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Return to Twelve Oaks -- From MGM's Epic Gone With The Wind

Few of today’s cinematic offerings are as dramatic and dark as Orson Welles’ tale of power and lust Citizen Kane, or as message-driven as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, or as life affirming as Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life, but today’s layered stories about human failings and real people, are among the best films being made.

Hollywood

Great Movies Tell Us Something Worth Knowing

The movies that matter in our lives are the ones that tell us about ourselves, show us something from a new perspective, or enrich our lives. They do so by providing a reflection of the human condition as it really is, not as we wish it to be. Some movies rise above the ordinary dust of life by means of clear context that connect characters and their behavior to the defining threads of the time in which the story unfolds.

Story Driven Movies Live On

The Old South in Victor Flemming's Gone With The Wind

While story-driven movies are overwhelmed by today’s revenue-driven epics meant to attract less sophisticated, and less demanding audiences, the story-driven genre remains intact, if not vibrant. Few of today’s cinematic offerings are as dramatic and dark as Orson Welles’ tale of power and lust Citizen Kane, or as message-driven as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, or as life affirming as Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life, but today’s layered stories about human failings and real people, are among the best films being made.

The origins of serious, story-driven and/or layered content movies rests, to some degree, on Victor Flemming’s immensely successful Civil War drama, Gone With The Wind.  GWTW, as it is often referred to, told a complicated story through multiple threads. At the center was a romance first budding, then unfolding at what was often the wrong place and at the wrong time.

Great Stories From Great Directors

The Movie

Gone With The Wind

Based on Novel By Margaret Mitchell

Clark Gable,
Vivian Leigh,
Leslie Howard,
Olivia DeHavilind,
Hattie McDaniel,
Thomas Mitchell,
Butterfly McQueen.

Directors

Victor Flemming,
George Cukor,
Sam Wood

More recently, movie stars turned directors, including George Clooney and Clint Eastwood, have brought new energy and realism to stories about important issues, delicate subjects and even history by means of excellent screenplays and excellent direction. Clooney’s Good Night And Good Luck, took on an immensely complex set of subjects ranging from journalistic values, to business ethics, communist-baiting, misuse of power, the emergence of  a new medium and McCarthyism.

Like Flemming’s epic, today’s story-driven movies are layered in ways that reveal the human condition on several levels. While this technique was not invented by Margaret Mitchell in her novel about the Old South, her story unfolds on many simultaneous levels — deftly captured by director Flemming in the more limited confines of the movie format. Even so, GWTW arrived in theaters so long that it occupied as much time as the double features ( two movies ) common in most American theaters until the 1960s.

No matter when they were made,  layered story telling is as old as the movies. For some, the best produced and directed story-driven movie of all time was Victor Flemming’s telling of Margaret Mitchell’s epic civil war story, Gone With The Wind.

Victor Flemming’s Gone With The Wind

Victor Flemming’s monumental Gone With The Wind ( Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh ) was begun in 1936 and first exhibited three years after. The making of GWTW proved to be nearly as tumultuous as the story of war torn Georgia during the civil war.

Flemming, and directors George Cukor, fired for not shooting fast enough, and Sam Wood, who played an uncredited directorial role, stuck close to Margaret Mitchell’s long and complex novel by layering the surface love story atop foundation layers ranging from the impending collapse of southern aristocracy, to male dominance, civil war politics, Southern pride, slavery, militarism and disgraceful ignorance.

What Flemming shows us is a collapsing upper class more attuned to Elizabethan England that rural Georgia.

Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh in Victor Flemming's Gone With The Wind

Clearly the layered elements of Gone With The Wind contributed to its four hour running time. But what Cukor and Flemming brought to the screen was as much a new genre as an epic story of conquest and desperation.

The genre defined by Flemming and Cukor was not that of historical epic, but one of reflection on society, bigotry, intolerance and pride. Today’s best directors go deeper into the roots of issues which would have been largely taboo in Flemming’s time. Even so, contemporaneous Hollywood directors of Flemming’s era preferred more traditional ways of story telling that favored uplifting storylines and strong ethical underpinnings.

Frank Capra did something similar — as did other directors fond of complex, meaty storylines. Capra, for example, defined his approach to the relevatory genre in 1946′s It’s A Wonderful Life ( Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed ) by means of what seems a simple Christmas tale of rediscovery but is, in reality, a sophisticated reflection of depression-era America and conflicting values. Still, Capra movies were not as complex as those done by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, and others, which served to make Capra films stand-out as much for the clarity of a single storyline, as by Capra’s sometimes tongue-in-cheek depiction of American values, attitudes and beliefs.

Merchant-Ivory

The bridge between the Flemming-Capra era and today’s best story-driven movies is highlighted by a series of movies made outside Hollywood. Perhaps the most important are the the great Merchant-Ivory pictures of the 1980s in which great story telling is broadened beyond the problems of the lower classes. In their highly successful film The Remains of the Day, Merchant-Ivory tell a love story not unlike that of  Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler for, just as in Gone With The Wind, the story unfolds against a series of underlayers.

Kazuo Ishiguro‘s storyline is set in pre world-war II England. While it deals with events leading up to Britain’s appeasement of the Nazis in the late 1930s, it is multi-threaded with story layers that add complexity and depth. On top of its war theme are story elements that closely parallel GWTW’s layers: (1) corruption of wealth, (2) oppression of household staff, (3) upper class engagement in self-deception, (4) political amateurism, and (5) the destruction of idealism by the realities of war.

Clooney-Eastwood

Today it’s risk-taking directors, including but not limited to George Clooney and Clint Eastwood, have chosen to take on immensely compelling and often complicated stories of people faced with great adversity and opportunity. If Eastwood’s acting career is dotted with mindless conflict and violence in place of either character or story value, his directorial career is very much the opposite.

Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby won for Eastwood Academy Awards. But as his work broadened to more difficult stories, Mystic River (2003) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2007), Eastwood’s willingness to go deep into any subject extended beyond The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Play Misty for Me (1971), and  In the Line of Fire (1993).

Along with directors Clooney and Eastwood, the Weinstein Company chooses to produce complex, layered, story-driven movies. When the Weinsteins’ bought rights to Der Vorleser, an intricately plotted German language novel by Bernhard Schlink, a story that deals with the aftermath of Nazism in post war Germany, they sought out director Stephen Daldry ( Billy Elliott ) to exploit its cinematic potential. What Daldry brought was his unique skills and experience at telling complex stories as much by cinematography as acting.

If there is a future for film, it may be in the digital domain, not theatrical release. Should this be the case, the future for complex, multi layered stories of human triumph and failure would seem destined for continued success.

Thanks, in part, to Victor Flemming’s vision of the Old South now being re-released in wide screen format, multi-channel sound and restored images captured to BluRay high definition.