Year of Release: 1939Country of Origin: USA
Director: Victor Fleming
Cast: Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, Billie Burke
Plot outline: A Kansas farm girl dreams herself into a magical land where she must fight a wicked witch to escape (IMDb).
The Wizard of Oz is a lavish, beautiful movie. The painted backdrops are stunning. The sets are vibrant and colourful. The Emerald City is a marvelous Art Deco wonder, and the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West is a dark, forbidding place guarded by green faced, chanting halberdiers and colourfully uniformed flying monkeys. While the narrative is engaging in its own right, its appeal is greatly enhanced by the movie's visual beauty, which so captivates the viewers that they are drawn into the movie's unique world and are readily excited and fascinated by the events depicted. The movie does, however, have a number of faults. Both the script and the acting are annoyingly smarmy and falsely adorable. From the cute turns of phrase frequently employed to the affected, syrupy mannerisms adopted by the actors, the movie wallows in its own mawkishness. The Munchkins, in particular, are grating. They speak in excruciating, artificially high pitched voices and ooze saccharine from every pore on their waddling frames. Dorothy's companions are only marginally less irritating. While they are visually well conceived, their forced cuteness quickly grows tiresome. Although the movie's constant adorableness is certainly its most severe problem, the movie is further weakened by its distracting conceit that the events depicted as occurring in Oz were a dream. Even for a child, this particular element is forced, silly, and trite. To make matters worse, the director has used this device to imbue the movie's concluding scene with a false sentimentality that can leave the viewers with a foul, sugary aftertaste. Visually enthralling and narratively engaging, The Wizard of Oz could easily have been a truly great movie, but it is so self consciously sweet that it is frequently unpalatable. (KA)
My judgement: *** out of 4 stars
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