1939 was a banner year in movie history. Not only was it filled with brilliant titles vying for critical applause and box office success, it was a year characterized by monopolistic studios who could produce, distribute and exhibit their work without obstacle, save for one another's pursuits. This level of corporate control extended to the maturing use of sound and color technologies and served to promote varied screen stories that were guaranteed an audience regardless of their relative merits or failures.

It was a time of house styles, movie moguls, escapist entertainment and movie palaces. Each release could expect to take a year or more to work through major urban centers and reach more rural venues. Movie stars and technicians enjoyed both the security and limitation of long-term studio contracts just as methodical price controls could be exerted by East and West Coast movie financiers who influenced the tone, subject and length of movies as surely as production staffers.

1939 was also the last year to know any peace before World War II. Although American involvement didn't begin until after the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the '30s were ended with political contradictions about the continuation of US isolationism versus support of Allied interests in Europe and Asia.

On the silver screen this troubling ideological climate was reflected in movies that were sometimes produced as escapist epics, often done with Technicolor and stereophonic sound, or as more realist melodramas, often done in black and white. The quality of the year's films, and the sheer quantity of their number when realizing how many more were annually produced as compared with today, meant there was steep awards competition.

According to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences rulebook of the day 10 films could be nominated for Best Picture. Among 1939's group were several movies that have since become classics including Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz and Wuthering Heights. The other nominees were Dark Victory, Love Affair, Ninotchka, Of Mice and Men and, of course, the eventual winner and there were still other films with impressive reputations such as Young Mr. Lincoln that failed even to be nominated.

In short, 1939 was a banner year for movies.

What set apart "The most magnificent picture ever!", as Gone with the Wind was tagged in its release, was its outstanding literary pedigree and extraordinarily lavish production value. For a budget of $3.9 million Margaret Mitchell's best selling novel was produced with no expense denied and no worthwhile scene ignored.

Having written her novel between 1926 and 1929 and then publishing it in 1936, Mitchell's story of a southern woman and her plantation was one of the hottest properties ever to be considered in Hollywood. One month after its publication, in fact, David O. Selznick purchased the movie rights for the unprecedented sum of $50,000, then the most ever spent to secure an author's first novel for the screen.

Just as Mitchell's novel went through several title changes before settling on Gone with the Wind, among them "Tomorrow is Another Day", "Not in Our Stars", "Bugles Sang True" and "Tote the Weary Load", MGM went through similar struggles casting the central role of Scarlett O'Hara. Having passed on the part when the male lead was set for Errol Flynn, Bette Davis kicked the search for Scarlett into overdrive. Some 1,400 actresses were eventually interviewed for the part with 400 doing line readings and still the movie went into production without an actress cast as the lead.

It was then that Myron Selznick introduced Vivien Leigh to his brother, the film's producer. After having read the source novel and different books on the Civil War, Leigh won the role and, as they say, the rest is history.

Gone with the Wind is a Civil War-era soap opera primarily focused on Scarlett O'Hara and her struggles to maintain the family plantation, Tara, while pursuing Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) as her heart's desire. Naturally there are many more subplots, competing relationships and historical glimpses as to render any summary suspicious in its simplicity, yet the movie is undeniably Scarlett's story.

There are entire fan communities devoted to her character, along with a TV mini-series called Scarlett, and a veritable cult to be built around her in the American South that celebrates antebellum culture with historical re-enactments and the like. A parallel exits with Mitchell's personal experience as the inspiration for her heroine just as the Mitchell estate itself is something of cultural colony of her epic story.

Running nearly four-hours Gone with the Wind is also one of the great Hollywood masterpieces, but not simply for its scale and no-expense-spared production circumstance. While it's true all seven of then-existing Technicolor cameras were used at various points on the film, just as the movie chewed up three different directors from George Cukor, and Sam Wood through Victor Fleming, the film sustains its sprawling, hours-long story and established one of the most enduring myths in Hollywood history.

As a result any discussion of Gone with the Wind is not merely an effort to evaluate or situate it in an historical circumstance. Instead all such discussions step into the complex ways in which Americans viewed themselves in 1939, not just as movie patrons but also as framers for a larger piece of national history. Gone with the Wind may not be the greatest movie ever made but it is one of the great screen stories. It is also completely cemented to a particular representation of the Civil War and Reconstruction era that has almost uniquely been absorbed into popular culture as a document about what the 1860s looked like and how people felt about their lives.

Not only is this interpretation dangerous, it misses the point of what the film really offers.

In short, there was no attempt on the part of Margaret Mitchell or MGM to do anything but create an epic melodrama set in one of the most tumultuous periods of American history. Because the resulting book and film have assumed a life far beyond the scope of the silver screen, however, all Southerner whites have been mythologized as plantation owners, or else white trash, and all black slaves have been turned into grateful servants, or else ignored altogether.

Thus the relationship of Gone with the Wind to its depiction of race relations is the most influential and negative aspect of the film. By developing substantial roles for Butterfly McQueen (Prissy), Eddie Anderson (Uncle Peter) and the Academy Award-winning role of Mammy played by Hattie McDaniel, the first black American to win such an award, the film gave a mainstream voice to black expression. Yet it did so at the expense of dealing with the real experience of slavery and racism by putting all such cultural baggage at bay in preference for the central love story of Rhett and Scarlett.

Slavery notwithstanding, and literary attempts to redress the problem like the recent novel The Wind Done Gone, the Civil War was also a struggle between federalization and the opposite values of a more independent democracy. These subtleties were lost on the movie's producers even though it might be more appropriate to remember a few things about classic art and cultural context.

On the one hand it's important to criticize a film for what it is rather than what it could have been. On the other hand it's important to criticize what a film becomes when it reaches its public and expands beyond simply being a strip of film running 24 frames a second.

In such circumstances it's important to note how Gone with the Wind became a phenomenon of national significance. So much so, in fact, trying to consider it as being good or bad is beside the point.

Of course it's good. It's even great. The real question is about how it's used by each subsequent generation of moviegoers who use it to create meaning about both 1939's Hollywood style but also about the period translated from Margaret Mitchell's novel.

I submit that the depiction of 1939's Oscar-winning movie is a demonstration of Hollywood studio predominance and expertise in the art of movie making. As far as imagining the Civil War, however, Gone with the Wind is merely claptrap at the service of theatrical admissions and higher box office.