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

[fjm.livejournal.com]

And now you need to read,
Baum's The Wizard of Oz
Ryman's Was
Gregory Maguire's Wicked

in that order.

And then we can discuss all of the above because I am *not* giving you any spoilers. Unusually, this cluster of book, homage, and meta-critique are a really exciting trinity, I've been longing to teach a seminar/facilitate a discussion called Oz, Was, Wicked ever since I read the Maguire book.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

The character-doubling is a movie thing. In the books Dorothy is both less indulged and more pragmatic: her main character dilemma for the first six books is that she'll go off to Oz, be useful, needed, indulged, have a wonderful time, but her sense of duty and love always drives her back to Kansas, because her aunt and uncle (who are much more elderly) honestly can't run the farm without her. (Dorothy is in fact too Dutiful and Saintly to be believable, really, and one thing I do like about the movie is that she is far less so.)

I highly recommend the second and much later movie, Return to Oz, starring Fairuza Balk, in which Dorothy upon her return is quite rationally sent to an asylum for treatment, and through some kind of cause or effect Oz itself becomes a much darker place-- while the movie manages to stay fairly true to the plot of the second book anyway.

[sovay]

Glinda, the Good Witch, is unbelievably irritating.

I just saw Billie Burke in Dinner at Eight (1933), where she's perfect for the role of a dizzy socialite.

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).

Precisely because it takes him forever to recognize that he's intelligent, and not just the headful of straw he's always assumed himself to be, the Scarecrow has always been a character that has resonated with me.

[profane-stencil.livejournal.com]

I couldn't estimate how many times I saw the film on tv as a child. (The Wizard of Oz is one of a very few shared experiences that unite Americans as a culture, transcending barriers of age, locale, politics, religion, and so on. We all see it when we are young, and it leaves an indelible mark on our imaginations. We can hardly imagine not knowing it. It ranks among our earliest and most defining experiences of wonder and of fear, of fairy-tale joys and terrors, of the lure of the exotic and the comfort of home.)

The moral is abhorrent. However, I don't think too many people are all that aware of the message. (Seen plainly, The Wizard of Oz is a symbolic story of how America’s four major sociological elements can progress if and only if they adopt Ben Franklin’s aphorisms over the lessons of the Bible. “God helps those who help themselves” is the Aesopean moral to the story, and to get there, we follow the adventures of Industry (the Tin Man), Agriculture (the Scarecrow), Military (the Lion), and Citizenry (Dorothy) as they make economic progress down a street backed by the gold standard, to reach the city of Ounce (oz.) which is green like money, wherein they find and then expose the fraudulent myths of Religion (The Great Oz)...) In my experience, people focus on the black-&-white and color transitions, and the Munchkins, and quoting the Wicked Witch, etc. I can at least hope that no one takes any lessons from it.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

I grew up watching The Wizard of Oz every year when it was presented on tv. I loved it, except for the unbelievably irritating bit at the end where she has to go home and it becomes obvious it was "just a dream" (long before Dallas). The winged monkeys are the best. And my sister could laugh just like Glinda.

The book is quite different and worth reading. As a child, I read several of the subsequent Oz books and enjoyed them.

I also liked the Fairuza Balk movie, an adaptation of Ozma of Oz with some of the Land of Oz thrown in (can't quite remember).


I ought to read Ryman and Maguire. Hmm.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

That's a plan!

In fact, I've already read Was, because, you know, Geoff Ryman... but your sequence makes much more sense.

And that's a brilliant sequence of titles.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Thank you for both of those.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Billie Burke looked familiar - and it's no criticism of her, it's a thankless role.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Two good links - thank you.

I knew that Oz has a major place in the US canon, and was quite surprised that the friends I saw it with didn't know that, saw it as a curiosity and a byway...

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Well, I could have sworn I'd seen the film before - I can't think why I haven't. But clearly I'm going to have to get my act together and read the book.

[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.

[valydiarosada.livejournal.com]

Back when Geof Ryman was writing Was, he gave a number of talks at SF Conventions about the Wizard of Oz - both the book and the film. Some snippets I remember from back then (and we are talking the 1980s here):

- Frank L Baum's story was not meant to frighten children at all
- The scene where Dorothy looks into the crystal and sees a worried Aunt Em turn into the Wicked Witch of the West is genuinely scary scene
- The actor who played the Wizard searched the second-hand clothes shops until he found exactly the right battered jacket for the character. He was going through an inside pocket one day, when he found a name tag sewn inside. The name was Frank L Baum. Apparently fans used to gather outside Baum's house, and in the evening he would emerge, wearing his "reading jacket" and read to them from his books. And the actor had quite by chance bought this "reading jacket". The studio suppressed the story because they thought no-one would believe it.
- The special effect where the Wicked Witch disappears in a burst of flame when wrong and the actress landed up in hospital with serious burns. When she eventually returned to work, the green make-up for the Witch irritated the new skin very badly causing real pain, so that whenever the Witch looks as if she's on the point of screaming in agony, it's because the actress is only just stopping herself from doing so.

Geof Ryman's a good speaker.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

Yes, absolutely right. Hamilton wasn't having much fun--she was in too much pain. After the fire disaster, she refused to do the scene when the witch takes off on her broomstick (not only was she concerned for her own safety, but she was a single mother at the time, and if she couldn't work...). Her stand-in did it--and the broomstick blew up and broke the stand-in's leg.

I don't think it's just the crystal ball scene--the whole WWW is absolutely terrifying, nightmarish. I was terrorized by her as a child and yet I couldn't get enough of her, either. It was a classic attraction-repulsion, and that was entirely a creation of the movie. The witch in the book was very much a comical figure, who couldn't pose any threat to Dorothy because of the magic kiss of Glinda.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Geof Ryman's a good speaker.

No surprise there - and thanks for sharing that memory!

[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.