So Red the Rose (1935)

User Rating:

7.3/10   

Director:

King Vidor

Writers:

Maxwell Anderson (writer)
Edwin Justus Mayer (writer)

Release Date:

20 December 1935 (USA)

Genre:

Drama

Tagline:

THE FIRE OF THE SOUTH! The fury of love..! ...Romance rides across the pages of history..!

Plot:

SO RED THE ROSE is King Vidor's quietly affecting Civil War romance, starring Margaret Sullavan as a Southern aristocrat...

Plot Keywords:

American Civil War | Based On Novel

Cast

Margaret Sullavan	...	Valette Bedford
Walter Connolly	...	Malcolm Bedford
Randolph Scott	...	Duncan Bedford
Janet Beecher	...	Sally Bedford
Elizabeth Patterson	...	Mary Cherry
Robert Cummings	...	George Pendleton
Harry Ellerbe	...	Edward Bedford
Dickie Moore	...	Middleton Bedford
Charles Starrett	...	George McGehee
Johnny Downs	...	Yankee boy
Daniel L. Haynes	...	William Veal
Clarence Muse	...	Cato
James Burke	...	Major Rushton
Warner Richmond	...	Confederate Sergeant
Alfred Delcambre	...	Charles Tolliver

Runtime:

82 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Company:

Paramount Pictures

Trivia:

One of over 700 Paramount Productions, filmed between 1929 and 1949, which were sold to MCA/Universal in 1958 for television distribution, and have been owned and controlled by Universal ever since.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Have You Got Any Castles? (1938)

A Preliminary Sketch for GWTW

I saw this film on television (channel 21 I believe) back in the 1980s. It was okay, and (given the standards of racial stereotypes in 1935)actually ahead of its time in one scene. Otherwise, it is a pale sketch for Gone With The Wind. I think the reason is that whatever failings on racial grounds haunt us regarding Margaret Mitchell's novel, Miss Mitchell created memorable characters in Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler (and yes, even in Mammy)while the screenplay writers and the novelist who wrote SO RED THE ROSE did not do so. Also, the disasters facing Margaret Sullivan's world (while ruinous) are not as visually nightmarish to us as Scarlet's finding her father insane and her mother dead, or of seeing Atlanta burn. There are moments in SO RED that subtly show the size of the disaster - the death of the weakened defeated Walter Conolly, as he returns home in his carriage, for example. But while sad, it just does not hold a candle to the collapse of the ante-bellum Atlanta in GWTW.

The one moment that does stand out (and stands out against the normal racist rubbish of the 1930s) was when Sullivan confronts her slaves, who have heard the Yankee troops are approaching and they may be free. She tries to control them with reminders of how good her family was to them (although - tellingly - she slaps one who dare suggests its wasn't all that great). But further bad news reaches her, and she collapses. The slaves look at her - and walk away to desert the plantation. No scene like that is in GWTW, but I suspect it happened far more frequently than Margaret Mitchell would have preferred to have know of.