The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming) (Patreon)

72/100

Umpteenth viewing, last seen sometime in the '80s. Befitting its status as a beloved cultural object (which makes it tricky to perceive as an ordinary film), my primary emotional response, both in memory and then again while actually watching it, can be boiled down to: fondness. It's hard to imagine anyone who was introduced to The Wizard of Oz as a small child not finding it immensely comforting...to an extent, in my own case, that perhaps precludes genuine passion. My very favorite movies are like lovers; this one's more like my mom. But I do love Mom, and it was wonderful to experience this again. Rather than attempt to "review" it, I'll just toss out a few bullet-point observations. 

• Sepiatone! I'm old enough, and it's been long enough, that all of my previous viewings, whether on network TV or VHS, improperly depicted the Kansas sequences in conventional monochrome. I'd since seen clips, of course—they restored the sepiatone way back in 1989 (plus I worked at a video store in the early '90s, and we surely had it on the monitors now and then)—but actually watching the entire film as it was designed made a significant difference. That brownness connotes thematically appropriate warmth that's absent from b&w, and it also arguably makes for a more dramatic contrast when Dorothy opens the door and steps into Technicolor Oz (a moment that still gets me weepy—probably more so now, because I know that it was accomplished via clever practical effects rather than just by having someone digitally remove the color in post). 

(I once inadvertently ruined that moment for some nieces, informing them in my best pompous-cinephile manner that Actually no, that wasn't the first time audiences of the era had ever seen color onscreen. Which is of course true—out of curiosity, I just now looked it up; Wizard of Oz was the 31st three-strip Technicolor feature—but the thought of audiences sitting down with no awareness of what was coming and being utterly transported is so irresistible that I regret not letting them keep believing it for a while.)

• Speaking of the sepiatone warmth being thematically appropriate, that's another thing holding me back from true ardor. "There's no place like home" just doesn't resonate for me—I could not wait to move 3000 miles across the country, and would still be living today in the Oz that is NYC, had the global economy not crashed in 2007–08. It of course helps that the new friends Dorothy leaves behind are all imaginary versions of people at the farm, and that she's so eager to return. Still, though, not my idea of a happy ending.

• Garland's just miraculous. She's 16 playing what's really meant to be more like 12, and tasked with making guileless sincerity compelling, which is damn close to impossible. They considered casting Shirley Temple, so just imagine what that Dorothy would've been like. Or almost any other Dorothy, really. Garland wholly commits to the script's emotional simplicity, putting no spin whatsoever on it, and mows down my cynical defenses. A nothing exchange like the Scarecrow asking "How do you do?" and Dorothy replying "Very well, thank you" somehow manages to trigger loving and protective feelings for her. It's amazing, and that's without even addressing Garland's heartfelt rendition of "Over the Rainbow," which uncredited Kansas director King Vidor wisely stages as essentially a single shot during which she keeps moving around without ever getting more than about five feet from where she started. (There's one cutaway to Toto and another to the sun peering through clouds, but it looks to me as if those interrupt an unbroken performance.)

• That is one exceptionally well-trained dog, by the way, hitting its mark perfectly during the number and then holding for the rest of it, plus throwing in a paw shake. Apparently they had trouble getting it to follow everyone else down the yellow brick road, but you'd never guess, watching the movie, that Toto isn't always where he's supposed to be, even in lengthy wide shots. (Related aside: I had trouble concentrating throughout the entire Tin Man sequence, because my eye kept drifting to the never-explained crane or whatever it is that's just sort of wandering around in the background. Which I'm aware of only because people somehow once saw its final, very distant appearance, unfolding its wings, as a Munchkin committing suicide on-camera, ostensibly unnoticed by everyone.)

• Hunk, Hickory and Zeke aren't given much time to establish their personalities before Dorothy reimagines them, which is probably fine; I don't know that the film would benefit from spending more pre-twister time in Kansas. That's Ed, the Wizard's foreshadowing by way of Professor Marvel arguably provides more of a punch than anything else: Not only does he send Dorothy home, he concocts a benign lie to motivate her, demonstrating that even a con man can sometimes be a purveyor of goodness. Basically, the story's complete in 15 minutes, and then we just watch it replayed as myth. Just like Tropical Malady. 

• I could live without much of Munchkinland, honestly. Too many mini-songs in sped-up chipmunk voices. Also those half-children, half-Dick-Tracy-villains in the Lollipop Guild creep me right out. Still spend a lot of that stretch waiting for Dorothy to ease on down.

• Margaret Hamilton might be more upsetting as Miss Gulch than as the Wicked Witch. Few things more traumatic for a kid than the thought of someone taking their pet away to be killed. And now that I've learned screenwriting structure, gotta say the movie does sort of have a Witch Problem, in that she spends most of it as a literally remote threat (and never follows through on her threats when she's actually present—Glinda notes that she has no power in Munchkinland, but it's unclear to me where that impotence ends). Wizard of Oz even partially invents the Bond-style "I'm gonna leave them alone and not witness them dying, just assume it all went to plan" method of diabolical execution—while the WWW doesn't actually set up an unnecessarily slow-moving death mechanism, she does, for no apparent reason, leave Dorothy alone with an hourglass, vowing to kill her when the last red sand grain has fallen. Look, I have a gun, in my room, you give me five seconds...

•  "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" has to rank fairly high on the list of movie lines that became much more useful and consequential and pervasive than the individual who wrote them (it wasn't Baum) could ever possibly have guessed. Casually inventing a paradigm.