95) The Wizard of Oz

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Director: Victor Fleming

Starring: Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, Margaret Hamilton, Billie Burke, The Singer Midgets


Kate and I went to see Wicked last night for the second time. We saw it about a year ago and with its Sydney season in its final weeks we thought we should catch it once more before it disappears. It's brilliant. I thoroughly recommend it to any who haven't seen it. I came home inspired to have another look at the original Wizard of Oz, a film I haven't seen in at least a dozen years.

A young farm girl from Kansas named Dorothy (Garland) finds herself transported to the magical land of Oz when her house is swept up in a twister. Her only way to get home is to make her way to the Emerald City and ask for help from the Wizard (Morgan). On her journey along the yellow brick road she meets up with a Scarecrow in need of a brain (Bolger), a Tim Man in need of a heart (Haley) and a Lion in need of some courage (Lahr), all of whom join her on her journey.

What makes The Wizard of Oz such a classic is that it has this elegant simplicity without being emotionally shallow. If you were to read the screenplay for the film it would almost read like a primary school play, not surprisingly Best Screenplay was not among it's seven Oscar nominations. The dialogue, conversations and interactions between characters are really basic. The scenes are also quite simple. The sequence of events that occur in Oz is really straightforward, lacking any real twists and turns in the plot. Yet despite this overall simplicity of the film, there is an emotional resonance which comes through. The story manages to tap into emotions connected with the experience of growing up, the venturing out from home, the longing to return, the feelings of not being smart enough, emotionally strong enough or brave enough. It really is amazing the way that such a simple and simply told story can really draw out an emotional response. Credit for that should go to Judy Garland. She really gives the film its emotional centre. There is a great vulnerability to her performance when so many other child actors could too easily have slipped into overly hammy vaudeville mode to match their surroundings.

While I compare her to other child actors, she was sixteen or seventeen at the time so was more of a young lady. So much so that Fleming ordered that her breasts be taped down to make her appear younger. When George Lucas made the same demand of Carrie Fisher in Star Wars she would later joke, "There's no jiggling in the Empire." Evidently there is no jiggling in Oz either.

If you are compiling a list of great moments in the history of cinema you would have to include the moment when Dorothy steps out of her house into Oz and in the process steps out of black and white and into the wonderful world of Technicolor. The brightness and vibrancy of the colour really hits you and despite the fact that there is nothing natural looking about Oz, you are very obviously looking at a sound stage, the transition from browny-grey into bright colour is still breathtaking.

If you want an alternative way of reading the narrative to The Wizard of Oz, you can't go past a famous plot synopsis that TV reviewer Rick Polito published in his column in the Marin Independent Journal. His summary of The Wizard of Oz read as follows: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.” Classic!

Both times that I saw Wicked one of the main questions that I left with was why were the shoes given to the Witches sister silver when everyone knows that they are meant to be red. They are, after all, called the ruby slippers. However, I have since discovered that in L. Frank Baum's original book they were silver. The origin of the famous ruby slippers is the film. It was for the movie that they were switched from silver to red, because red looked more dazzling in Technicolor.

It is a sign of a different time when you look down the credits list and see that the munchkins were played by 'The Singer Midgets', a vaudeville group comprised of little people and named after their founder Leo Singer. When the credits came up, I thought the fact that they were called the Singer Midgets was bad enough, but when I found out that the Singer wasn't because they sang, but rather the name of the owner of the group, that was just a bit off.

The Wizard of Oz is a beautifully simple film which is one of the bona fide classics, not because it is one of the best films ever made, but because it contains so many memorable scenes, lines, images, characters and songs. Even if you've managed to live your entire life so far without having seen The Wizard of Oz I guarantee if you were to sit down and watch it it would feel strangely familiar simply due to the enormous impact it has had on popular culture.