Frankly, My Dear, Do You Need a Comma After ‘Frankly’?

The phrase “Frankly, my dear,” begins one of the most memorable movie lines. Rhett Butler (played by Clark Gable), said those three words to start his final, parting line to Scarlett O’Hara (played by Vivien Leigh) in the 1939 movie “Gone with the Wind.” Even if you’ve never seen that movie, you’ve likely heard that movie line. It created quite a stir because it ended with profanity that was frowned upon onscreen at the time, even though the movie producer was granted an exception by the Hays Office to use it. Eventually, that controversy died down, but another controversy arose concerning that line that has nothing to do with profanity and everything to do with punctuation.

Frankly, my dear...

In the book “Gone with the Wind,” the word “frankly” is absent from that iconic line spoken by Rhett to Scarlett. The line just begins with “My dear,” followed by a comma. Movie producer David Selznick added “Frankly,” followed by a comma, and he was insistent about that, as can be seen in his list of possible, less-offensive ways to end the line. Each suggestion that he considered began with “Frankly, my dear,” with a comma after “Frankly” and after “dear.”  For example, one of those suggestions was for Rhett to say, “Frankly, my dear, it is of no consequence,” which might be what some of you are thinking about this article’s focus on the commas in that line. 

Is it of any consequence whether or not “frankly” is followed by a comma? It was to William Safire, a writer for The New York Times. In 1994, when CBS produced its spinoff “Scarlett” series, one of its advertisements had the beginning of that iconic “Gone with the Wind” movie line captioned onscreen as “Frankly my dear,” with no comma after “Frankly.” That prompted Safire to give CBS his annual Bloopie Award because of the missing punctuation. 

Adverbs at the beginning of a sentence

But, wait, an adverb at the beginning of a sentence doesn’t have to have a comma, right? That’s correct. 

The word “frankly” is an adverb and when used at the beginning of a sentence, it is called a sentence adverb. Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs, but ...

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