The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Wizard of Oz (1939/USA/dir. Victor Fleming & King Vidor) appeared at #79 on my original list.
What it is • In early 1939, it was MGM Production #1060, just another job for the many professional actors, technicians, and businessmen involved with its making. That August, released six days before the outbreak of World War II in Europe, it was a lavish family film, touched by vaudevillian comedy, screen-musical, and adventure/fantasy influences - an escapist treat for parents and children, whose half-cost and/or matinee tickets made it difficult for the studio to recoup its considerable investment. The following year, on Leap Day, the film's respectable nominations (including one for Best Picture) yielded two wins (both musical) plus a special award for Judy Garland. In 1949, when Frank Morgan - the wizard himself - passed away, this role was not mentioned in his filmography. Within a decade, broadcast in black-and-white on early television sets - so that even the candy-coated world of Oz took on the dusty shades of the Kansas sequence - the movie finally became the pop culture phenomenon it remains to this day. Since then, it has inspired in-depth psychoanalytic analyses, sync-ups with Pink Floyd records, and endless parodies and references and analogies from editorial cartoons to everyday speech. By sheer coincidence, as I wrote the previous sentence, another person in the room opened a backpack and discovered a Barnes & Noble bag featuring the curled-up feet of the Wicked Witch of the East with text from L. Frank Baum's book (and while the original story remains a classic, it's unlikely it would be remembered nearly so universally today if not for the film version which long ago supplanted the literary images and phrases). The Wizard of Oz is truly inescapable; quite likely it is the most referenced motion picture in history, and certainly it is one of the most viewed. Yet at its core is a simple story, presented straightforwardly for all of its resonance and associations. A young girl, lonely and frustrated in her native Kansas, is apparently transported by a twister to a faraway land, where she must defeat the Wicked Witch of the West, befriend the lovably incomplete Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion, and discover the truth about the fearsome Wizard in Emerald City before learning that "there's no place like home."
Why I like it •
