I try to start all of these off with a
plot summary. Even if it's a well-known film, I feel that leaving a
plot summary out would hurt the feeling of continuity between posts.
That being said though, this time, I just can't do it. Attempting to
summarize the plot of The Wizard of Oz would be not only
redundant, but insulting to the reader.
That said, this movie probably means a
lot less to me than it does to most people. While I have seen it
multiple times, I'm fairly certain I saw the 90s cartoon long before
I saw the movie. I remember a period in my life when that show
represented my understanding of The Wizard of Oz, and my
default version of the song was “We're off to save the
Wizard.”
For that reason, along with the fact
that it's been years since I've watched either version, I look on
this movie with fairly fresh eyes. I really expected to have to look
hard to find the fear. I was ready to try hard to put myself into
the perspective of a small child to try to understand how anyone
could possibly find it scary... and amazingly, I didn't have to. The
witch (Margaret Hamilton) and the flying monkeys manage to be scary,
even for an adult.
Comparing movies to dreams is something
that gets thrown around in film criticism a lot. It seems to be code
for “I like this film, despite it making no logical sense, so I'm
going to pretend it's like a dream.” For this film, though, I can
see the comparison as valid. The idea of an evil witch telling you
that you'll be killed when an hourglass runs out is exactly like
something that would happen to me in a nightmare. She has no logical
reason to give Dorothy any amount of time to live, but she does it
anyway to create a sense of dread. The story runs on emotion rather
than logic.
The flying monkeys, meanwhile, seem
surprisingly realistic for a film made in the 1930s. In fact, many
of the effects, the costumes not withstanding, are surprisingly not
dated. I can only attribute this to the use of practical effects in
an era long before the notion of a computer capable of generating a
still image, let alone a space battle, had even been dreamed of.
There's an ongoing debate about how old
Dorothy (Judy Garland) is supposed to have been in this adaptation,
with many claiming that the 16-year-old Garland was playing a 12 or
even 8-year-old. Shirley Temple, who would have been 11 at the time
of the film's release, had apparently been considered for the role.
Personally, I prefer to think of Dorothy as Garland's age. Granted,
she would be an incredibly naïve 16-year-old, assuming that the
Wizard (Frank Morgan) can arbitrarily do anything without any rhyme
or reason to his powers, but I find it hard to believe that a totally
innocent 12-year-old from Kansas would be able to adapt to the
situation she was in, or even fully comprehend it.
While it doesn't directly relate to the
fear aspects of the movie, I would like to note that I approve of the
ending. For anyone unaware, the idea of Oz being a dream was forced
on the film by studio executives who thought that 1939 audiences
couldn't deal with the idea of a literal fantasy land. Many people
today feel that this was a misstep. I, on the other hand, feel that
making it a literal place close enough to Kansas to travel to by
Tornado would have simply been too idiotic to accept. Maybe I'm too
logical, especially after praising the movie for running on emotion
over logic, but that would have just bugged me. Fantasy lands are
traveled to by portal, or concealed by magic. You don't get to them
by physical movement without supernatural help!
Recommending this film would be like
recommending oxygen: There's no way that you've lived long enough to
be literate, and not seen it. So, why bother?
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