Wizard of Oz (1939)

 

 

“Wizard of Oz” (1939)

 

Introduction

 

1939 is often called the greatest year in the history of film-making, seeing the release of more classic films than any single year. In addition to this one, it featured “Gone with the Wind,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “Stagecoach,” and many others, just too numerous to list.

 

Though this film was based on one of America’s most beloved Children’s Book, and that same book that had been profitably adapted several times in the silent era, it was still was the riskiest of the above listed film-projects because it proved to be the most expensive, yet was reaching out to the smallest market. Hell, it was only two years earlier that Disney's “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937) demonstrated there was a market for feature-length Children’s Movies at all.

 

It had a notoriously troubled production. Three men get Screenwriting credit, Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf, but in fact far more than a dozen contributed at various times, including legends like Irving Brecher, Herbert Fields, Arthur Freed, E. Y. Harburg, Samuel Hoffenstein, Jack Mintz, Sid Silvers, Richard Thorpe, George Cukor and King Vidor.

 

Casting was also headache, with so many of the first considered refusing or being rejected it was a miracle that the final cast of the film was so flawless. W.C. Fields was the first choice to play the Wizard. Gale Sondergaard considered for the Wicked Witch. Buddy Ebsen was cast as the Tin Man, and actually started filming in the role, but during shooting had to be hospitalized because he had been breathing aluminum dust from his makeup which coated his lungs so that soon he could barely breathe, so had to be replaced. Though Judy Garland was the actual film-makers first choice, the guy with the final say on everything, Producer Louis B. Mayer, was desperate to give the role to reigning Child-Star Shirley Temple, and she would’ve gotten the role had he been able to cut a deal with her studio, Twentieth-Century Fox, but Mayer couldn’t, and Garland was back in.

 

Ebson was not the only person nearly killed on set. Margaret Hamilton, whose performance as the Wicked Witch is now legendary, was almost blown to bits in a pyrotechnic screw-up and landed her in the hospital for six-weeks. Also put at risk was 17-year-old Garland, amazingly talented but emotionally troubled, who was victimized by the studio in a way we would now criminally prosecute as child abuse: They fed her uppers in the morning and downers at night to keep her apace with the constantly changing shooting schedule; most biographers trace her life-long battle with substance abuse to this.

 

Then there was the issue of the directors.

 

The first director, Norman Taurog, had to be replaced before filming commenced.

 

Richard Thorpe helmed the film for the first nine days. On the tenth day was when Ebsen was hospitalized and the production was shut down. During the shut-down Producer Mervyn LeRoy reviewed the already shot footage and thought Thorpe was given the actors poor direction, so he demanded Thorpe be replaced.

 

Next came George Cukor, one of the most advantageous of the many staff changes, and who had the most direct impact on Garland’s Oscar-winner performance. Initially, the studio had Garland in a blond wig and heavy, "baby-doll" makeup, and Thorpe had directed her to played Dorothy in an exaggerated fashion. Cukor changed Garland's (also Hamilton's) makeup and costume, and requested Garland "be herself" in front of the camera. This was a bold and expensive move as it meant that pretty much everything had to be re-shot, but with Ebsen being replaced, a lot of it was going to have to be re-shot anyway, which probably made the pill a little easier to swallow. But then Cukor had to leave the production because of a prior commitment to the simultaneously filmed “Gone with the …”

 

Next came Victor Fleming, who helmed most of the production, but then got pulled off to replace Cukor on “Gone with the …”

 

Then, finally, King Vidor finished the project.

 

Flemming was the only one of the above who got screen credit for “The Wizard of …” and won the Oscar.

 

Things did not improve much even with the much touted release, though the film received positive reviews (Frank S. Nugent, "delightful piece of wonder-working which had the youngsters' eyes shining and brought a quietly amused gleam to the wiser ones of the oldsters ... not since Disney's ‘Snow White’ has anything quite so fantastic succeeded half so well") and Oscar attention, it did unimpressively in the box office. During its initial release it earned only $3,017,000, which might have been a success in the late 1930s except you have to subtract from that its more than $2,000,000 budget (the nightmare production is to blame, it was initially supposed to be much cheaper than that).

 

The film’s real success wouldn’t come till after 1956 when TV re-introduced it to the public. It became one of those films, like “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946), “The Sound of Music” (1965), and “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971) whose broadcasts became an annual family tradition. It was by far the most important of the lot, becoming perhaps the most famous film ever made, according to the Library of Congress it’s the single most viewed motion picture in history.

 

Despite becoming a TV staple, “The Wizard of …” never disappeared from the theaters, the glorious color and famous songs begged that experience. Periodically, in addition to the usual revival houses, it gets a major re-release like it being converted to 3D and shown in 318 theaters for 13 days and grossing over $5,200,000. I do suspect that its triumphant return coming at the time that the nation is sluggishly pulled itself out of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression is not a coincidence.

 

The film is filled with wonderful bits of dialogue, more than a dozen lines can be dropped at random in any place, at any time, and pretty much any person in the English-speaking world will know what is being talked about. A few examples:

“Toto, I don’t think were in Kansas anymore.”

“Lions, and tigers, and bears! Oh, my!”

“I’ll get you my pretty, and you little dog too!”

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

 

Critic MaryAnn Johanson put it perfectly, “I can’t imagine my childhood without this movie.”

 

Critic Roger Ebert chose it as one of his Great Films, writing that "'The Wizard of Oz' has a wonderful surface of comedy and music, special effects and excitement, but we still watch it six decades later because its underlying story penetrates straight to the deepest insecurities of childhood, stirs them and then reassures them."

 

Novelist Salman Rushdie acknowledged "The Wizard of Oz was my very first literary influence ... When I first saw The Wizard of Oz it made a writer of me.”

 

Critic Danny Peary, “The effect that this Hollywood classic has had on Americans cannot be overestimated. Its influence on filmmakers alone is profound: it’s often joked that every film since 1939 includes some reference to it, and I’m not so sure this isn’t true.”

 

That is because of the adaptability of the imagery and the themes of this more-familiar-than-any-other film. It’s a malleable and essentially universal cultural short-hand, demonstrated by how the internet is filled with memes referencing this film, and some of which turn the story-outline upside-down in hilarious ways:

 

“Rebellious runaway arrives in an unfamiliar place, kills the first person she meets, then forms a gang with the expressed purpose of killing again.”

 

“Epic winner-take-all battle between three women over a really good-looking pair of shoes.”

 

 

 

Part one:

The plot (or at least most of it) and the spectacle of the film

 

In convincing us that a whole new world was unfolding right before our eyes, this lavish, big-budget movie wisely restrained itself to mostly low-tech, stage-bound effects. It absolutely revels in its artificiality, most of the performances are broad in the style live Children’s Theater, up-till-then a source largely un-milked in cinema. Despite the inventive make-up being flawless, there’s surprisingly little reliance on close-ups. The sound-stages are allowed to look like stages and the backgrounds obvious matt paintings. The Kansas farm in early B&W scenes (actually sepia-toned) establishes the film’s exquisite artificiality; Kansas was a real place, but here highly stylized, preparing the viewer to accept what is offered when impossible events are sold with the simplest and most primitive prop-tricks.

 

The first really marvelous (and in this context I mean “inducing marvel”) is the first fantasy scene, wherein the tiny farm house is picked up and furiously lashed through the air by a powerful tornado without being reduced to splinters. Dorothy, who had tried to run away from home but changed her mind, had been trapped outside the safety of the root cellar, and hid from the storm in her bedroom, where she was knocked momentarily unconscious. Waking in midst of the maelstrom, she runs to the window which frames a chaotic mix of artifacts of the world that she’s leaving behind/being liberated from, whirled and spun the same way she is: a picket fence, a tree, a chicken coop, a cow.

 

The twister itself is a distinctive achievement, this was an era the raging black column of wind was likely an impossible effect to simulate realistically, it would’ve been harder to achieve than the parting of the Red Sea Disney Animators pulled-off seventeen years later in “The Ten Commandments” (1956). The FX team, led by Arnold Gillespie, went for the simple and tactile, bundling and twining lady’s nylon stockings together and the spinning the rope-ish creation very fast. As low-tech and jokey-sounding as it was, it remained the most memorable movie tornado for two more generations. Finally, Director Jan de Bont unleased “Twister” (1996) which employed the most advanced CGI FX, unimaginable in the days before even the most primitive electronic computer had been created.

 

In the stormy sky outside Dorothy’s window, absurdity is piled upon absurdity, with other human victims of the storm’s rage floating past the window and seeming quite calm about it. An old lady knitting calmly in a rocking chair, Dorothy waves timidly; two gentlemen steadily rowing a boat even though there is no water beneath them, they doff their hats; and terrifying Miss Gulch, who doesn’t like Dorothy’s dog Toto, madly pedaling her bicycle. Gulch is played by Hamilton, and before Dorothy’s eyes she’s transformed into the Wicked Witch of the West, black cape a-fluttering and zooming away on her broomstick, thus setting up the whole rest of the story.

 

The house lands gently into one of the most famous moments in movie history: As Dorothy steps out into the new world, that B&W film switches into shockingly vibrant Technicolor. Johanoan again, “The transition from the sepia tones of Dorothy’s Kansas to the Technicolor world of Oz is a reminder of how glorious color film must have been when it was new.”

 

Ebert, “As a child I simply did not notice whether a movie was in color or not. The movies themselves were such an overwhelming mystery that if they wanted to be in black and white, that was their business. It was not until I saw ‘The Wizard of Oz’ for the first time that I consciously noticed B&W versus color, as Dorothy was blown out of Kansas and into Oz.”

 

In 2009, the movie blog, “Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule,” asked participants to name their “favorite moment in three-strip Technicolor.” The majority of the 138 respondents chose some variation of “When Dorothy opens the front door of her transplanted Kansas home and sees Oz for the first time.”

 

As it happened, Dorothy’s house landed on the Witch of the East (that’s not Hamilton Character) and killed her. Dorothy is horrified, but the denizens of this region, a diminutive race of Munchkins, have a different reaction, and begin sing and dance around the increasingly confused girl:

 

“Ding-dong, the witch is dead!

Whicholwitch?

The wicked witch!

Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead!

..morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably, and reliably- dead!”

 

The celebration abruptly ends when Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West arrives and is understandably annoyed at her sister’s abrupt demise, but seemingly more interested in retrieving her sisters’ Ruby Slippers. But the shoes reject her (the Witch’s fingers curl backwards as she tries to touch them, a simple but quite cringe-worthy effect) and magically jump to Dorothy’s feet.

 

Next arriving is Glinda, the Good Witch, played by Billie Burke, who keeps the situation from escalating. After the Wicked Witch departs, the Good Witch directs Dorothy to take Toto and “follow the Yellow Brick Road” to the Emerald City, and appeal for help from the Wizard, played by Frank Morgan.

 

Mick LaSalle declared that the film's "entire [Munchkinland] sequence, from Dorothy's arrival in Oz to her departure on the Yellow Brick Road, has to be one of the greatest in cinema history — a masterpiece of set design, costuming, choreography, music, lyrics, storytelling and sheer imagination.”

 

The Muchkins begin to sing again:

 

“You're off to see the Wizard,

the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

You'll find he is a Whiz of a Wiz if ever a Wiz there was

If ever, oh ever, a Wiz there was,

The Wizard of Oz is one because

Because, because, because, because, because

Because of the wonderful things he does.”

 

The film then becomes about two peril-filled quests, first to “see the Wizard” during which Dorothy picks-up some companions, the Cowardly Lion, played by Bert Lahr, the Tin Man, Jack Haley who replaced Actor Ebson, and the Scarecrow, played by Ray Bolger, and then a second begins when the Wizard sends Dorothy and her new friends to kill the Wicked Witch in order to earn their Hearts’ Desire.

 

Even if one has not looked at the film in decades, there remains sequences burned in one’s mind with incredible vividness. Some, like those above, are remembered with delight, but others, mostly appearing late in the film, evoke the sheerest, darkest, terror.

 

Scariest of all were they army of bluish, bat-winged Flying Monkeys under the orders of the Wicked Witch. In a remarkably brutal scene for a kid’s movie, they swoop out of the sky, kidnap Dorothy and Toto, and literally tear the Scarecrow limb-from-limb (as he’s made of straw, he manages to sew himself back together). This continues fuel the nightmares of young children to this day.

 

Then there’s the climatic confrontation between Dorothy and the Witch:

 

Witch: “And you, my dear, what an unexpected pleasure. It's so kind of you to visit me in my loneliness.”

Dorothy: “What are you gonna do with my dog? Give him back to me.”

Witch: “All in good time, my little pretty. All in good time.”

Dorothy: “Oh please give me back my dog.”

Witch: “Certainly, certainly, when you give me those slippers.”

Dorothy: “But the Good Witch of the North told me not to.”

Witch: “Very well. [To her winged-monkey captain] Throw that basket [containing the dog] in the river and drown him.”

Dorothy: “No, no. Here, you can have your old slippers but give me back Toto.”

Witch: “That's a good little girl. I knew you'd see reason.”

 

Because magic has more backbone than Dorothy, this proves impossible, and the Witch gets a nasty electric shock:

 

Dorothy: "Oh I'm sorry. I didn't do it. Can I still have my dog?"

Witch: "No! … Fool that I am. I should have remembered. Those slippers will never come off, as long as you're alive. But that's not what's worrying me.”

 

Toto shows more spunk and strength of will than Dorothy and escapes. Garland was 17 at the time, just shy of being a woman, but she very convincingly conveys Dorothy’s far-more-vulnerable 11-years. This is problematic though, because in the book, Dorothy was a heroic girl, full spunk not evident in the movie (more on that later).

 

The Witch then displays a huge hourglass with blood-red sand and turns it over, Witch: “Do you see that? That's how much longer you've got to be alive. And it isn't long, my pretty. It isn't long. I can't wait for everything to get those shoes.”

 

Toto, the Cowardly Loin, Tin Man, and Scarecrow, all deserve more credit for the Witch’s defeat than Dorothy. The Witches final words have woven themselves into America’s cultural short hand much like so much of the rest of the film, “Oh! You cursed brat. Look what you've done. I'm melting! Melting! Oh, what a world! What a world! Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness. Oh, I'm gone, I'm gone, I'm going. Oh. Oh.”

 

Following this, Dorothy and her companions return to the Wizard, and the final moral of the story is explicated. It’s fairly straight-forward, but none-the-less has generated some debate, as I will explore in the next section.

 

Part two:

The rest of the plot, and the politics of the film

 

Though the film was more faithful to the book than prior adaptations, the changes that were made were significant, especially the “it was all a dream” conclusion. Each change had significant impact on the any interpretation of the film.

 

The book was first published in 1939, and its Author, L. Frank Baum, denied it had any political allegory, but no one has ever believed him. It’s pretty obvious that his wife’s, Matilda Gage's, radical-for-the-era Feminist politics were woven throughout, and some of this is preserved in the movie: The male Wonderful Wizard isn’t really wonderful nor a Wizard, and the three characters who shape all the action, both motivating the plot and wielding hold all the power, are all women, Dorothy and the Good and Wicked Witches.

 

There was a lot of tone shifting, mostly with Dorothy, who was a Heroic and dynamic in the book, but the film stripped her of almost all of her self-motivated actions. Had it not been for Garland’s enchanting performance, Dorothy would’ve likely have disappeared into the background while she allegedly led the Epic Quest; her male companions and the little dog do way more than she does. When Dorothy finally gets her moment, the climatic confrontation with the Wicked Witch, all she does is sit down and weep.

 

The Good Witch’s role is smaller in the movie, and several other strong women from the boo don’t appear at all. Meanwhile, the Wicked Witch’s role was expanded, and she exercises the most power of any female. 

 

Fairy Tales and Horror films often hinge on the power of Evil appearing to be greater than the power of Good, and with the exception of Vampire films, where a handsome foreign man sexually subjugates all the women he meets, Evil Feminine Power generally has more substantive than Evil Male Power, like how, most of the time, Werewolves are Dumb Brutes, while Manipulation, Possession, Witchcraft, and the willful control of the Powers of Nature belong among the Women’s Mysteries. Evil men generally don’t do much more than kill lots of people but Women Control. In this film the Wicked Witch is essentially a head-of-state, and more convincingly and impressive in that role than any of the males, especially the Wizard, who presumes the similar authority.

 

“Gone With the …” made by the same studio at the same time, also defied conventional sex-roles, even more bluntly. On the other hand, Character Scarlett O’Hara’s emotional dependence on Character Brett Butler and the film’s convoluted Racism has denied that film the same place in the Feminist cannon as “The Wizard of …”

 

Both the book and movie are explicit in their disillusionment with people in power – all Politicians will fool, disappoint, or harm you, and that one is better off trusting in their natural abilities and inner strengths. All corners of the political spectrum can embrace that moral, but what is the ideology underpinning this version of the universal complaint?

 

Well, in 1964 by High-School Economics Teacher named Henry M. Littlefield achieved some fame with a paper arguing that the book was an Allegory of rise of Populist (or People’s Party) Ideology in late 19^th c. Littlefield cited Baum’s Feminism of course, but also made the case that the symbolism of Yellow Brick Road and silver slippers (ruby slippers were another of the film’s changes from the book) represented the heated debate over the move from gold to silver coinage at the time. The puffed-up Wizard of Oz was supposed to be a parody of President William McKinley. Sounded good, but largely debunked by Baum’s Biographers, as Baum was an avid Republican and a supporter of McKinley while the Populists did not embrace the Suffragettes in their 1896 Presidential Platform.

 

The film, on the other hand, is most often interpreted as an allegory of New Deal taking American out of the disaster of the Great Depression into a bold and better world. The crisis was symbolized by the tornado depositing Dorothy’s farmhouse in Munchkin Land. The Tin Man and the Scarecrow are (respectively) embattled factory and farm worker. The Emerald City Universal recognized as being inspired by New York City, the center of the era’s Progressive ideologies and part-time home of the then-President, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt (in NYC, even the Republicans were New Dealers).

 

This view seemed better grounded than Littlefield’s “Baum was a Populist” theory because it was put forward by someone involved with the film, main Song Writer, and uncredited Scriptwriter, E.Y. Harburg. Harburg was both an avid Socialist and enthusiastic supporter of FDR, and he proudly proclaimed that, "The Emerald City was the New Deal.”

 

But there’s a problem here too, because that would make FDR the Wizard, and the Wizard is a fraud.

 

It has to be pointed out that this was an era which neither Writers nor Directors were a film’s guiding force (as demonstrated by how many of each this film had). The guiding light was the Executive Producer and the era’s very hands-on Studio Heads. (Side-bar trivia: Harburg’s most memorable song in the film, "Over the Rainbow," which became Garland’s anthem, very nearly ending up on the cutting room floor.) I don’t know much about Executive Producer Mervyn LeRoy’s Politics, but a close look at the Studio Heads above him seems instructive.

 

Hollywood was the first city in the USA to really extricate itself from the Depression, and did so with less assistance of FDR’s New Deal policies than much of the rest of the country. Jews dominated the highest ranks of the industry, and Liberal and Leftist Jews dominated the creative Intelligentsia, but the Jewish Studio Heads tended to be more Politically Conservative.

 

The Studio Heads enjoyed absolute hegemony over Hollywood’s Civil Authorities that was, to a degree, threatened by FDR’s pro-Labor and pro-Union stances. The Studio Heads also fought hard against American Liberalism’s aggressively anti-Monopolist stance that would, following the Supreme Court siding with the Justice Department in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948), profoundly wounded the studios’ near-God-like power. They were isolationists in opposition to FDR’s internationalism, and never challenged the Nazi’s rise in their films even though many movies were ripe with Political Propaganda on other subjects. These guys even allowed the German Nazis to pre-view and censor American films, even films were only going to be shown only in US, to appease the presumed future rulers of Europe.

 

The year of this film, 1939, would also see the first American Anti-Nazi film by a major studio, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” but that was Warner Brothers, not MGM. It was not until after Goebbels kicked MGM out of Germany the next year that MGM made an anti-Nazi film.

 

Jewish Louis B. Mayer (the Mayer in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) went as far as to invest in, and receive revenues from, German military industries (yes, you read that right, the Jewish guy was a Nazi-war profiteer). Mayer was also an absolute thug when it came to his employees; I don’t know if he was in anyway directly responsible for the pharmaceutical abuses of Actress Garland, but his blackmailing of Actor Clark Gable is now the stuff of Hollywood legend.

 

Mayer also green-lit and lavishly endowed “Gone With the…” (initial budget was much higher than “Oz,” but over-runs would reverse that) which romanticized the Confederate cause, engaged in Slavery apologetics, and was subtly supportive of the Klu Klux Klan. Few fans of this film want to talk about the sequence where almost all the male-lead characters joined with Klansmen on a vigilante attack that indiscriminately murdered the desperately-poor residents of a Racially Integrated shanty town after two of them harassed Character Scarlett on the road.

 

So, what does the plot really say?

 

The Cowardly Loin wants courage, the Tin Man wants a heart, Scarecrow wants a brain, and Dorothy wants to go home. The Wizard, who is a fraud, promises to fulfill all their wishes, but first they must go one a dangerous quest, during which the Lion shows courage, the Tin Man is so sensitive he cries and rusts himself, the Scarecrow proves to be the only character with any common sense, and Dorothy eventually leans she never left home at all, it was all a dream. The Wizard gives them nothing except what was already their birth-right, yet almost gets them killed forcing them to earn it. Just like a Conservative would say FDR did, giving Americans what was already theirs, but first charging them taxes to enjoy it (Federal Income Tax had been with us since WWI, but would be radically expanded and start looking like our current tax-system, only under FDR).

 

Then again, Harburg’s opposing interpretation comes from a guy who both worked on the film and lived the moment. The film was unabashedly optimist at a moment when the nation was pulling itself sluggishly out of its worst financial crisis in living history, and that may carry more weight in interpretation than analytical dissection. The Great Depression was the consequence of greed gone wrong, of letting the self-interest of a few with huge Self-Entitlements overwhelm the Collective Good, and we were rescued from that disaster by an optimism that was also a rediscovery of our collective responsibility to that Collective Good.

 

 

Trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkZcYMy85lY

 

Flying Monkey’s Attack:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SESI19h4wDo

 

“I’m melting!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aopdD9Cu-So