While the film was praised for its fidelity to the novel, this aspect was also singled out as the main factor in contributing to the lengthy running time. John C. Flinn wrote for "Variety" that Selznick had "left too much in", and that as entertainment, the film would have benefited if repetitious scenes and dialog from the latter part of the story had been trimmed. "The Manchester Guardian" felt that the film's one serious drawback was that the story lacked the epic quality to justify the outlay of time and found the second half, which focuses on Scarlett's "irrelevant marriages" and "domestic squabbles", mostly superfluous, and the sole reason for their inclusion had been "simply because Margaret Mitchell wrote it that way". "The Guardian" believed that if "the story had been cut short and tidied up at the point marked by the interval, and if the personal drama had been made subservient to a cinematic treatment of the central theme—the collapse and devastation of the Old South—then "Gone With the Wind" might have been a really great film". Likewise, Hoellering also found the second half of the film to be weaker than the first half: identifying the Civil War to be the driving force of the first part while the characters dominate in the second part, he concluded this is where the main fault of the picture lay, commenting that "the characters alone do not suffice". Despite many excellent scenes, he considered the drama to be unconvincing and that the "psychological development" had been neglected.