1939; directed by Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Mervyn LeRoy, Norman Taurog, Richard Thorpe and King Vidor; adapted by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf; 98 mins
If you love The Wizard of Oz, this review may be disappointing to you. Not massively so, I hasten to add. It’d be foolish to say this is a bad film at all but it’s one of those canonical classics in which – leaving aside whether or not it’s aimed at me and all the non-sequiturs that go along with that – it’s not for me.
Dorothy is a humble farm girl in Kansas, upset because their horrible neighbour, Miss Gulch, threatens to have her beloved dog, Toto, put down. She decides to take him and run away. Soon, however, she meets a kindly fortune teller who convinces her to go back and look after her sick Aunty Em. She arrives back in the farmhouse in time for a terrible tornado to whisk it into the air, landing in a magical land called Oz! With help from Glinda, the Good Witch of the North and watching out for The Wicked Witch of the West, Dorothy follows the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, there to meet the Wizard who can send her home.
On the way, she meets… well, you know. That was hard, trying to write a brisk set-up to that movie and emphasises, like so many old movies, just how much incident they pack into an hour and a half. It’s well over an hour before they go to the Wicked Witch’s castle and that entire odyssey gets set-up, fought and finished. The storytelling skills back then were undoubtedly top class (these recent Disney remakes perfectly demonstrate how you can cram less content into bigger runtimes).
Judy Garland is rightly iconic as Dorothy, there’s no denying. She brings so much gusto and genuine heart and soul to this studio head’s golden calf that most of the emotional weight is down to her. With all due respect to the cast, who’re all playing their hearts out, the greatest performance is Terry as Toto! How well trained was he?! Did they have him locked up in a shed with all those Russian ballet dancers? Incredible!
There is so much to admire but honestly, plenty left me cold. A couple of the songs drag and the comedy performances are of a type that thankfully has died out. The Munchkin section was too much. That whole shebang looks like a mould farm run amok in Liberace’s pants. Gaudy is not the word. Otherwise, there’ll be no complaining about the production design – or indeed, the effects – here. It was made in 1939 and I’d rather obvious sets being charming and magical than photorealism that clearly isn’t real.
Technically, The Wizard of Oz is hugely impressive and still holds up for the most part. Plus, whereas the recent 1917 was technically very accomplished but failed on the emotional front, this movie is clearly hitting all the right beats and accomplishing them very well. If I were a child in the 1930s, my mind would be well and truly blown by what I saw. It’s not for me.
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