Movies

When HBO Max went live last month, one of the streaming service’s selling points was its TCM-branded channel of Hollywood classics, including “Citizen Kane,” “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Casablanca” — and “Gone With the Wind,” the Oscar-winning 1939 adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, and, according to the American Film Institute, the sixth-greatest American movie of all time.But on Monday — amid intense reflections on depictions of race and policing in popular culture after protests about police brutality — the filmmaker John Ridley wrote an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times pleading with HBO Max to remove “Gone With the Wind” from its streaming library. “It is a film that glorifies the antebellum south,” wrote Ridley, who won an Oscar for the “12 Years a Slave” screenplay. “It is a film that, when it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery, pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of color.”On Tuesday night, the service temporarily pulled the film from its catalog, citing the need for “an explanation and a denouncement” of the movie’s depictions of race relations — presumably something similar to the “outdated cultural depictions” disclaimer offered on some titles on Disney Plus.In fact, “Gone With the Wind” is no stranger to controversy. Here’s a quick explainer.I’ve never seen the movie. What’s the story?As with Mitchell’s best-selling novel, “Gone With the Wind” is set on a Georgia plantation during and after the Civil War. The protagonist is Scarlett O’Hara (Viven Leigh), headstrong daughter of the plantation owner, and the primary focus of the narrative is her romantic exploits. But a fair amount of the film’s leisurely 221-minute running time is spent on the struggle to keep the plantation afloat, and on Scarlett’s relationships with the family’s slaves, including Prissy (Butterfly McQueen), Pork (Oscar Polk) and Mammy (Hattie McDaniel, who won an Oscar for her performance — the first African-American so honored.)What do critics object to?As Ridley notes, the primary point of contention is the film’s romanticizing of the antebellum South, and its whitewashing of the horrors of slavery. The film presents the region’s pre-Civil War era as a utopia of tranquil living, and the Northern forces as interlopers, trying to disrupt that way of life. The servant characters are written and played as docile and content, more dedicated to their white masters than to the struggle of their fellow enslaved people (and uninterested in leaving the plantation after the war). And, much like D.W. Griffith’s horrifying hit “The Birth of a Nation,” the film casts the freed slaves of the Reconstruction era as morally dangerous and politically naïve.How was it received when it was released?Most critics joined in a chorus of praise, and moviegoers flocked to theaters. It remains the top-grossing film of all time, when adjusted for ticket price inflation. The academy was also impressed, giving it 10 Oscars, including best picture, best actress, best director (Victor Fleming) and, of course, McDaniel’s statuette.So nobody objected in 1939?Right-leaning pundits have already branded HBO Max’s removal as yet another example of contemporary “woke”-ism run amok, but “Gone With the Wind” has been the object of controversy since its inception. As detailed by Leonard J. Leff in The Atlantic, several groups sent letters to the producer, David O. Selznick, while the film was in preproduction, flagging their concerns with Mitchell’s novel, including its frequent use of racist slurs and characterization of the Ku Klux Klan as a “tragic necessity.” The Los Angeles Sentinel called for a boycott of “every other Selznick picture, present and future.”Under that pressure, Selznick and his screenwriter, Sidney Howard, ultimately softened some of those elements, and agreed to the N.A.A.C.P.’s suggestion of hiring a technical adviser “to watch the entire treatment of the Negroes.” In fact, he hired two — both of them white.When the film was released, the dramatist Carlton Moss wrote in The Daily Worker that the film “offered up a motley collection of flat black characters that insulted the black audience,” singling out McDaniel’s Mammy as “especially loathsome.” The Chicago Defender put an even finer point on it, calling the film “a weapon of terror against black America.”What’s more, according to Leff, demonstrations and protests were held at theaters in several major markets, including Washington, D.C., Chicago and Brooklyn. To some extent, the protests have never stopped; despite the film’s canonization as an American classic, prominent voices from Malcolm X to Spike Lee to Ridley have spoken out through the decades about its troubling themes, characterizations and imagery. And with this most recent flap, it’s become clear that concerns over the film’s representation and context aren’t going away anytime soon. More

Spike Lee’s career can be described as a lover’s quarrel with American movies — and with America, too. As he has demonstrated his mastery of established genres (the biopic, the musical, the cop movie, the combat picture, and so on), he has also reinvented them, pointing out blind spots and filling in gaps. His critique of Hollywood’s long history of ignoring and distorting black lives has altered the way we look at movies. His attempts to expand the frame and correct the record have changed the course of the cultural mainstream.I’m tempted to say that with “Da 5 Bloods,” which debuts on Netflix on Friday, Lee has done it again. But when has he ever repeated himself? This long, anguished, funny, violent excursion into a hidden chamber of the nation’s heart of darkness isn’t like anything else, even if it may put you in mind of a lot of other things. In its anger, its humor and its exuberance — in the emotional richness of the central performances and of Terence Blanchard’s score — this is unmistakably a Spike Lee Joint. It’s also an argument with and through the history of film.[embedded content]The story, about the lethal consequences of a search for buried gold, is struck from the template of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” A journey upriver from Ho Chi Minh City into the Vietnamese interior recalls “Apocalypse Now,” which the characters have all seen. One of them is also a big “Rambo” fan.And even as it takes up unfinished real-world business at home and in Vietnam, “Da 5 Bloods” wrestles with some of the defining myths and motifs of American cinema. It’s a western, concerned with greed, honor, loyalty and revenge. It’s a bittersweet comedy involving a group of male friends looking back and growing old. It’s a platoon picture about a dangerous mission, a father-son melodrama, an adventure story, a caper and a political provocation.There’s more. There’s a lot. Double crosses, red herrings, dead certainties and live land mines. Furious debates about ends and means, money and morality, capitalism and imperialism. Hawaiian-print shirts, tropical drinks, OxyContin bottles and assault weapons. It doesn’t always hold together, but it never lets go.As prologue to the main narrative, there is a churning, chronologically disordered montage of images from the ’60s and ’70s — news clips and photographs that illustrate the fateful convergence of military escalation in Southeast Asia and racial conflict in the United States. Some of the faces and voices are familiar, and the lesson is clear.From every angle, the situation was a mess, a quagmire. For black soldiers like the five in the movie’s title, it was especially agonizing. They were asked to kill and die in a morally dubious undertaking in the service of a country that refused to treat them as full citizens. North Vietnamese propagandists (like Hanoi Hannah, played by Veronica Ngo) didn’t hesitate to point this out.When we touch down in the present, we are in a Ho Chi Minh City hotel where the four surviving bloods — Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), Eddie (Norm Lewis), Otis (Clarke Peters) and Paul (Delroy Lindo) — have gathered for what looks like an old-timers’ reunion tour. Part of the Big Red One (the Army’s First Infantry Division), the men have come to look for the remains of their squad leader, Stormin’ Norman, who was killed in a firefight.A deep thinker and a shrewd tactician, Norman has taken on almost mythical grandeur in his comrades’ memories. They refer to him as “our Malcolm and our Martin.” When the borders of the frame narrow and the color balance shifts to signify that we are back in the war, Norman is played by Chadwick Boseman, a casting choice that underlines the heroism of the character, who is stamped with the likeness of Jackie Robinson and T’Challa.The bloods believe that somewhere in country, along with Norman’s bones, lies a strongbox full of gold bars, the property of the U.S. government until Norman and his squad claimed them, either as the spoils of war or as reparations.The four veterans have different ideas about what should be done with the loot if they manage to recover it, and they aren’t the only interested parties. Tien (Le Y Lan), Otis’s former lover, is part of the scheme, in association with an unsavory Frenchman in a white linen suit (Jean Reno). Paul’s semi-estranged son, David (Jonathan Majors), joins the expedition, which crosses paths with a trio of international NGO workers (Mélanie Thierry, Paul Walter Hauser and Jasper Paakkonen). There’s also Vinh (Johnny Tri Nguyen), the group’s Vietnamese guide, who reminds the visiting Americans that wars never really end.The truth of this observation is borne out in various ways, some of them bluntly literal. Lee, who wrote the script with Danny Bilson, Paul DeMeo and Kevin Willmott, doesn’t escape from the exoticism that has characterized most American movies about Vietnam, and he doesn’t pursue the connections between black-power politics and international anti-imperialism as far as he might have.But his strength as a political filmmaker has always resided in his ability to bring contradictions to chaotic life rather than to resolve them in any ideologically coherent proposition. This is the opposite of a shortcoming. It seems safe to say that America itself has never been an ideologically coherent proposition, and its greatest artists embrace havoc as a kind of birthright, producing not analyses of chaos but indelible embodiments of it.Which brings me to Lindo. “Da 5 Bloods” is full of wonderful performances, and the warm, profane masculine banter among the bloods is a response to and a relief from the horror they have shared and still face. They all live with pride and regret, scarred in large and small ways by the trauma they endured as young men. Instead of using digital de-aging or look-alike casting, Lee places Whitlock, Lindo, Peters and Lewis alongside Boseman in the flashback scenes, which creates a sense of the uncanny immediacy of memory. The living project their present selves back into the past, while the dead never grow old.To describe Paul as haunted would be less an understatement than a category mistake. He is a colossal, terrifying presence — an archetype in the mold of Natty Bumppo, Captain Ahab, Bigger Thomas and Rambo himself. Lindo’s performance, though, is achingly specific, rigorously human scaled.The storm of rage, guilt, resentment and self-pity that surges through Paul is traced to various sources, small tragedies that illuminate larger catastrophes. When they first meet up in Ho Chi Minh City, shaking hands and busting chops, the other guys give Paul grief for his red MAGA baseball cap. (The hat is almost a character in its own right.) “That’s right, I voted for him,” Paul declares.Everyone knows what Spike Lee thinks of the current president, but everyone should also remember that Lee often shows an almost affectionate interest in characters whose views he finds abhorrent. (It’s a long list that encompasses John Turturro’s Pino in “Do the Right Thing” and the snarling white supremacist played by Paakkonen in “BlacKkKlansman.”) And Lee doesn’t treat Paul as a misguided reactionary. His pain is the motor and the moral of the story. He isn’t the hero of the movie. He’s the reason to see it.Da 5 BloodsRated R. Blood. Running time: 2 hours 34 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

HBO Max has removed from its catalog “Gone With the Wind,” the 1939 movie long considered a triumph of American cinema but one that romanticizes the Civil War-era South while glossing over its racial sins.The streaming service pledged to eventually bring the film back “with a discussion of its historical context” while denouncing its racial missteps, a spokesperson said in a statement on Tuesday.Set on a plantation and in Atlanta, the film won multiple Academy Awards, including best picture and best supporting actress for Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American to win an Oscar, and it remains among the most celebrated movies in cinematic history. But its rose-tinted depiction of the antebellum South and its blindness to the horrors of slavery have long been criticized, and that scrutiny was renewed this week as protests over police brutality and the death of George Floyd continued to pull the United States into a wide-ranging conversation about race.“‘Gone With the Wind’ is a product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society,” an HBO Max spokesperson said in a statement. “These racist depictions were wrong then and are wrong today, and we felt that to keep this title up without an explanation and a denouncement of those depictions would be irresponsible.”HBO Max, owned by AT&T, pulled the film on Tuesday, one day after John Ridley, the screenwriter of “12 Years a Slave,” wrote an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times calling for its removal. Mr. Ridley said he understood that films were snapshots of their moment in history, but that “Gone With the Wind” was still used to “give cover to those who falsely claim that clinging to the iconography of the plantation era is a matter of ‘heritage, not hate.’” More