We didn’t go to the cinema a lot when I was child, but memory suggests that the most regular period for family film-going was from around about 1968-1971 when we lived in west London and would pop over the river to a cinema in Putney. It was during that period I saw Disney’s Snow White on re-release – and was terrified.
This was still the era of two-film programmes: Snow White was my first cinema trip and it was paired, if I remember correctly, with MGM’s Tom Thumb (Russ Tamblyn, Terry-Thomas, Peter Sellers et al).
It seems fairly safe to think that I saw The Wizard of Oz at around this time – 1969 would have marked the 30th anniversary of the film’s release and explain why it was back in cinemas.
Wizard of oz t captured my imagination then and has never stopped being an important part of my cultural life since – which includes being in two stage productions (as the Mayor of Munchkinland in a girls’ school production and later, as the Wicked Witch of the West, before you ask).
Last weekend, The Other Half and I went to our usual cinema to watch a single screening for the 80th anniversary.
I know the film so well that I can mouth along with the songs and a load of the lines, but seeing it on the big screen for the first time in ... gulps ... 50 years was a fascinating experience.
Being in a cinema makes you pay closer attention than if you’re watching at home, with all the distractions. Never before, then, had I really appreciated Harold Rosson’s cinematography – particularly in the opening sepia section of the film.
As times change and history moves on, you can view cultural works through a changing prism.
Today, Frank Morgan’s blustering conman wizard seems like a harbinger of politicians and political leaders for whom bluster and empty rhetoric is all they have.
Terry the cairn terrier – cast first and paid best of all her co-players – really is more than a set-dressing. She’s in is much of the film. Apparently, when she broke a paw during filming, she convalesced at Judy Garland’s home – and Garland desperately tried to adopt her.
Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West remains scary – there is nothing to make her more ‘child friendly’ at any stage. There’s nothing to blunt the fact that, for instance, she is a torturer – not least in her psychological torture of Dorothy as the film builds to a climax.
And so to Dorothy and Garland’s iconic performance. Somewhere Over the Rainbow retains its magic – not least in her rendition.
She produced an extraordinary performance: there is nothing brattish about Dorothy: she’s a serious young girl – an orphan with (apparently) no friends of her own age; vulnerable at the same time as being self-reliant and with a simple yet strong sense of what’s right and what’s not.
There is an extent to which The Wizard of Oz is like Casablanca: there are many ways in which it shouldn’t work – or at least, not have travelled well down the decades.
The message of there being “no place like home” is twee and limiting. The film as a whole is arguably over long and, with the introductions of the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion, repetitious.
And yet, and yet ...
At the cinema we went to, a new generation was seeing it on a big screen for the first time
Eight decades on, The Wizard of Oz defies so much and, in retaining its own magic, reveals for us again why cinema as a whole can be such a magical experience.
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