Gone With the Wind

You left out the best mini series made in the 80's, The Winds of War/War and Rememberance.

I also liked this one better too. Although both of them were equally absurd at some points. :)

Oh and I'm a girl.


***May your soul rise to heaven before the devil knows your dead***

Ghosts of Mississippi

"Gone with the Wind" was filmed in 1939, only 74 years after the Civil War ended. Many people in the South were not willing to admit how evil slavery was. The South was very racial then. The African American stars of the picture did not come to Atlanta for the premier; they would been forced to stay at hotels and eat at restaurants for "coloreds." They certainly would not have been welcome at the gala Junior League ball given to welcome the movie people to Atlanta. Margaret Mitchell, author of GWTW, made many unflattering comments about African Americans in the book, but that's how she was brought up. It was the prevalent attitude in her society.

North & South and Gone With the Wind may be nice depictions of the Civil War Era but they are wholly inaccurate programs to the true events. And I agree with you that GWTW makes slavery look like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Flashbuck, thank you for starting this thread! It is the only one so far who tries to make an interesting comparison with the earlier narratives on film of this era. Many of the cómments/answers were also interesting to read.

Obviously, comparing a film to a series of 6 times 1 hour and a half, twice (not including book III which I have still to watch) is difficult. Valid point that the slaves' situation is completely glossed over in GWTW, but then its author also hailed from the South. But the most important difference in my opinion is, as has been stated alreday, that N+S is the story of two friends struggling to remain friends, and alive, whereas GWTW seems to be about Scarlett growing up, but all too late. The story of George and Orry has moved me deeply.

With all due respect to North and South (which I found tremendously entertaining), mentioning its aesthetic merits in the same breath as those of GWTW is an insult to GWTW. North and South was a lavishly produced, slightly campy look at sectionalism in America on the eve of the civil war with great supporting turns by some of the 1980s' best character actors. But GWTW is one of the most important films in world history; it is the most popular and widely seen film of the twentieth century and the most financially lucrative, simultaneously pioneering techniques of production design and color cinematography that would set the stage for a whole new generation of filmmaking. It represented the best 1939 Hollywood could offer in terms of costuming, sets, and acting performances; Vivien Leigh's Scarlett may be the most complex and iconic female film character of all time. Based on a Pulitzer Prize winning narrative, it revolves around a compelling central love quadrangle in which Scarlett's hubris allows her to thrive in the aftermath of the Civil War while simultaneously spelling interpersonal misery, providing the plot with a sense of almost Aristotelian unity. There is not a single character in N&S that can even begin to approach Scarlett's complexity, let alone Vivien Leigh's acting turn.

Well, I'm only halfway through the first miniseries, so am not an authority, but North and South seems like it covers so much territory that things get flattened out and simplified, to a degree.

For instance, when Lesley Ann Down and Patrick Swayzee are reunited, it's all just quickly shuffled off as "He must have thrown away our letters!" There's no real exploration of the situation or their emotions surrounding that. There simply isn't much intensity of loss. (And when that slave was finally allowed to run away down the railroad tracks, what happened to him? Do we find out later?)

The photography, music, clothes and sets are superior in GWTW. Not to mention the performances.

I can't compare their two stories, as haven't finished the mini series yet. (At the same time, I don't feel completely compelled to finish it.)

I like both for different reasons.

Back in early 2013 Encore started running the whole North & South series; all three books, one after another. It has sort of trailed off in the number of presentations on Encore since then. Honestly, I had barely remembered it from the 1980s, book one that is. I don't think I ever saw Books 2 & 3 first time they aired. I like all of the three, even the third one which did not have as much grandeur as the first two. I have never read the Jakes novels so I cannot relate the TV series to the books. I didn't detect any big plot discontinuities that would suggest a big part of the book(s) story was left out of the series, but then, I really don't know.

I really like the coal pencil drawings during the opening credits and the musical score especially at the end of each episode. I don't mean it's the main thing about the series I like, above the story line, but just that it's a very nice touch and class act to the series. It is really, here in second decade of 21st century, nice to hear an orchestral music score and not some rock music soundtrack or even techno-synth drivel. It would certainly be out of place for a Civil War program. I thought the TV series (I presume the novel also) provided some historical realism in the various characters, great and small. There was a foaming-mouth lunatic and well adjusted class act from both sides North/South of the Mason Dixon line. However, I heard the novel had the Elkana Bent from Ohio while the TV program had him from Georgia. I would guess that would require a major diversion from the novel. Or would it? Have you read the novel(s)?

GWTW was a great movie that I saw many times as a child and pre-teen before I ever read the book (as teenager). Oh man! The book was just over 1000 pages but it was incredible, even when I reread it 30 yrs later. So much of the book was left out of the movie. The movie is terribly whittled down from the book; many characters left out completely and/or their dialogue in the book was given to another character for the movie. To me, slavery was not a major issue in the book. The book was overwhelmingly about a teenage girl concerned for her social and love life against the backdrop of the antebellum, plantation South. Of course, there will be blacks involved in such a story but not central to it, so their condition will also not be central to it. Most southern whites had no contact with slaves before/during the ACW, so slave owning wasn't part of their life. Same for Reconstruction and later into 20th century.

I hope a remake of North/South is never done because Hollywood would no doubt politically correctize it to death and completely degrade it.


The 1980s were certainly the era of good mini-series; Winds of War, Shogun and, even though it's late 70s I'll count it anyway, Centennial et al. I don't think there will be another era like that, as far as TV drama.