Star Crossed

Every now and then you can't beat Gone With the Wind as a great, lazy, sandwich-eating way to spend an afternoon. Apart from Gandhi it's the only film I've ever seen that admitted it needed an intermission (and even had special intermission music! You can't fault David O Selznick for grandeur of scale). And I think the intermission in Gandhi was only there because the cinema management thought, quite rightly, that we might need it. I went to see The Unbearable Lightness Of Being as a student, and secretly rechristened it The Unbearable Numbness Of My Bum, although that may have less to do with the undeniable length (and lack of intermission) of the actual film and more to do with the fact that, if you're not a big fan of Daniel Day Lewis, the sight of him saying "Take your clothes off" FORTY-SEVEN BILLION TIMES can get a little wearisome.

Anyway, back to Gone With the Wind - my delightful friend Marky Mark told me that apparently Margaret Mitchell was a total fan of astrology, and had deliberately written the novel so that each of the main characters was a perfect archetype of a particular star sign, as follows:

Scarlett O'Hara = Aries

Rhett Butler = Sagittarius

Ashley Wilkes = Pisces

Melanie Wilkes = Cancer

I think I more or less got that right. It's a great theory but I worry for the future of fiction if, on top of unsolicited quibbling about inaccuracies in period detail etc, the author was also subject to letters arguing that no Libra would behave like that... but then I would worry, being a Pisces.

(The picture above, by the way, comes from my favourite scene in the film, when Scarlett's unlamented second husband has just died, and she's drunk the better part of a bottle of brandy - Rhett comes to see her, and as she's desperately rinsing her mouth out with eau de cologne to hide the smell of booze, Mammy shows him in with the line "Mr Rhett's here to see you, Miz Scarlett. I told him you was prostrate with grief.")