Off to see the Wizard

[shewhomust]

I was convinced I'd seen The Wizard of Oz before - in the cinema, what's more. But durham_rambler says he has never seen it, and there was so much in it I didn't recognise, perhaps I haven't either. How very strange. And I know I've never read the book (though I'm pretty sure there's a copy in one of the piles, somewhere: I wonder if I could find it?).

Some miscellaneous thoughts about The Wizard of Oz:

• The screenplay is by Noel Langley.


• Despite living with her aunt and uncle, Dorothy isn't a poor little orphan who nobody loves: clearly she is the child indulged by everybody on the farm. This is exaggerated in the early scenes by the fact that Judy Garland is barely a child at all: she's visibly an adolescent, which makes it odd that she can't see why people are too busy to deal with her concerns Right Now.


• I wonder if the doubling of characters between Kansas and Oz is present in the book, or something introduced by the screen adaptation?


• The Wicked Witch of the West is a great part - as villains often are - and Margaret Hamilton shows every sign of having fun with it. But she has a wonderful face - never less than interesting, and sometimes surprisinly beautiful.


• Glinda, the Good Witch, is unbelievably irritating.


• The Lion shows signs of genuine cowardice (though even he has enough courage to come out of the forest and threaten passers-by - I suppose he wouldn't have much part in the story if he didn't. But the Scarecrow is perfectly intelligent from the start, and the Tin Man verges on the sentimental (not to say "camp"): he could probably do with less heart, not more. I suppose it's a sign of intelligence, to realise that you aren't as intelligent as you'd like to be (and likewise, mutatis mutandis, for the heart).


• The Wicked Witch's colour is red: she appears in a puff of red smoke, she tries to waylay the travellers in a field of red poppies, she measures out Dorothy's life with an hourglass whose red glittering sands exactly match the ruby slippers: obviously the slippers are hers too.


• The cabby who drives the travellers into the Emerald City, with his horse of a different colour, has the same cockney accent as Dick van Dyke.


• I found the Emeral City very sinister, with Dorothy and co. being swept off to a beauty parlour on arrival, while the locals sing about how they laugh all the time in the merry old land of Oz (I've just realised that what this was reminding me of was The Silver Chair, and the warm welcome given to Jill, Eustace and Puddleglum by the giants)


• The winged monkeys were good, but the Witch's guards have the best uniform ever: I want a coat like that.


• And the moral of the story is, be content with what you have, because you aren't going to get anything else. Don't start me on how wrong that is.

A morning well spent.

Comments

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

Yes, the character-doubling is a movie thing, and she was not at all abandoned or overlooked in the movie. (In the book, Kansas is considerably less appealing.) The cabby is Frank Morgan, who played the Wizard (and also the doorman and guard).

But I disagree about Dorothy being an adolescent. Garland certainly was, but I watched this movie religiously, every single chance I got, growing up (pre-VCRs, but I was in NYC which mean that there were a lot of revival houses) and I never doubted for an instant that she was a little girl like me. I would have put her at 7 or 8 when I was a kid. I saw that she was tall, but that reallyy didn't affect my understanding of the character. The way she talked, her character, her feeling of being overlooked, the way the other characters treated her--it was very clear to me that she was a child. (At the time I hadn't read the book.)

As to the moral...I don't know. When I was a child, it was completely swamped by the fact that Oz clearly rocked all over Kansas. I mean, nobody I know ever saw that movie and came away not wanting to go to Oz, so while I agree that that's the explicit moral, I think it's a very ineffectual one, sort of in the way the crazy transgressions and wildness of 18th-century romances are tied up at the end with a marriage. The moral doesn't really contain or undo the fantasy that came before it. Now that I'm an adult, I find the ending more poignant than anything else, because of course it's not true. It's the relief of a child at being home again, the typical hyperbole that you believe with all your heart at the time you say it, but which can't ever really be true.

I took lessons from the movie, I think, but not necessarily the ones referenced above. There's something there about friendship, and cleverness, and adventure, and powerful adults.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

But I disagree about Dorothy being an adolescent...

Sorry, I may have over-compressed that argument: my point was that I was tending to misread Dorothy, because Garland is really too old for the part as written. She's also wonderful, and I wouldn't have wanted her not to play that part, but her behaviour and her appearance are at odds.

(I wonder if part of what we are talking about is the place of The Wizard of Oz in the canon? I would say that in the UK, the film is "an early Judy Garland musical" rather than the adaptation of a children's classic).

As you say, this affects how you see the ending, and I have been reconsidering that.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

"I wonder if part of what we are talking about is the place of The Wizard of Oz in the canon? I would say that in the UK, the film is "an early Judy Garland musical" rather than the adaptation of a children's classic."

Ooh, that's interesting. I didn't know that; I wonder if it has to do with the fact that when the movie was first released, British censors considered the WW of the W to be so frightening that they assigned it an "A" rating, which made it impossible to see the movie without an adult. I'd say that in the US, it's not even considered an adaption of a children's classic; rather it's considered the children's classic itself. I read all the Oz books except for Wizard when I was a child, and I sort of considered the books and the movie to be taking place in entirely separate fantasy worlds, with two different Dorothys. Sort of, because I also thought of them as the same. It's hard to explain, really.