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. What did I think?
It made good sense to me.
The switch from black and white to color would have had a
special resonance in 1939, when the movie was made. Almost all films were still
being made in black and white, and the cumbersome new color cameras came with a
“Technicolor consultant” from the factory, who stood next to the
cinematographer and officiously suggested higher light levels. Shooting in
color might have been indicated because the film was MGM’s response to the huge
success of Disney’s pioneering color animated feature, “Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs” (1937).
If
“Wizard” began in one way and continued in another, that was also the history
of the production. Richard Thorpe, the original director, was fired after 12
days. George Cukor filled in for three days, long enough to tell Judy Garland
to lose the wig and the makeup, and then Victor Fleming took over. When Fleming
went to “Gone With the Wind,” King Vidor did some of the Munchkin sequences,
and the Kansas scenes.
There
were cast changes, too; after Buddy Ebsen, as the Tin Man, had an allergic
reaction to the silvery makeup, he was replaced by Jack Haley. Musical numbers
were recorded and never used. Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West)
was seriously burned when she went up in a puff of smoke. Even Toto was out of
commission for two weeks after being stepped on by a crewmember.
We
study all of these details, I think, because “The Wizard of Oz” fills such a
large space in our imagination. It somehow seems real and important in a way
most movies don’t. Is that because we see it first when we’re young? Or simply
because it is a wonderful movie? Or because it sounds some buried universal
note, some archetype or deeply felt myth?
I
lean toward the third possibility, that the elements in “The Wizard of Oz”
powerfully fill a void that exists inside many children. For kids of a certain
age, home is everything, the center of the world. But over the rainbow, dimly
guessed at, is the wide earth, fascinating and terrifying. There is a deep
fundamental fear that events might conspire to transport the child from the
safety of home and strand him far away in a strange land. And what would he
hope to find there? Why, new friends, to advise and protect him. And Toto, of
course, because children have such a strong symbiotic relationship with their
pets that they assume they would get lost together.
This
deep universal appeal explains why so many different people from many
backgrounds have a compartment of their memory reserved for “The Wizard of Oz.”
Salman Rushdie, growing up in Bombay, remembers that seeing the film at 10
“made a writer of me.” Terry McMillan, as an African-American child in northern
Michigan, “completely identified when no one had time to listen to Dorothy.”
Rushdie wrote that the film’s “driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even
of good adults, and how the weakness of grownups forces children to take
control of their own destinies.” McMillan learned about courage, about “being
afraid but doing whatever it was you set out to do anyway.”
They’re
touching on the key lesson of childhood, which is that someday the child will
not be a child, that home will no longer exist, that adults will be no help
because now the child is an adult and must face the challenges of life alone.
But that you can ask friends to help you. And that even the Wizard of Oz is
only human, and has problems of his own.
“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. As adults, we love it because it reminds us of a
journey we have taken. That is why any adult in control of a child is sooner or
later going to suggest a viewing of “The Wizard of Oz.”
Judy
Garland had, I gather, an unhappy childhood (there are those stories about MGM
quacks shooting her full of speed in the morning and tranquilizers at day’s
end), but she was a luminous performer, already almost17 when she played young
Dorothy. She was important to the movie because she projected vulnerability and
a certain sadness in every tone of her voice. A brassy young child star (a
young Ethel Merman, say) would have been fatal to the material because she
would have approached it with too much bravado. Garland’s whole persona
projected a tremulous uncertainty, a wistfulness. When she hoped that troubles
would melt like lemon drops, you believed she had troubles.
Her
friends on the Yellow Brick Road (the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly
Lion) were projections of every child’s secret fears. Are we real? Are we ugly
and silly? Are we brave enough? In helping them, Dorothy was helping herself,
just as an older child will overcome fears by acting brave before a younger
one.
The
actors (Jack Haley, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr) had all come up through a tradition
of vaudeville and revue comedy, and played the characters with a sublime
unself-consciousness. Maybe it helped that none of them knew they were making a
great movie. They seem relaxed and loose in many scenes, as if the roles were a
lark. L. Frank Baum’s book had been filmed before (Oliver Hardy played the Tin
Man in 1925), and this version, while ambitious, was overshadowed by the
studio’s simultaneous preparation of “Gone With the Wind.” Garland was already
a star when she made “Wizard,” but not a great star–that came in the 1940s,
inspired by “Wizard.”
The
special effects are glorious in that old Hollywood way, in which you don’t even
have to look closely to see where the set ends and the backdrop begins. Modern
special effects show *exactly* how imaginary scenes might look; effects then
showed how we *thought* about them. A bigger Yellow Brick Road would not have
been a better one.
The
movie’s storytelling device of a dream is just precisely obvious enough to
appeal to younger viewers. Dorothy, faced with a crisis (the loss of Toto),
meets the intriguing Professor Marvel (Frank Morgan) on the road. She is
befriended by three farm hands (Bolger, Haley and Lahr). Soon comes the
fearsome tornado. (What frightened me was that you could see individual things
floating by–for months I dreamed circling around and around while seated at
the little desk in my bedroom, looking at classmates being swept mutely past me.)
Then, after the magical transition to color, Dorothy meets the same characters
again, so we know it’s all a dream, but not really.
There
are good and bad adult figures in Oz–the Wicked Witches of the East and West,
the Good Witch Glinda. Dorothy would like help from her friends but needs to
help them instead (“If I Only Had a Brain,” or a heart, or nerve, they sing).
Arriving at last at the Emerald City, they have another dreamlike experience;
almost everyone they meet seems vaguely similar (because they’re all played by
Morgan). The Wizard sends them on a mission to get the Wicked Witch’s broom,
and it is not insignificant that the key to Dorothy’s return to Kansas is the
pair of ruby slippers. Grownup shoes.
The
ending has always seemed poignant to me. Dorothy is back in Kansas, but the
color has drained from the film, and her magical friends are mundane once
again. “The land of Oz wasn’t such a bad place to be stuck in,” decided young
Terry McMillan, discontented with her life in Michigan. “It beat the farm in
Kansas.”
