Haskell finds the film’s lasting appeal inextricably linked to Leigh’s Scarlett, said Armond White in The New York Times. Working together, they created a uniquely moving epic that changed our expectations about movies forever. “Something fierce, something beyond normal ambition united these three,” she writes. Selznick, and Selznick’s Scarlett, Vivien Leigh, said Julia Keller in the Chicago Tribune. A pioneering feminist critic with Southern roots, the author brings “the knowledge of a film historian and the background of a genuine film enthusiast” to this superlative examination of a story “most adults feel they already know.” Haskell’s “crisp and conversational” writing style approaches poetry when she expounds on the luck that produced a particular alchemy among Mitchell, film producer David O. No one is better poised to answer those questions than Haskell, said Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. Why do we-and why should we-still give a damn about Gone With the Wind? Routinely bashed by critics for pre-feminist, historically revisionist, and racially backward attitudes, they continue to capture the popular imagination.

But those factors don’t fully explain why both Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1936 novel and the 1939 MGM film have proved enduring successes.

Privilege and poverty, thieving Yankees and genteel Confederates, torridness and tumult, the damnably elusive Rhett Butler and the indomitable Scarlett O’Hara. Gone With the Wind has just about everything you could want in a bodice-ripping romance, says film critic Molly Haskell. Frankly, My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited

Frankly, My Dear by Molly Haskell