The Wizard of Oz at 80, Part I (General overview)

Released 25 August 1939, The Wizard of Oz is almost universally considered one of the greatest films of all time. Has anyone not seen this film at least once?! Giving a plot summary seems almost pointless, since everyone’s familiar with it! The Library of Congress says it’s the most-viewed film in history.

The film came out in what many historians and laypeople alike consider Hollywood’s all-time greatest year. So many classic films débuted in 1939. I’d rate 1927 as the next-greatest year for film.

L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has been adapted to the silver screen 23 times since 1908, including films about side characters, parodies, sequels, cartoons, and loose adaptations. The most famous is the seventh version discussed here.

The film is famous for starting in black and white, shifting to Technicolor, and ending in B&W. It shows the two artistic modes of filmmaking can exist side-by-side harmoniously, just as many films in the late Twenties (and in some countries into the Thirties) wonderfully blended both silent and sound storytelling.

Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) and her little dog Toto (a female Cairn Terrier named Terry) live in rural Kansas with Dorothy’s Aunt Em and Uncle Henry. Trouble starts when busybody neighbour Almira Gulch complains Toto bit her and gets an order from the sheriff to have Toto euthanised.

Dorothy, bound and determined to protect her furry buddy, bicycles away with Toto, but he jumps out of the basket and runs back to the farm. Dorothy then decides they’ll run away. While on the run, she meets Prof. Marvel, a fortuneteller who shows her a crystal ball image of Aunt Em dying of heartache.

Dorothy, plagued by guilt, bicycles home just as a tornado hits. The storm cellar is inaccessible, so she runs to her room. Dorothy falls unconscious before the house is lifted up and starts spinning in the air.

Dorothy lands in Munchkinland, an area in the magical Land of Oz. The Munchkins and Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, greet her as a grand conquering hero, since the house landed on the Wicked Witch of the East and killed her. All that can be seen of her are her legs poking out from under the house.

The Wicked Witch of the West presently arrives to claim her sister’s ruby slippers, which Glinda magically transfers onto Dorothy’s feet. Before the Wicked Witch of the West departs in a column of fire, she furiously swears she’ll capture Dorothy, Toto, and the slippers.

Glinda tells Dorothy to follow the yellow brick road which leads to Emerald City, where she can ask the great, mighty, and powerful Wizard of Oz for help in going home.

Along the way, Dorothy meets the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), who longs for a brain; the Tin Woodsman (Jack Haley), who wants a heart; and the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr), who desires courage. Dorothy invites them to come with her to Emerald City so they can have their own wishes fulfilled.

Along the way, the Wicked Witch of the West puts many obstacles in their way, but their progress is never thwarted. When they finally arrive, the Wizard of Oz, who appears as a floating head surrounded by smoke and fire, promises to help them if they bring back the witch’s broomstick.

The danger intensifies when they reach the witch’s castle.

This film has more than earned its reputation as one of the greatest of all time. It’s aged so well, and can be enjoyed by people of all ages, on different levels. I also highly recommend seeing it on the big screen if you can. I saw it at a local indie theatre in March 2017.

Underrated Treasures befitting my dinosaur tastes

Ninja Captain Alex is hosting another of his legendary blogfests, this time giving participants the chance to extoll and expound upon the virtues of some of their underrated favorite things. Click the button to get the full list of participants.

I don’t watch much television, so I won’t be able to cover the fourth section.

Music:

I was turned onto The Small Faces by Senti of my estrogen Who lists back in the early Aughts. (Her real name isn’t Senti, but it was the nickname she went by since she was such a sentimentalist for all things Sixties.)  If you only know from U.S. oldies radio (which has become a joke in the last decade), you’d think The Small Faces had a one-hit wonder with the obscenely overplayed “Itchycoo Park.” Completely false!

Like The Who, they were from London, and like both The Who and The Hollies, they were always far more popular in their native Britain than across the pond. Unlike The Who and The Hollies, though, they only had two Top 100 singles in the U.S., making them even more of a hidden secret. They were active from 1965-68, and had another album released in 1969. They were singer and guitarist Steve Marriott (who sadly died in a house fire in 1991), bassist Ronnie Lane (who sadly died of MS in 1997), drummer Kenney Jones (who later joined The Who after Moonie passed on), and keyboardist Ian McLagan, who replaced Jimmy Winston in 1966. Ian later married Keith Moon’s ex-wife Kim, who sadly passed on in 2006.

They had so many great albums, but I’d recommend their 1968 masterpiece Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake to start out with. Unlike the most overrated album of all time, this is a concept album which actually has an original, consistent concept.

Film:

Instead of going with my usual inclination and recommending a silent film, I’m going to recommend the 1994 Russian film Burnt by the Sun (whose title literally translates as Wearied by the Sun). It’s set during one very eventful day in the Summer of 1936, in the thick of the Great Terror. Oleg Menshikov, one of Russia’s finest actors, plays Mitya, the former beau of the now-married Marusya Kotova. Marusya’s husband, Sergey Petrovich Kotov, is much older than she is, but they seem happy together, and they have a young daughter named Nadya.

Given the historical setting, you kind of know things aren’t going to be happy for long, but I won’t give away anything other than to say the ending is absolutely chilling. Please avoid the horrific sequel Burnt by the Sun 2, set during WWII. Not only does it have many historical inaccuracies, but there’s some serious, serious, serious retconning that completely contradicts everything that happened in the first film, as well as changing young Nadya into a full adult woman.

Literature:

Many people aren’t familiar with La Vita Nuova, Dante Alighieri’s sweet, very personal, underrated 1295 work. It’s a collection of beautiful poetry and autobiographical prose, all about his unrequited love for the beautiful, unattainable Beatrice. Dante walks a very fine line between love and obsession, but he never really crosses that line and behaves inappropriately. He’s man enough to step back and not tell Beatrice, a married woman, about his true feelings. (Dante was also married himself, though you’d never know it from any of his writings!)

Beatrice’s death devastates him, and he almost stops writing in his grief. Later, a beautiful woman visits and inspires him to start writing again, but Dante quickly feels very ashamed he took another woman as his muse, and vows to only write poetry for Beatrice forevermore. At the end, we see the germ of the idea which eventually became his beautiful masterpiece, The Divine Comedy. He wanted to immortalise Beatrice for all time in the best way he knew how.