The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Now that school is out, I've been trying to get a few projects together to keep myself busy. One of them will be actually keeping this blog updated, and I've found that giving it a more clear trajectory will make things easier and more fun. In addition to the occasional film review or special feature, I'm attempting to shoehorn in this experiment of sorts.

I've talked about the National Film Registry before. It's a pretty fascinating list. Basically, the only requirement to make the list is that the film must be at least 10 years old, and culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

Here's their homepage.

So in reviewing these films (and there are 650 of them), this blog might last forever, or until I decide to give up.

Let's begin this futile endeavor.

Let me start by saying that all the films on the list are American. So the "significance" is in regards to our country and culture. So I'll try to offer an explanation as to why it's on the list.

But let's just dive in...

The list began in 1989, so I'll start with that group. I'll do each year in reverse alphabetical order just cuz. The first film, then, is The Wizard of Oz.

Original poster, way cooler than the new ones.

The Movie
To spare you all a nostalgic and boring essay on how awesome the film is, I'll just try to sum it up in my own way. 

The Wizard of Oz is about a white trash family who sic their dog on old ladies and abandon their schizophrenic daughter during a tornado after some short lived, casual searching. The daughter then has a fever dream after being hit on the head by a window frame like a wimpy dumbass. 

This hopeless schizoid, Dorothy,  had run away from home after this huge c-word named Ms. Gulch steals her dog for the purposes of murdering it in cold blood after it bit her. 

Everyone says the Wicked Witch is the bad guy in this movie, but really it's Miss Gulch. Fuck her.

I can forgive the Wicked Witch. She's feared and reviled just for being green and ugly and then some random girl kills her sister and both the girl and the incredibly pompous Glinda refuse to give her the sister's only heirloom. Miss Gulch has absolutely no motivation to be a twat. She always pissed me off, even as a little kid. 

Anyway, Dorothy runs into a street mountebank named Professor Marvel, whose Phd is in cooking hotdogs over the fire. 

He essentially robs Dorothy and then tells her that her Aunt Em is dying of a heart attack, so that she will think she has no family to go back to and be forced to travel with him as his young lover.

He failed to take into account that she still has a drunk uncle and three farmhands to return to. She does so, much to Marvel's disappointment (he later visits her at her home, hoping to get some, but has to put on a facade when he sees her family is still alive, something he had not anticipated). 

So after she gets knocked out in the cyclone, she ends up in Oz, which is obviously a dream. I don't care what the books said, it's as clear as day in the film and everything that happens just reeks of dream logic. The dead witch's toes curling up into themselves is totally something you would dream.  

She's greeted by this insufferably self assured and unhelpful socialite who definitely has no magical powers except for turning into a bubble named Glinda. Glinda laughs derisively at Dorothy's confusion and unleashes a horde of dwarves to ogle her. Let's point out my favorites, shall we? 

This guy struts slowly across the frame, desperately clinging to the small amount of fame that he has. 

This one makes this face like she really knows what she's talking about, and she always caught my eye as a child.

When I was a kid, I thought this guy said "You killed us so completely". So as a child, I thought dorothy killed all the munchkins when her house landed, turning them all into ghosts. And they were thankful. 

This particular munchkin is Harry Earles, who plays the main character in Tod Browning's Freaks (1932). 

Glinda gets threatened by the Wicked Witch, and then Glinda tells her she has to see the Wizard and floats off in her bubble, refusing to offer any more help. Which is crap. Glinda doesn't have anything better to do, she's just a horrible person. 

So Dorothy goes to see the Wizard, essentially the god of Oz, so she can go home. She runs into a Scarecrow with muscular atrophy, a tin man who wears mascara, and a lion who inexplicably has a New York accent. They all set off in hopes that the wizard will cure their maladies with homeopathy. 

After several speed bumps and delays, mostly from accidentally running into munchkin actors hanging themselves in the background, they arrive at Emerald City, a bizarre dystopian community where nobody has a job (we get up at twelve and start to work at one, take an hour for lunch and then at two we're done. Jolly good fun!). Those who do have jobs are presumably in indentured servitude, and even at that they are severely understaffed, as they have one guy doing three jobs that require different uniforms. 

So they see the wizard, a floating hologram head, and he says they have to kill the Wicked Witch and bring back her broomstick. They head out to her castle, Dorothy gets kidnapped, and her friends have to save her. 

Some really lame shit happens, and the witch lights Scarecrow on fire because he totally held his arm out for her to do it and then freaked out when she called his bluff. 

Also, Tin Man's face. Gold. 

Luckily, the witch is a huge diptshit who, despite her deathly allergy to water, leaves buckets of water just lying around. So Dorothy gets some on her when she uses the water to put out scarecrow. Witch dies.

Then, and this is where I get totally lost, they bring back the broomstick and the wizard still refuses to help them. Then, Dorothy's dog, Toto, starts meddling around where he shouldn't (which is what got her in trouble in the first god damn place), and reveals the wizard to be just some old turd in a booth. 

Now what I don't get is, if he was just a normal guy with no motives or agenda, why was he being such a dick in the first place? And when he's revealed, everyone is pretty much cool with it after a few seconds. He's like "Yeah, I was just jerking you all around, let me get your shit". And that's the end of it. 

So anyway, he tries taking dorothy home in a hot air balloon but Tin Man totally sabotages it. 

So Glinda drags her useless ass up there and tells Dorothy to tap her heels together three times, making some bullshit excuse that Dorothy had to learn a lesson before she went home. 

She wakes up at home and she tells her family about her dream, but they just laugh it off. I don't blame them. Ever had someone describe their dream to you? It's like, oh my god, who cares? 

Credits. 

Why Is It On the List?
In all seriousness, I love this movie. I love almost all of the songs, and the dancing from the Scarecrow and Tin Man are some of my favorite parts of the movie in particular. What's crazy, though, is that in some bizarre way, it's aged incredibly well. That's what makes it culturally significant.  

Older movies are often less watched by the younger crowd because films were simply different back then. You need to develop a taste for them at this point. Yet parents go out of their way to show this movie to their kids, and almost every kid is enthralled by it as if it were made today. 

And you wouldn't necessarily think that given the subject matter. Just think about it. A girl goes to a fantasy land and hangs around with a talking scarecrow, a lion, a tin man, runs into wizards and witches-- what a clusterfuck! There were several attempts to make the film before and they all sucked because no one knew how to handle the content. 

The decision to shoot in color for the Oz scenes, of course, made a huge difference. This is part of what makes it both historically and aesthetically significant. Color was a relatively new thing, and just look how they use it. They make a distinction between fantasy and reality. Color is used thematically, not just to look pretty.  

But in my opinion, I think they kind of made fun of themselves a little, and that makes everything easier to accept. Look at some of this. 

Bert Lahr really hams up in this role. And I don't think it has everything to do with the demands of the part. I think he's giving us a wink wink. 

That sense that we get that the filmmakers are saying "Yeah, we know this is pretty silly", and adding little nudges to us about that is part of what makes the film successful. It's self awareness has allowed it to endure. 

It's a really big film that took that crazy premise by the horns and wasn't afraid to be tongue-in-cheek. That, and some of those songs are just undeniably wonderful. 

It's no surprise it's on the list. And I honestly think that most of us would be really confused if it weren't.