COMPARE & CONTRAST: Birth Of A Nation vs Gone With The Wind vs The General

TRIGGER WARNING:  
Talking about race in American culture and movies, so some readers may want to brace themselves (looking at you, wypipo).

. . .

Confining “classic films” to movies that:
Demonstrate technical expertise, and
Influenced other films and creators

-- we have three (and only three) movies about the American Civil War we can safely put in the classic bin.

Before we go further,
let’s restate the obvious:
A film’s impact in the medium of motion pictures is separate from its impact on the culture as a whole.

Case in point:
Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph Of The Will is a perfect textbook example of how to stage massive crowd scenes for maximum visual impact, and how to promote individuals and ideas in purely cinematic terms.

It also contributed mightily to the Nazis’ rise to power, their subsequent wars of conquest, and the deaths directly and indirectly of tens of millions of human beings.

It’s important to know The Triumph Of The Will exists and why it’s important in film and cultural and political history, but you need never subject yourself to its vile hate mongering.

With that in mind,
let us proceed.

. . . 

Here are the three bona fide classic movies about the American Civil War:

The Birth Of A Nation
(1915)

Gone With The Wind
(1939) 

The General
(1926)

They are all problematic for the same reason:
They embrace the “lost cause” myth of Southern white supremacists.

The Birth Of A Nation is by far the worst offender of the trio, helping to restart the Ku Klux Klan and promulgate jim crow for decades to come.

Director D.W. Griffith was a Southern boy, Kentucky born with a father who served as a colonel in the Confederate army (Kentucky, a border slave state, tried to stay neutral at the beginning of the Civil War, then leaned heavily towards secession, but by 1862 threw its lot in with the Union).

Griffith bought into the lost cause myth heavily, and The Birth Of A Nation explicitly states African-Americans are fit only for slavery, becoming a murderous / rapacious mob once freed, and the Ku Klux Klan were gallant heroes attempting to turn this tide.

Griffith tries to have it both ways, depicting Abraham Lincoln as a thoughtful and compassionate leader who would have treated the South better had he survived (ignoring the fact Andrew Johnson did everything in his power to prevent the Union from holding the South accountable, and that Lincoln’s assassin was a Southerner who killed him in revenge after the war ended).

There can be no denying Griffith’s enormous talents as a film maker (again, separating thematic content from the technical expertise).  While the Hollywood publicity machine was quick to claim The Birth Of A Nation was the first feature length film (i.e., 65 minutes or more), the truth is the Australians, the Chinese, the English, the French, the Italians, the Japanese, and the Russians all made feature films long before Griffith, and Griffith wasn’t even the first American to make a feature but was preceded by at least a half a dozen other film makers.

What Griffith was, however, was a master synthesizer of all the techniques that preceded him.  Griffith made movies better than anyone else of his era, and his best films are still eminently watchable to this day.

That’s what makes The Birth Of A Nation so harmful and destructive:  Like the Riefenstahl film, it seduced common audiences into complacency while stirring the worst people to action.

It’s a film whose final cost is not measured in dollars but in innocent blood and tears.

Griffith wasn’t stupid, and while he might have felt personally immune to the criticism of his racist attitudes, he was savvy enough to recognize publicly embracing them would not serve his career well.  He followed The Birth Of A Nation with Intolerance, an epic that jumps around in its story lines like a Tarantino film, and in later movies displayed a far gentler albeit still patronizing attitude towards African-Americans.

But the damage was done, the lost cause myth cemented into not just the Southern psyche but white America in general.

Like The Triumph Of The Will, I would never recommend The Birth Of A Nation as a “must see” film to anyone.  If you’re a film historian and you want to subject yourself to this cancer, that’s your choice, but if you’re a student of film there’s nothing Griffith did technically or artistically in this movie that he didn’t do better in his later efforts, and other film makers have since emulated his innovations and built upon them.

. . . 

For many decades Gone With The Wind was celebrated as the pinnacle of American film making, but once the romantic blinders are removed we see it for what it is:  An over long, over blown epic that promulgates what we now recognize as white supremacy, classism, and rape culture.

And while it uses every technical trick in the book, it doesn’t use them as well as Orson Welles did a year later with Citizen Kane.

Gone With The Wind is really two movies:  A well made Civil War epic and its lackluster Reconstruction sequel.

They should have ended the movie with “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again!”  (Seriously.  The only two memorable scenes in the second half other than “I don’t give a damn” both center around Scarlett O’Hara’s dresses.)

Again, let’s emphasize that a technically well made movie does not excuse bad intentions in thematic content.

Gone With The Wind is a rip-roaring bodice-ripping historical novel, admittedly well researched and well written by Margaret Mitchell.

She isn’t necessarily writing from a conscious desire to spread the message of white supremacy, but as a Southern gal who grew up in the midst of the lost cause myth, she ends up breathing that message into every line of the book.

The movie version can’t escape that, nor does it try to.  There’s a brief scene early on where both Mitchell and the later film makers prefigure the lost cause myth with Rhett Butler explaining to the good ol’ boys at the Tara cotillion that they’re about to be brutally decimated by the Union in a war of attrition, but both author and film makers side with the good ol’ boys and support their God given right to throw away their lives and destroy their homes in an attempt to keep enslaving millions of innocent people.

That last part in italics never gets mentioned, does it?  As others have observed, Gone With The Wind isn’t antagonistic towards African-Americans, rather it treats them as if they don’t exist other than walking / talking props among the scenery.

In that regard, Gone With The Wind is on par with The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged (only with a far superior writing style).  The protagonists of all three books are narcissistic sociopaths who will lie / cheat / steal / blow up buildings because the common folk -- the people who actually put in the grunt labor to make things work -- are nothing but slaves there for the elites’ entitlements, and God (or market forces, take your pick) help them if they ever raise their heads or voices -- much less their hands -- in protest.

Oh, but doesn’t it look gorgeous?  All those beautiful rich Technicolor gowns and sets and matte paintings.  All those balls and dances.  All those smoldering looks.  All those flames as Atlanta burns…

There’s the true hero of the story:  William Tecumseh Sherman.  The mofo cut the Confederacy in half, destroying lines of supply and communication, obliterating any rebels who dared to stand up to him, shortening the war by several months, and freeing tens of thousands of enslaved people in the process.

None of which would have been necessary if a few greedy bastards such as the O’Haras had lived Christian enough lives to say, “Y’know, maybe the way we’re treating these people is wrong…”

Gone With The Wind proved insanely popular, on a scale with The Birth Of A Nation a generation earlier, and once again it made it easier for mainstream middle American whites to turn a blind eye to injustices still being perpetuated on African-Americans of that day.  

And it kept playing again and again, one of the very few non-Disney movies to enjoy a substantial re-release schedule, popping up about once every seven years in theaters until first the arrival of cable then VHS.

And it’s still popular, still a steady seller in DVD and BluRay.

That’s in no small part to the skill of both Mitchell and the film makers in hiding the most egregiously problematic elements of the story under a thin patina of romanticism.  It became a cultural touchstone that everyone knew and everyone could reference, from political cartoons to Carol Burnett skits.

But it’s still racist and white supremacist, saying African-Americans exist only to serve whites.

It’s still classist, saying not all whites are worthy of what the upper class hogs for itself.

It’s still about rape culture, saying all Scarlett needed was one good rape by Rhett Butler to set her straight.

Is it a product of its era?

Absolutely.
The same way over the counter heroin at your friendly neighborhood drug store was a product of its era.  The same way cocaine laced Coca-Cola was a product of its era.

Just because it wasn’t recognized as a bad idea then means we should still circulate it now.

Compared to The Birth Of A Nation, Gone With The Wind is a far less hate filled work, and one that inspires less immediate harm.

It has inspired harm over several generations by making it easy to overlook the real harm it represents in favor of a romantic antebellum fantasy.

If someone wants to see a film that represents the Hollywood studio system at the height of its creative power, I’d recommend Casablanca or The Wizard Of Oz.

I’d put Gone With The Wind way down on that list, and I’d caution it with caveats, but I would say it represents a good example of the old Hollywood system firing on all eight cylinders.

At least for the first half of the film.

. . . 

In most ways, Buster Keaton’s The General is the least problematic of these three films.

In another, it’s as bad as Gone With The Wind.

The good thing about The General is that modern audiences can easily enjoy it.

Buster Keaton chasing after a stolen steam locomotive?  What’s not to love?

It’s one of his best comedies and if it’s not the very best, I’d hate to live on the difference.

It certainly lacks the overt racism of The Birth Of A Nation. 

In fact, it almost lacks any race at all.

And ironically, that’s what makes it a problem.

In researching this post, I re-watched The General, something I wasn’t willing to do for The Birth Of A Nation or Gone With The Wind.

I re-watched it looking for African-American faces anywhere in the film.

I think I found four.

Two porters lugging a trunk in an early scene at a train station, possibly two small children with their backs turned to the camera at the edge of a crowd about ten minutes later.

That’s it.

In a movie about one of the most crucial events in American history, an event entirely predicated on the issue of the enslavement of millions of African-Americans…that’s it.

Four faces.

Total screen time: Less than a minute.

If critics can justifiably lambast Gone With The Wind for sailing over the bloodied backs of millions of enslaved African-Americans to focus on the luxury liner S.S. Scarlett O’Hara, what can they say about a Civil War movie that almost succeeds in eradicating those enslaved humans from the story?

Paradoxically, this makes The General the safest of these movies to show an unsuspecting audience.

The Civil War is boiled down to the dark uniform army fighting the light uniform army; why they were fighting is never explored in detail.

But the lost cause myth was so prevalent at that point that Keaton and company didn’t need to discuss the causes of the war.

Audiences – even those completely ignorant of U.S. history -- automatically assume the light uniform army are the good guys simply because Buster is on their side.

Buster would never do anything bad, would he?

Of course not!

And so -- =poof!= -- millions of people erased from history.

Top that, Thanos.

To be honest, I don’t know how a modern audience should react to that, in particular an African-American audience.

Disappointment at being culturally short changed again?

Relief at being spared the most egregious stereotyping and white supremacy apologies?

Or just plain enjoy Buster chasing after a stolen locomotive?

The General’s cultural weightlessness helps it become a great film.

It’s a purely cinematic endeavor, with the intertitles used primarily to explain the spies’ and military leaders’ plans and motives, not tell us what Buster is thinking and doing.

For a guy called “the great stone face” Buster could be awfully expressive with his body language, and he needs title cards the least of all the performers in this movie

. . .

So where does that leave us, as a 21st century audience in a 21st century culture?

We can neither deny nor ignore the impact of these three films.  Even The Birth Of A Nation, as vile and as hateful as it is, influenced the country and the country’s attitudes for a century.

Gone With The Wind feels like something we’ve outgrown, something some audience members can look back on with fondness, but not anything we can fully embrace again.

The General can still make us laugh, and in this case the sin of omission seems far less than the others’ sins of commission.

Learn from the past.

Do better in the future.

© Buzz Dixon