2009 Gone With The Wind DVD
The Ultimate Collectors Edition contains: LIMITED and NUMBERED one-of-a-kind Velvet Box packaging. Contains the feature film mastered in hi-definition plus more than 8 hours of timeless extras, including an all new documentary narrated by Kenneth Branagh.
Warner Bros Home Entertainment presents 1939: Hollywood's Greatest Year,” “Gone with the Wind: The Legend Lives On” featurette, and much more. Collectibles include an Exclusive 52-pg Hardcover Photo and Production Art Book, ten (10) 5”x7” frameable Watercolor Reproduction Art Prints, Bonus CD Soundtrack Sampler, and Reproduction of the Original 1939 Program. Gone with the Wind (70th Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Edition) will be released on Nov. 17th 2009. Order it from Amazon.
Collectors DVD Reviews:
A Classic but it's NOT for everyone! I used to think that this Hollywood classic was for everyone. However, after reading nearly 300 reviews of the film, I think that isn't true anymore.
This movie is NOT for you IF
# 1) you think a movie must be as historically accurate as a history book,
# 2) you think a 1939 movie should reflect the values of the 21st century,
# 3) your attention span is so short that you must only see movies from 90-120 minutes in length,
# 4) you can only accept politically correct films, particularly in terms of racial issues,
# 5) you are so DUMB as to think widescreen movies were made before the 1950s (although to be fair, Selznik originally intended to use a special widescreen process for the so-called "burning of Atlanta" sequence but gave up on the expensive idea),
# 6) you can only accept computerized special effects as they appear in modern films, or
# 7) your idea of great acting is to be found in slasher or teen films being made these days.
The movie Gone with The Wind is NOT a documentary on the Civil War period. It is NOT a history of slavery in America. It is NOT a story of perfect people behaving perfectly at all times. It IS an adaptation of a novel written by a Southern woman who, as a child, sat and listened to the stories the old Confederate veterans told about the old days before, during, and after THE war. It IS a love story, probably about the novelist's grandmother, which reflects the attitudes left over from that long-ago time. To criticize this film for so many unrelated issues is silly. It stands on its merits as a masterful film that tells of bittersweet love and lost fantasy. That it succeeds so well is a tribute to the actors and filmmakers of over sixty years ago.
The Main Characters
David O. Selznick wanted Gone with the Wind to be somehow more than a movie,
a film that would broaden the very idea of what a film could be and do and
look like. In many respects he got what he worked so hard to achieve in this
1939 epic (and all-time box-office champ in terms of tickets sold), and in
some respects he fell far short of the goal.
While the first half of this Civil War drama is taut and suspenseful and nostalgic, the second is ramshackle and arbitrary. But there's no question that the film is an enormous achievement in terms of its every resource--art direction, color, sound, cinematography--being pushed to new limits for the greater glory of telling an American story as fully as possible.
Vivien Leigh is still magnificently narcissistic, Olivia
de Havilland angelic and lovely, Leslie Howard reckless
and aristocratic. As for Clark Gable: we're talking one of
the most vital, masculine performances ever committed to film.
Gone With The Wind Collector's DVD
Another review of the Four Disc Collector's Edition:
Gone With the Wind was never released in a Widescreen version on DVD because it was never released in a Widescreen version on film. In fact, when it was released (1939), there were NO "Widescreen" movies at all -- becaues no one had yet thought about formatting movies in that way.
Through the 1940s and into the 1950s, essentially ALL movies were in the 3:4 format that we now consider to be "regular". My understanding is that those proportions originally were adopted by the film industry to roughly correspond with the proportions of viewable area for the "live" theaters extant when the film industry started. Similarly, when television arrived in the late 40s/early 50s, its screen format was determined by copying the 3:4 screen proportions of films made up to that time. By the mid-1950s, the film industry became concerned about losing its audience to TV, so various WIDESCREEN formats (CinemaScope was one;
I think there was another called VistaVision; I can't remember the others offhand) were conceived by the film industry in the 1950s as a way in which the film industry could distinguish its film products from what could efficiently be shown on television screens. This was the film industry's attempt to keep audiences coming to theaters to see their movies, rather than just waiting to see movie productions on home televisions; by coming to the theater, the audience could experience something different that what television could offer.
Other "ideas" in this effort against TV included attempts to interest audiences in 3D films, as well as enhancing film audio, both by greatly improving sound range and fidelity and later by adding stereo, at a time when TVs had only a single, inexpensive speaker that didn't sound all that "hot." In fact, the creation/addition of 5.1 audio (Surround Sound) was yet another film industry effort to distinguish itself from what then was available for use in homes.
Anyway, if someone now wants to issue a "Widescreen" version of GWTW, the
only way to do it (without distorting the content) would be to cut off the
top and/or bottom of every frame all the way through -- just think about how
THAT would look...
More detailed information about the Gone With The Wind movie is found on www.imdb.com/.
