Moonlight and Magnolias
Selznick’s great accomplishment was to transcend the novel while staying true to it. Sometimes dismissed as pro-Dixie melodrama, the novel and film are knowing critiques of the regional, racial, sexual, and class conflicts that continue to divide us.
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Selznick had the vision to buy the movie rights before the book was published, believing that Depression-era audiences would love Scarlett’s ruthless moral compromises and defiance of convention. But the story also spoke to him personally. Haunted by his father’s business failures, Selznick empathized with Scarlett’s struggle to survive after her family had lost everything. Scarlett’s obsessive, often reckless nature reflected his own. And consigned by his Jewishness to outsider status, he knew what it was to move, like Scarlett, through a society that both rewarded and scorned him.
Hutchinson and director Steven Robman enliven this basically static situation with hefty doses of physical humor, deliciously executed by a crack cast. In one vignette Fleming and Selznick pantomime the scene in which Scarlett helps her hated rival, Melanie, deliver a baby with scant help from her slave Prissy; in Selznick’s office, the famous, shocking moment when Scarlett slaps the hysterical Prissy turns into a Three Stooges-style sequence in which the trio take turns socking one another. But the episode serves a serious purpose too: it fuels the play’s ongoing debate between Hecht and Selznick about the importance of maintaining a Jewish identity and Jews’ responsibility to respond to social injustice. At one point Hecht makes a wager with Selznick he knows the compulsive gambler won’t refuse: he’ll call three of their showbiz pals and ask them whether Selznick is “an American” or “a Jew.” Hecht wins the bet: all three label Selznick a Jew. The episode is lifted from Hecht’s autobiography–which doesn’t ensure its veracity. But its poetic truth is potent.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Liz Lauren.
