<P> The critical perception of the film has shifted in the intervening years, which resulted in it being ranked 235th in Sight & Sound's prestigious decennial critics poll in 2012, and in 2015 sixty - two international film critics polled by the BBC voted it the 97th best American film . </P> <P> The film has featured in several high - profile industry polls: in 1977 it was voted the most popular film by the American Film Institute (AFI), in a poll of the organization's membership; the AFI also ranked the film fourth on its "100 Greatest Movies" list in 1998, with it slipping down to sixth place in the tenth anniversary edition in 2007 . Film directors ranked it 322nd in the 2012 edition of the decennial Sight & Sound poll, and in 2016 it was selected as the ninth best "directorial achievement" in a Directors Guild of America members poll . In 2014, it placed fifteenth in an extensive poll undertaken by The Hollywood Reporter, which ballotted every studio, agency, publicity firm and production house in the Hollywood region . Gone with the Wind was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry in 1989 . </P> <P> Gone with the Wind has been criticized as having perpetuated Civil War myths and black stereotypes . David Reynolds writes that "The white women are elegant, their menfolk noble or at least dashing . And, in the background, the black slaves are mostly dutiful and content, clearly incapable of an independent existence ." Reynolds likened Gone with the Wind to The Birth of a Nation and other re-imaginings of the South during the era of segregation, in which white Southerners are portrayed as defending traditional values and the issue of slavery is largely ignored . The film has been described as a "regression" that promotes the myth of the black rapist and the honourable and defensive role of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction, and as a "social propaganda" film offering a "white supremacist" view of the past . From 1972 to 1996, the Atlanta Historical Society held a number of Gone with the Wind exhibits, among them a 1994 exhibit titled, "Disputed Territories: Gone with the Wind and Southern Myths". One of the questions explored by the exhibit was "How True to Life Were the Slaves in GWTW?" This section showed slave experiences were diverse and concluded that the "happy darky" was a myth, as was the belief that all slaves experienced violence and brutality . </P> <P> W. Bryan Rommel Ruiz has argued that despite factual inaccuracies in its depiction of the Reconstruction period, Gone with the Wind nevertheless reflects contemporary interpretations that were common in the early 20th century . One such viewpoint is reflected in a brief scene in which Mammy fends off a leering freedman: a government official can be heard offering bribes to the emancipated slaves for their votes . The inference is taken to be that freedmen are ignorant about politics and unprepared for freedom, unwittingly becoming the tools of corrupt Reconstruction officials . While perpetuating some Lost Cause myths, the film makes concessions in regards to others . After the attack on Scarlett in the shanty town, a group of men including Scarlett's husband Frank, Rhett Butler and Ashley raid the town; in the novel they belong to the Ku Klux Klan, representing the common trope of protecting the white woman's virtue, but the filmmakers consciously neutralize the presence of the Klan in the film by referring to it only as a "political meeting". </P>

Who was the cast in gone with the wind