Some elements seem grotesquely dated, but this restoration of the 1939 classic finds the film as powerful and mad as ever

The mother of all event movies returns to the big screen in a glittering new digitally restored print: the story of kittenish belle Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh), a pampered princess of the old south, her love for the doomed and self-consciously gallant gentleman Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), and the fascination that a certain handsome rogue – Rhett Butler, unforgettably incarnated by Clark Gable – conceives for her. The movie is lenient to the Confederacy, to say the very least of it (its officers are repeatedly called the "cavaliers") and also, incidentally, to the idea of a gentleman's imposition of his conjugal rights. The surtitle at the beginning candidly refers to the lost "civilisation" based on "Master and Slave", for all the world as if we are talking about the ancient Egyptians, rather...