'Frankly, My Dear' by Molly Haskell

"Gone With the Wind" -- a book in 1936 and then a movie in 1939 -- was above all a phenomenon. To this day, the Civil War epic romance remains the most successful blockbuster ever. As film critic Molly Haskell sees it in her slender reappraisal, "Frankly, My Dear: 'Gone With the Wind' Revisited," it is also a conflicting icon in American culture.

Haskell, who grew up in Virginia, divulges a curious fact about the fiction: Her great-great-grandfather was Wade Hampton, the South Carolina general, and later governor, after whom author Margaret Mitchell named Scarlett O'Hara's first child (in the book -- he didn't make it to the screen).

The author of "From Reverence to Rape," an early feminist examination of women in the movies, first published in 1974, Haskell has not written a memoir, but her book is marked as much by personal feeling as it is by critical assessment.

In looking at the making of the film, Haskell focuses on producer David O. Selznick. A man who lived on Dexedrine, peanuts and bananas, he went through three directors (George Cukor, Sam Wood and the ultimately credited Victor Fleming). His appetite for screenwriters was even more voracious, including Sidney Howard, Ben Hecht and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to name only a few.

But his mania paid off, as did his machinations to snatch Clark Gable, who was under contract to MGM, and his public relations ploy to enlist the book's legion of fans in the search for the perfect Scarlett.

"Casting is part of the writing," Haskell notes, and her account of the process is particularly enjoyable, with meditations on the "ocular intensity" of Bette Davis, the unexpected parallels between Yankee Katharine Hepburn and Southern minx Scarlett and the difficulty of detecting potential stardom in screen tests.

Then there is the "discovery" of Vivien Leigh for whom "Gone With the Wind" was "both the glorious peak and the beginning of the end of her movie career."

All this, though, is a warm-up for the core of the book, which is Haskell's chapter on Mitchell, her manipulative heroine, Scarlett, and the transgressions the two perpetrated against received ideas of sexuality and gender.

Underneath those magnolias and hoop skirts, Scarlett is a female subversive, "a predator who marries three men she doesn't love," "a rotten mother" and "a successful business woman." But the real marvel is how little she pays for her misdeeds.