Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" is a line from the 1939 film "Gone with the Wind" starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. The line is spoken by Rhett Butler (Gable), as his last words to Scarlett O'Hara (Leigh), in response to her tearful question: "Where shall I go? What shall I do?" Scarlett clings to the hope that she can win him back. This line is also partially spoken by Rhett Butler in Margaret Mitchell's novel "Gone with the Wind", published in 1936, from which the film is derived.
Gone with the Wind (film) of the "limit" put on black aspiration by old prejudices. Malcolm X later recalled that "when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under the rug". Upon its release, "Gone with the Wind" broke attendance records everywhere. At the Capitol Theatre in New York alone, it was averaging eleven thousand admissions per day in late December, and within four years of its release had sold an estimated sixty million tickets across the United States—sales equivalent to just under half the population at the time. It repeated its success overseas, and was a sensational hit during the Blitz