Heroic depictions of antebellum life in Gone with the Wind have been condemned as glorifying slave ownership.Credit:MGM
Set on a plantation and in Atlanta,the film won multiple Academy Awards,including best picture,and remains among the most celebrated movies in cinematic history. But its rose-tinted depiction of the antebellum South and its blindness to the horrors of slavery have long been criticised,and that scrutiny was renewed this week as protests over police brutality and the death of George Floyd continued to pull the United States into a wide-ranging conversation about race.
“Gone With the Wind is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have,unfortunately,been commonplace in American society,” an HBO Max spokesperson said. “These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today,and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible.”
HBO Max,owned by AT&T,pulled the film on Tuesday,one day after John Ridley,the screenwriter of12 Years a Slave,wrotean op-ed inThe Los Angeles Times calling for its removal.
Ridley said he understood that films were snapshots of their moment in history,but thatGone With the Wind was still used to “give cover to those who falsely claim that clinging to the iconography of the plantation era is a matter of ‘heritage,not hate.’”
John Ridley,Oscar-winning screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave,wrote:"Gone with the Wind is a film that romanticises the Confederacy."Credit:Reuters
By several measures,the film was one of the most successful in American history. It received eight Academy Awards and remains the highest-grossing film ever when adjusting for inflation. In 1998,it placed sixth on the American Film Institute’slist of greatest films of all time.
There was little criticism of the film when it was released,though in 1939 an editorial board member ofThe Daily Worker,a newspaper published by the Communist Party USA,called it “an insidious glorification of the slave market” and the Ku Klux Klan.