Vin Diesel’s unlikely pick for cinema’s first action movie: “You really felt the danger”

Posted On January 22, 2026January 22, 2026

Vin Diesel is undoubtedly one of the biggest action stars of modern times, with just the Fast and Furious films alone being some of the highest-grossing movies of recent years, even if they contain the combined intelligence of a single-celled organism.

Take away his nitro-fuelled romps, though, and he still has a CV that ranks up there with the very best of the gun-toting, one-liner quipping sort.

Given that he’s such an integral part of the genre’s modern fabric, it’s no surprise that Prof Diesel has taken a keen interest in its history. While it’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that action movies really kicked off, Guillermo del Toro thinks it was with the 1964 film The Train, the BFI goes back 40 years earlier with Raoul Walsh’s The Thief of Bagdad, and Diesel’s answer falls somewhere in the middle, and it’s not one anyone was expecting.

Speaking to author Cindy Pearlman for her book, You Gotta See This: More Than 100 of Hollywood’s Best Reveal and Discuss Their Favorite Films, the shiny-headed icon revealed that his action movie timeline began with one of the greatest movies ever made.

“If you think about it, Gone With the Wind really is the first action movie,” he said, like it was the most normal thing in the world. “You have Rhett [Butler] having to go through this tumultuous time of war. Here is a man who has to transport the people he loves, including his woman, Scarlett. They need to move from one bad location to the next during this time of war with the entire city burning all around them… You really felt the heat and the danger.” 

He continued by citing further moments like Vivian Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara being forced to kill a Union soldier as proto-action sequences, noting, “It’s not easy to kill Union soldiers in a hoop skirt”, making it sound like something he does on the regular.

He also praised the film’s ground-breaking technical achievements, which he pointed out took place “way before the days of computer-generated effects”. You’re telling me they didn’t have CGI in 1939! Shut the front door…

I suppose we should establish if Diesel is talking complete nonsense or not, where it sounds like he is, but there might actually be something to this cockamamie idea. It’s clear that most of Diesel’s argument stems from the wartime setting of Gone With the Wind, and while the American Civil War isn’t the sole driving force of the narrative, there are enough scenes that feature it to provide spills and thrills over the near four-hour runtime. As described, Rhett Butler’s quest to flee Atlanta with Scarlett in tow sounds like a scene from a Fast and Furious movie, albeit with just one horsepower instead of 800.

The thing about Gone With the Wind is that it’s so big in every sense of the word that one could probably make a case for it inspiring a whole number of things. While Diesel’s theory isn’t entirely ridiculous, there are probably better candidates for the title of ‘First True Action Movie’.

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