One of this great but frustrating movie’s weaknesses is the lackluster performance by the out-of-place Leslie Howard, who, unlike Vivien Leigh, couldn’t manage to put aside his real-life British accent and commit to playing a Georgian. I agree with this BBC piece (“Gone with the Wind: Is it America’s strangest film?”):
The idea that anyone — let alone anyone as unconventional as Scarlett — would choose this wishy-washy character over ... Rhett is absurd: the most preposterous aspect of a daringly, bewilderingly idiosyncratic film. After more than 75 years, we’re still mesmerised by Scarlett. We’re still tantalised by Scarlett and Rhett. But Scarlett and Ashley? Frankly, we don’t give a damn.
If only he’d been played by Jimmy Stewart!
The reference to Jimmy Stewart makes more sense in the context of the entire post, the #1 choice for the year being a Jimmy Stewart movie. And the #4 choice.
Leslie Howard died in 1943 when his plane was shot down by the Nazis:
Howard's World War II activities included acting and filmmaking. He was active in anti-German propaganda and shoring up support for the Allies—two years after his death the British Film Yearbook described Howard's work as "one of the most valuable facets of British propaganda". He was rumoured to have been involved with British or Allied Intelligence, sparking conspiracy theories regarding his death in 1943 when the Luftwaffe shot down BOAC Flight 777 over the Atlantic... on which he was a passenger.
Gable joined the Air Force in 1942, and "flew five combat missions, including one to Germany, as an observer-gunner in B-17 Flying Fortresses between May 4 and September 23, 1943, earning the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross for his efforts."
During one of the missions, Gable's aircraft was damaged by flak and attacked by fighters, which knocked out one of the engines and shot up the stabilizer. In the raid on Germany, one crewman was killed and two others were wounded, and flak went through Gable's boot and narrowly missed his head. When word of this reached MGM, studio executives began to badger the Army Air Forces to reassign its most valuable screen actor to noncombat duty.
Gable was a conservative Republican, but he voted for FDR because his wife, Carole Lombard, a liberal activist, convinced him to do so.
As for Jimmy Stewart, he was the first movie star to enlist in the military in WWII:
After first being rejected for low weight in November 1940, he successfully enlisted in February 1941. As an experienced amateur pilot, he reported for induction as a private in the Air Corps on March 22, 1941. Soon to be 33 years old, he was over the age limit for Aviation Cadet training—the normal path of commissioning for pilots, navigators and bombardiers—and therefore applied for an Air Corps commission as both a college graduate and a licensed commercial pilot. Stewart received his commission as a second lieutenant on January 1, 1942.
I'll skip the details other than to say he attained the rank of brigadier general. John calls Stewart "the greatest male actor of his time." He also says: "Stewart was ahead of his time in having a soft, sensitive quality back when most male actors lacked such nuance."
Of course, Stewart was a big right winger. I say "of course," but maybe you'd say "Oddly enough..." or "Nevertheless...." Ha ha. I wouldn't! I think the 2 things go together quite nicely.
But Hitler favored that manly swagger of Clark Gable.
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Sydney writes:
You wondered in your post why Scarlett would choose Ashley over Rhett, and that whole premise makes the film off kilter, but in the movie and the book, everyone tells Scarlett that the two of them are not a good fit. The motivation for her is to catch him. She doesn't love him.She loves the idea of making him love her. Again and again Scarlet steals the beaus of other women, just because she can. This is much more obvious in the book than the movie. By the end of the book, she comes to realize that she never did love Ashley,. She loved the idea of him, which was far short of the reality of him. In this way the book is actually kind of an anti-romance genre. She also regrets how much she's damaged her relationships with other women, making it impossible for her to be a part of their community. So at the end she is tragically truly alone.
Jeff writes: "GWTW might be a strange movie to a foreigner, but it's not to an American, particularly an American of the 1930's. I'd recommend the book Southern Ladies and Gentleman, by Florence King, who is one of the funniest writers in American history. "
Ed writes: "Certainly Scarlett, taken as purely a passionate and impulsive soul, makes more sense as an lover of Rhett than of Ashley, - as indeed she later saw herself. But she wasn't purely anything. Behind the passion was a little engine of ambition turning over. And behind the ambition was illusion. That illusion was of the genteel South, the tidy and trans-Atlantic (hence the accent not working so badly) upper crust unstained by soil and blood. Stuart would have been too solid to play the part. You needed someone on the cusp of ethereal and ephemeral, where Howard dwelt."
MikeR writes:
@Sydney. Yup - Ashley was never a real character in the book. Scarlett fixated on him at the beginning, and was never mature enough to rethink that until it was way too late.
I guess I always disliked her character, so this fits right in.
Birches writes: "I'm going to break my self imposed rule of only one comment per day at Althouse to say that Leslie Howard with an accent really worked for me. The gentry patrician land owners of the South all wanted to be America's version of British nobility. It made sense to me that Ashley, as the embodiment of that ideal, would speak like British nobility as well."
George writes: "Concerning his English accent. Southern aristocracy had pretty strong ties to England. It's quite possible that he would have been sent to an English boarding school and on to matriculate at some place like Oxford or Cambridge."
Jeff Gee writes: "My choice for Ashley: Lew Ayres, based on his performance as Katharine Hepburn's alcoholic (and pretty clearly gay) brother in the 1937 version of "Holiday." He's not playing Ashley or even somebody with much in common with him, but you can see the colors he could have brought to the part. (Fredric March would be been good, too). Poor Leslie Howard is terrific in "Pygmalion" but if all you've seen him in is GWTW (the case for most people) you wouldn't cast him as a cigar store Indian."
Brian writes: "Jimmy Stewart was also Chuck Yeager's commanding officer before both went to pilot training."
Michael writes: "An effete stammerer --Just watch 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' to understand what was wrong with Jimmy -- and right with John Wayne."
And look up what John Wayne did in WW2 to put it back the other way around.
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