I understand why so many people want this film banned and why so many people have problems with it. I can imagine that at least part of the reason for this film's high grosses HAVE to have come from the South. I'm reminded of the opening of Black Klansman where we witness Alec Baldwin giving a Klan recruitment film while GWTW plays in the background. This movie may not have led to as much recruitment of white supremacists as Birth of a nATION did but it didn't help.

Ebert put both movies in his Great mOVIES book, while endorsing both films were problematic. The fact remains trying to teach a film course without showing Birth of a Nation is impossible because without it there's a good chance Hollywood would never have been invented. And there's no way to talk about great films without mention Gone With The Wind because it was the gold standard for blockbusters for the next thirty years, until the Godfather unseated it. The film is so iconic that Billy Wilder has William Holden make reference to it in the opening of Sunset Blvd:

"You'd have turned down Gone With the Wind," he berates a screenplay reader.

The executive said: "No that was me. I said no one will ever go to a Civil War picture (a line tHE head of Warner Brothers actually said before Selznick got it greenlit at MGM)

The movie redefined what an epic film could be and for the next thirty years many studios tried to make another Gone With The Wind, mostly by doing period pieces and using glorious technicolor. No one ever tried to make a movie as openly racist as GWTW which is probably for the best, Hollywood had enough problematic films already without every single movie having slaves staying with their plantations after they were freed. And for all it's flaws Scarlet was a groundbreaking heroine for 1939: most women were Southern belles but there's something rigid and unbreakable about her that, outside of the work of Bette Davis, you didn't see other actresses trying to be before and wouldn't see for a long time afterwards. (Not until the film noir came along anyway and those women were outright villains.)

I have far more problems with the movies that used 'yellowface' and 'blackface' than I do Gone With The Wind. I understand why a lot of people demanded it be dropped from streaming. But the problems with America will not end if films like this disappear into catalogues. Indeed these are the EXACT kind of movies the people who speak the loudest against them need to see, if only to understand what they're up against in the cultural wars to come - and sadly, why they may keep losing them.