Still Scarlett After All These Years

But film critic Molly Haskell says it’s too easy to brush off Hollywood’s portrayal of Margaret Mitchell’s sprawling classic as antebellum folderol and costume melodrama.

Yes, there’s rape fantasy and romanticized slavery here. But there’s also Scarlett O’Hara as proto-feminist. Hattie McDaniel as the first African-American to win an Oscar. And filmmaking ambition that still dazzles, 70 years on.

This hour, On Point: Molly Haskell and “Gone With the Wind.”Guests:

Molly Haskell joins us from New York.  Born in North Carolina, raised in Richmond, Virginia, she's a film critic and writer whose work has appeared in Esquire, The Nation, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books. Her new book is "Frankly, My Dear: 'Gone With the Wind' Revisited."
Read Haskell's introduction to "Frankly, My Dear."

And from Los Angeles, we're joined by Karen Grigsby Bates, Los Angeles-based correspondent for NPR. In a 2008 piece for All Things Considered, she pondered her own interest as a young woman in the complicated character of Scarlett O'Hara.