It would seem that Gone With the Wind, written by a woman, concerned with a woman, and read by millions of women all over the world, is working out o… - C. A. Lejeune

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It would seem that Gone With the Wind, written by a woman, concerned with a woman, and read by millions of women all over the world, is working out on form. That is to say, it is primarily a woman's picture.
I say that advisedly, not to suggest that men won't like it, but because I am so sure that women will. It may not be a great, significant picture, with a strong, central theme, but I don't honestly believe that women care so much about great, significant pictures with strong, central themes. What they prefer, and what they will get in Gone With the Wind is a vivid account of personal and intimate details of this meeting and that quarrel; [life] seen not broadly, in perspective, but urgently, from day to day, as if they were living it themselves. Women are only dimly concerned with the meaning of what is happening in the world, but passionately concerned with the effect of what is happening on So-and-So. The American Civil War. the abolition of slavery, the burning of a city, the end of a social order, even the birth of a nation, would hardly in themselves justify the film's three hours and forty minutes of running-time. But in order to discover what happened to Scarlett O'Hara, to Melanie. to Rhett Butler, to the black mammy, to Scarlett's baby, during these events, most women will sit through this enormous picture without a murmur.
Curiously enough, the dominant feminine interest in the picture has worked through even to the acting. The best performances are all women's.

English
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About C. A. Lejeune

Caroline Alice Lejeune (27 March 1897 – 31 March 1973) was a British writer remembered as The Observers film critic from 1928 to 1960. She was among the earliest newspaper film critics in Britain, and one of the first British women in the profession. She formed a friendship early in her career with Alfred Hitchcock, "when he was writing and ornamenting sub-titles for silent pictures," as she later wrote.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Caroline Alice Lejeune C.A. L. Mrs. Edward Roffe Thompson Caroline Lejeune C.A. Lejeune C(aroline) A(nne) Lejeune

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But I believe and I stick to it that there is a code in this sort of free-handed slaughter, and Hitchcock has gone outside the code in Sabotage. As a detective fan and an Inveterate reader of thrillers I suggest that this is the sort of thing that should get a fellow blackballed from the Crime Club. Discreet directors don't kill schoolboys and dogs in omnibuses. Believe me, it isn't done..

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Its true concern, however, is with something much larger and more impalpable; the relationship between the crowd and the individual; the impersonal, jubilant, clamorous voice of the multitude, and the personal, agonisingly articulated dumbshow of a man.
You have to go to literature, to the novels of Dickens and Dumas, to find crowd scenes so superbly and massively handled. The changing scene is packed with people; you fix your eye on an individual player, only to find him presently overwhelmed, submerged, drowned in a sea of faces. And rightly so, for that is the whole secret of Les Enfants du Paradis. The characters are initially thrown together by the crowd and eventually torn apart, like so much flotsam and jetsam.

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