 The Wizard of Oz (1939) Those that don't like The Wizard of Oz may be victims of its overexposure throughout the last 60 years, but personally I don't see what's not to like about a movie this beautiful and full of hope. It's a rare movie that garners this much adulation and hype, and a rarer one that deserves it. The cast is wonderful, the performances magnificent, the set design incredible, and the message enduringly appealing. The Wizard of Oz is as good as it gets. Never mind As Good as It Gets, that's a bunch of trash. Maybe one day I'll even see it. It was wonderful seeing The Wizard of Oz on the big screen. In the theater, the colors are so much more vibrant, the songs are much more direct, and the overall scope of the picture is so much grander. The shock of the Technicolor when Dorothy opens the door and steps out into Munchkinland is impressive whether you've seen the movie once before or 50. The aspect of the film I loved most upon seeing it again was the score, composed by Harold Arlen with lyrics by E.Y. Harburg – ranging from the sublime ("Over the Rainbow" and the whole Munchkin suite of songs) to the very silly ("Lions and Tigers and Bears," about as flaky an idea for a song as you can get, yet so catchy). Performance-wise, I loved seeing Bert Lahr's over-the-top Lion – hilarious and poignant, and much better than I previously held his performance to be. Ray Bolger's Scarecrow is visually exciting, perfectly supple and dynamic, but also possessing sincere emotional depth. Jack Haley's Tin Man is about as flaming a character as the 30s had to offer, and a masterfully controlled physical performance as well. Praising Judy Garland is probably utterly redundant, but her performance is probably the single greatest achievement in the history of child acting, with shout-outs to Claire Danes for her sole appearance on "Law & Order," and Peter Billingsley in A Christmas Story. Utterly winning, Judy makes you absolutely care for and identify with this confused girl from Kansas and her mangy dog, too. You needn't read anything into Dorothy related to Garland's personal suffering, the performance stands tall on its own. Perfect. Supporting roles from Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch and Frank Morgan as the Wizard are letter-perfect as well, highly comic, yet scary and charming, respectively. Even imagining W.C. Fields as the Wizard (that would have
been pretty great) doesn't quite match Morgan's stuttering hilarity in
the role. (Those who wish to see footage of W.C. Fields in the part are
directed to (Those who wish to travel to 2027 now, please
use the link at Virtually every line and every image in this movie is indelible, something you can say for pitifully few films outside of the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings trilogies. Few films are as comforting. I've read some critics who find the film menacing, but I don't see that. Even the talking trees are pretty comical (although the flying monkeys are pretty damn weird). The movie is inspiring, and it's not hard to see why so many people regard it as their all-time favorite. The significance to gay iconography is impossible not to see (even my 5-year-old niece was commenting on the symbolic "coming out" into Munchkinland and the creation of a surrogate family—oh, okay, I don't have a 5-year-old niece, it was my 14-year-old houseboy). This is a deep film that has only gained more depth with the successive generations who have infused it with more and more layers of meaning. Considering the original book had more to do with carpetbaggers than individuality and the sense of "home" (am I remembering my high school history right?), it's a great testament to the film that it means so much to so many people. Apparently the carpetbaggers still notoriously hate the film, though. 🤷 I'll stop here before I'm tempted to list the top 15 best scenes, or best lines, or go into trivia, or defamation of the midgets who were in the film. I'm grateful to have had the chance to see The Wizard of Oz the way it was originally seen: as a beautiful evening's respite from worrying about the recent Depression and the coming Second World War.
Review by La Fée |
