunately, the common ground was based on negativity, of which relationships cannot survive. Both were cold blooded, opportunistic, selfish and arrogant. Scarlett had uncontrolled passion, but again regrettably, she bestowed her passion on the wrong person. Rhett was too cynical, too much a man of the world to care much about love. He equated lust with love, they were sides of the same coin for him. Scarlett's passion about Ashley Wilkes, ended in realizing that she had only infatuation for him and his riches. Rhett, with his antisocial public image was the only man in Scarlett's life who gave back as good as he got from her. Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler were too alike in their approach to life, yet they were perpetually disgusted about each other. Unlike most endings in literature or movies, Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler were not meant to be together forever. The ending certainly played very well in keeping with that notion.