Scarlett O’Hara has just arrived safely at Tara with the bedridden Melanie, after surviving a terrifying flight from an Atlanta in flames.
Penniless, desperate and half out of her mind with hunger, she runs into the fields, looking for something, anything, to eat. Using her hands to dig, she pulls up the only food she can find: a radish.
She takes a bite, gags and collapses to the ground in tears. Using the steely resolve that is essential to her character, she pulls herself to her feet, raises her fist to the sky and says, “God is my witness. As God is my witness, they’re not going to lick me. I’m going to live through this, and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folks. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill, as God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.”
The music swells, the camera pulls away to reveal a single, desolate tree and an impressive sunrise signifying hope for the future. And the audience heads to the lobby for intermission.
It’s one of the greatest scenes in movie history, and it isn’t bad in the book, either.
But I don’t get it. I never got it.
Here is a woman so hungry that she temporarily reverts to her native English accent (watch it again; you’ll hear it). She digs up a radish, nibbles on it and almost can’t keep it down?
She just hates radishes that much. To the beautiful, fiery, manipulative, scheming and, at the moment, starving Scarlett, the worst thing she could possibly eat is a radish.
Too strong, I suppose. Too sharp. Too pungent. But really, it’s just a nice, tasty radish. Yum.
If it were just “Gone with the Wind,” I would ignore it as an anomaly, albeit one that jabs me in the ribs every time I see it. But a similar thing happens in the screwball comedy classic “It Happened One Night,” and to my way of thinking, two films equals a trend.
Claudette Colbert stars as heiress Ellie Andrews, whose father has just had her marriage to an unpleasant husband annulled. She literally jumps ship and wants to make her way on very little money from Florida back to New York. Roguish newspaperman Clark Gable helps her, hoping to get a good story out of it.
One evening, when they have no money at all, he scrounges around a farm and returns with a handful of carrots. He scrapes one with a pocketknife and offers it to her. She is appalled.
“Raw?” she asks, incredulously. A few lines later, she says, “I hate the horrid stuff.”
The scene shows that she is a pampered socialite, even in the midst of the Depression, while he is a man of the people. When hunger finally drives her to eat the carrot, it is the first step she takes to becoming accessible and ordinary, and is also an important sign that their mutual antipathy is beginning to warm into love. It’s another great scene but is often overlooked because it is immediately followed by the famous hitchhiking scene.
But I watch it and ask: What’s wrong with a carrot? Did people in the 1930s have a weird aversion to raw root vegetables? Or was it just 1930s movies that starred Clark Gable?
Have root vegetables only become acceptable in the last 80 years? Did writers of the ‘30s just have bad taste? Or did they merely assume their audiences were finicky?
Incidentally, Gable nonchalantly eating carrots in that scene was actually the model for Bugs Bunny doing the same.
