Gone with the Wind

Watching movies is one of America's favorite past times. The Dark Knight, Baby Momma, and Twilight, were some of this year's top rating films. But when asked what the top movie of all time is, these names don't even top the charts. Which one does?

Gone with the Wind, directed by Victor Flemming, is rated as the top film of all time. Written and based in the year of 1939, Gone with the Wind, is about a plantation owner's daughter who experiences the beginning and the ending of the Civil War while living in Georgia. Scarlett O'Hara is a young naive girl who thinks she has the power to make everyone around her fall in love with her and be at her beckoning call. Ashley Wilkes, the main man who Scarlett "loves", denies Scarlett and marries his cousin Melanie Hamilton...another person who Scarlett cannot tolerate. (Enter Rhett Butler) Mr. Rhett Butler is a "southern gentleman" who lives and breathes war. He meets Miss Scarlett at a barbeque and finds out that she is his cup of soup. So far, he is the only man who truly is able to put her in her place and somewhat control her. But of course, Scarlett hates the fact that he likes her and Ashley does not. Then the war comes. Ashley Wilkes is off to fight the danged Yankees while Scarlett is left to tend to Melanie and her incoming baby. (Enter first climax) The North reaches Atlanta, where Scarlett and Melanie are, and begin taking over. Scarlett, eventhough she is still self-centered at this point in the film, decides to take Melanie, the baby, and her slave Prissy, back to the plantation (Tara) to escape the Yankees...how naïve.

Little did she know that Tara had already been burned to the ground and that her life would be changed forever. A famous quote made by Scarlett herself is, "As God is my witness, I will never be hungry again." Scarlett never went hungry again. She farmed the land and made it possible to gather food once more. She eventually moved back to town to work at a mill with her second husband, Frank Kennedy, who dies in a fight, and began working with Ashley. Rhett found out and offered to marry her. Scarlett, being the southern belle she is, said yes...yes, just another angle at which she would never go hungry (or be poor) again. The Butler's had a child named Bonnie (but she dies) and their "relationship" goes down the toilet of disaster. After Rhett divorces her for the final time, Scarlett realizes that what her dad had said in the beginning was the truth, "Land is the only thing in the world worth workin' for, worth fightin' for, worth dyin' for, because it's the only thing that lasts".

Gone with the Wind is not a personal choice of mine but I can easily see as to why it is the critic's choice at the #1 spot. My rating scale will be a 1-10 and for Gone with the Wind, I've supplied a 7.5. My reasoning is the plot was decent for its time but the fact that almost every single character dies off throughout the film, didn't thrill me. I'm all for romance, which this movie had plenty of, but the fact that Scarlett couldn't make a solid decision made me wonder what men see in women like that? Well, I take that back, we do know what men see in women like that...

Overall Gone with the Wind was a good symbolic film of the times and our country as a whole; proving throughout the film why it has been chosen as the number one film of all time.