Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Frankly My Dear Gone with the Wind Revisited by Molly Haskell Frankly My Dear: "Gone with the Wind" Revisited by Molly Haskell. Our systems have detected unusual traffic activity from your network. Please complete this reCAPTCHA to demonstrate that it's you making the requests and not a robot. If you are having trouble seeing or completing this challenge, this page may help. If you continue to experience issues, you can contact JSTOR support. Block Reference: #70105150-d02f-11eb-a1bf-cf88ace85174 VID: #(null) IP: 116.202.236.252 Date and time: Fri, 18 Jun 2021 12:19:32 GMT. Molly Haskell. Molly Haskell has one of the most essential voices in the history of film criticism. Her work changed the way we look at film and how we write criticism. In addition to being about what it's about—the image and treatment of women throughout movie history—the book [From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies] is also about what's shown and what's withheld, what's said and what's unspoken, and what effect that all has on the viewer. MOLLY HASKELL , author and critic, grew up in Richmond, Va., went to Sweet Briar College, the University of London and the Sorbonne before settling in New York. She worked at the French Film Office in the Sixties, writing a newsletter about French films for the New York press and interpreting when directors came to America (this was the height of the Nouvelle Vague) for the opening of their films. She then went to The Village Voice, first as a theater critic, then as a movie reviewer; and from there to New York Magazine and Vogue. She has written for many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian UK, Esquire, The Nation, Town and Country, The New York Observer and The New York Review of Books. She has served as Artistic Director of the Sarasota French Film Festival, on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival, as associate Professor of Film at Barnard and as Adjunct Professor of Film at Columbia University. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2010 and was featured in the Library of America's 2006 "American Movie Critics" edited by Philip Lopate. She was married for 43 years to the film critic Andrew Sarris who died in 2012. Her books include From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies (1973; revised and reissued in 1989); a memoir, Love and Other Infectious Diseases; and, in 1997, a collection of essays and interviews, Holding My Own in No Man's Land: Women and Men and Films and Feminists ; and Frankly My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited , which was part of Yale University Press's American Icon series. BUY NOW from University of Chicago Press. Molly Haskell. Exuberant is the best word for Molly Haskell’s Frankly, My Dear. a slim, unfailingly intelligent, fact-filled book that sets out to explain why Gone With the Wind (both book and movie) exercises such a potent and enduring hold on our imagination. Ms. Haskell. argues convincingly that the power of the Gone With the Wind archetypes—their “extraordinary human resonance”—derives principally from the deeply divided natures of Margaret Mitchell, David Selznick and Vivien Leigh. The argument touches on a wide variety of complicated topics, from race and gender to mass culture and the history of the Civil War, but that doesn’t stop Ms. Haskell from paying minute attention to the details, say, of the saga of how Leigh got to play Scarlett. In short, Frankly, My Dear is both ambitious and entertaining, cultivated and gossipy. On the one hand, Ms. Haskell quotes William James on our eternal fascination with war; on the other, she quotes Howard Hughes on the difference between swaggering Victor Fleming and the kindly, sensitive George Cukor: “Victor has the same talent, it’s just strained through a coarser sieve.” To give you a taste of the sheer verve of Ms. Haskell’s writing, here’s her summary description of Leigh, Ingrid Bergman and Greta Garbo before they were transformed into bona fide stars: “These actresses hadn’t yet had their eyebrows plucked, their teeth whitened and straightened, their breasts raised, their hairlines changed—in other words, been submerged in the Hollywood developing emulsion that raises star power to its full electromagnetic force.” The San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/01/RVO415I8UV.DTL. Armond White in the New York Times Book Review "What the Wind Blew In" February 26, 2009. “Frankly, My Dear” praises “Gone With the Wind” for illuminating still-conflicting romantic ideas. This comes at a time when film culture has fragmented into fan-boy/chick-flick dichotomies and populist-​versus-elitist criticism. Haskell’s endeavor, different from high-art appreciation yet not far from it, brings together audience taste and intellectual specification. Since adolescence, her admiration for the film has developed into “a more grown-up affection informed by a film lover’s appreciation of the small miracle by which a mere ‘woman’s film’ with a heroine who never quite outgrows adolescence was transfigured into something much larger, something profoundly American, a canvas that contains, if not Walt Whitman’s multitudes, at least multiple perspectives”. In Haskell’s thoughtful revisionism, Scarlett comes to embody personal and national contradictions. The chapter “E Pluribus Unum” shows how the “dualisms” of her creators were gathered into a credibly whole personality. Focusing on Scarlett’s turbulent, childlike ways, Haskell illustrates the traits of beauty, self-regard and “the uninhibited will to act” that have made “Gone With the Wind” one of the least dated classic Hollywood movies. These attributes will always be disputed, but Haskell’s critical sensitivity rescues Scarlett’s Americanism and femininity, indicating how her image redounds upon our eternal political struggles and deepest fantasies. Haskell clarifies the long shadow that Scarlett O’Hara casts over the American movie imagination. More than fiddle-de-dee. G one with the Wind, both the film and the book, has long been a key staging post in female adolescence. For generations its lush melodrama, dodgy sexual politics and great frock opportunities have sung out to any young girl yearning for something she couldn't quite place. It was, if you like, a fairytale for almost-adults, with Scarlett O'Hara as the wayward princess and Rhett Butler as the deliciously indifferent hero. Molly Haskell was one of those girls who grew up thrilling to GWTW's every silly, rotten riff. What makes her particular response worth reading, however, is that she went on to become a pioneering feminist film critic, principally for New York Magazine. Haskell is a southerner, with a great- great-grandfather who led a cavalry regiment during the civil war, so she also knows exactly the provincial yet patrician culture from which Margaret Mitchell and her book sprang. It is the movie, rather than the book, which is the true subject of this quirky, clever study. What intrigues Haskell is how a project so bungled - two directors, a string of scriptwriters, multiple nervous breakdowns - could have come together at the 11th hour. At the heart of her exploration are three inter-twined life stories: that of Margaret Mitchell, the genteel, one-book wonder from Atlanta, David O Selznick, the pushy immigrant producer who passed in Hollywood as an intellectual, and Vivien Leigh, at this point not mad and never lovelier. Mitchell's story will be the least known to British readers. Born into Atlanta high society in 1900, she spent her life trying to work out what it meant to be a southern belle, and whether she wanted to be one anyway. Unusually, she went out to work - as a journalist on the Atlanta Journal - but only because she had made the biggest belle mistake of all by marrying badly. Her husband, called "Red" (make of that what you will), was a shiftless loser. After 10 months she divorced him and married someone sensible called John. The couple cultivated his'n'hers illnesses with a kind of foetid passion, and it was while she was hobbled by a rheumatic ankle that Gone With the Wind poured out of her, written on little scraps of paper and secreted around the house. Neither art nor craft - there are far too many loose ends and longueurs - the novel nonetheless had a kind of de-historicised hyper-realism which made it perfect for America on the eve of the second world war. The fact that three of the leading actors in the film were British - Leigh, Leslie Howard and Olivia de Havilland - only underscored the sense that current conflicts, rather than old battles, were the real subjects under scrutiny. This double perspective of the 1860s and the 1930s allows Haskell to explore the way in which GWTW deals, and doesn't deal, with tricky topics. She is particularly good on the issue of slavery, which is virtually written out of the book and the film, so that you'd be forgiven for forgetting that the whole drama of saving Tara was actually about maintaining an economic and social status quo of a particularly wicked kind. However, with the casting of the film in 1939, this inconvenient truth bobbed to the surface once again. Hattie McDaniel, the African-American actress who played Mammy, was herself the daughter of former slaves and had cobbled together a career in vaudeville doing minstrel routines. At the premier of the film in Atlanta she was asked to stay away. At the Oscars, where she won Best Supporting Actress, she was seated apart from the other actors. Yet when, in her subsequent career, progressive critics took issue with her for continually taking roles as a loveable, generic "mammy", she snapped back that she'd rather play a maid for $700 a week than be one for $7. Haskell clearly admires McDaniel's pragmatic approach to the business of living in a world which is not shaped to your convenience, and she pokes wry fun at various of her northern friends who shudder theatrically at the mention of GWTW, as if admitting to having seen the film past the age of 14 is like confessing to a sneaking sympathy with the Ku Klux Klan. She is similarly subtle when it comes to the vexed episode in which Rhett forces himself sexually on Scarlett, with the camera cutting to Leigh purring in post-coital delight. A fantasy in which Clark Gable won't take no for an answer is not, says Haskell crisply, the same thing as rape, and anyone who can't tell (and enjoy) the difference is a bit daft. Frankly, My Dear could probably be characterised as a work of popular, post-feminist criticism. That makes it sound empty-headed and ignorant of its own historical context. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Haskell's great triumph in this wise and witty book is to look beyond Gone With the Wind's tatty glamour and restore it to a particular moment in the mid-20th century when educated women were restless, civilisation was under threat, and the wounding fact of America's racial apartheid could not hold for very much longer. Kathryn Hughes's The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is published by Harper Perennial. Molly Haskell. On a visit to New York, the brother of well-known film critic Molly Haskell dropped a bombshell: Nearing sixty, married with children, Chevey revealed he was transsexual and would begin to live openly as a woman. Despite her longstanding liberal views, Haskell was dumbfounded. In My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation , she recounts the steps in Chevey’s transition, while candidly exploring her own emotional journey, from shock and bewilderment after the initial announcement to a place of acceptance, empathy, and love for her sister Ellen. Throughout the book Haskell turns her critic’s eye on herself, but also broadens her lens to include psychoanalytical and scientific research, meditations on sexual anomalies in art and mythology as well as previously published memoirs such as Jan Morris’s classic Conundrum. This is a memoir that pulls no punches in its exploration of a controversial, delicate subject. Through Chevey’s transformation into Ellen, Haskell has produced a cultural map of not only her sister’s experience, but of gender roles and transsexualism in a world increasingly governed by notions of individual identity. My Brother My Sister is tender, honest, informed, and at times a humorous must-read for anyone who has ever struggled to discover who they really are. Chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the Top Ten Memoirs of Fall 2013. Read praise for the book by Kirkus, James Wolcott for Vanity Fair, and Liz Smith for Huffington Post. Read Molly Haskell in interview with Deborah Kalb and CNN.com. Listen to Molly Haskell on The Leonard Lopate Show: PURCHASE NOW! MOLLY HASKELL, author and critic, grew up in Richmond, Va., went to Sweet Briar College, the University of London and the Sorbonne before settling in New York. She worked at the French Film Office in the Sixties, writing a newsletter about French films for the New York press and interpreting when directors came to America (this was the height of the Nouvelle Vague) for the opening of their films. She then went to The Village Voice, first as a theater critic, then as a movie reviewer; and from there to New York Magazine and Vogue. She has written for many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian UK, Esquire, The Nation, Town and Country, The New York Observer and The New York Review of Books. She has served as Artistic Director of the Sarasota French Film Festival, on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival, as associate Professor of Film at Barnard and as Adjunct Professor of Film at Columbia University. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2010 and was featured in the Library of America's 2006 "American Movie Critics" edited by Philip Lopate. She was married for 43 years to the film critic Andrew Sarris who died in 2012. Her books include From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies (1973; revised and reissued in 1989); a memoir, Love and Other Infectious Diseases; and, in 1997, a collection of essays and interviews, Holding My Own in No Man's Land: Women and Men and Films and Feminists; and Frankly My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited, which was part of Yale University Press's American Icon series. Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited. Books. "From Reverence to Rape: the Treatment of Women in the Movies" Second Edition. "Haskell is interested in women--how they are used in movies, how they use movies, and how the parts they play function as projections and verifications of our myths about women's lot and woman's psyche." "[Haskell's] book is short on militant rhetoric and long on wise, constructive insight. She explores the tensions and potentialities of heterosexual relationships, as portrayed in the movies, with such humorous, sympathetic skill that both sexes can enjoy, and profit from, her work. "Love and Other Infectious Diseases: a Memoir" "Facing the possibility of losing him, Molly was forced to look inward to confront the contradictions in what had seemed an ideal relationship. . Part horror movie, part screwball comedy, 'Love and Other Infectiuos Diseases' is a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit." "Haskell speaks for all women as she confronts--with great intelligence and compassion and wit--the unspoken fears and ambivalences of marital love." "Few books have captured the symbiotic texture of married life at the magnificently precise level of detail this one does. There are moments of such naked honesty as to make any lover of candor's jaw drop in astonishment and glee." "Holding My Own in No Man's Land: Women and Men and Film and Feminists" "As a critic and a writer, Molly Haskell is like one of her own heroines from the romantic comedies of the 30's and 40's--smart, funny, provocative, tender, independent, and dedicated to the hope that men and women off screen and on can find a decent way of acting naturally."