The Wizard of Oz
The Wizard of Oz is a classic, much loved film musical and is generally ranked among the top ten best movies of all-time. Its signature song, "Over the Rainbow," which was almost cut from the film as being too sophisticated for the teenaged Judy Garland, won an Oscar for Best Song and has been voted the greatest movie song of all time by the American Film Institute. Thanks to its exposure on television The Wizard of Oz has been seen by more viewers than any other movie. In a recent People Magazine poll, it was chosen as the favorite movie of the twentieth century. The film has rightly proved to be one of the classics of Hollywood musicals with comedy and fairy tale besides. It is still the movie for which Judy Garland is best remembered.
Plot Summary
Dorothy Gale, an orphaned young girl unhappy with her drab black-and-white existence on her aunt and uncle's dusty Kansas farm. Dorothy yearns to travel "over the rainbow" to a different world, and she gets her wish when a tornado whisks her and her little dog, Toto, to the Technicolorful land of Oz.Having offended the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton), Dorothy is protected from the old crone's wrath by the ruby slippers that she wears. At the suggestion of Glinda, the Good Witch of the North (Billie Burke), Dorothy heads down the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, where dwells the all-powerful Wizard of Oz, who might be able to help the girl return to Kansas. En route, she befriends a Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), a Tin Man (Jack Haley), and a Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr). The Scarecrow would like to have some brains, the Tin Man craves a heart, and the Lion wants to attain courage; hoping that the Wizard will help them too, they join Dorothy on her odyssey to the Emerald City.
Instead, the Wizard sends them on a quest to kill the Wicked Witch of the West.
Principal Cast
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Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale At sixteen, Judy Garland won her only Academy Award, a special Oscar for the best performance by a juvenile, for her role in The Wizard of Oz. |
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Jack Haley as The Tin Man He starred in vaudeville as a song-and-dance comedian, then after numerous Broadway shows, went on to radio and eventually television. |
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Bert Lahr as The Cowardly Lion He starred in Broadway's "Ziegfeld Follies" and had his own show on radio before venturing into feature films. |
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Ray Bolger as The Scarecrow A unique classic movie singer, dancer, and comedian, Ray Bolger appeared in a little over 20 films during the course of his career. |
Technical Innovation
The Wizard of Oz was produced at the peak of Hollywood's Golden Age, when MGM had at its disposal the foremost technical experts available at that time. It was this standby of talent that made the production of such an ambitious film feasible. To mount such a project today would cost at least $50 million.It was photographed in a little-used three-strip technicolor process. In this process, three separate strips of black-and-white film were exposed through a prism which segregated the three primary colors. It was an extremely intricate process to handle and required enormous amounts of light to properly expose. While it was the most expensive process available to Hollywood at the time, it yielded an unequaled color quality. The studio chose the three-strip process because it worked out well with black-and-white stock. The framing of Dorothy's fantasy was processed in black-and-white, heightening the effect of the technicolor journey to Oz. The fact that the three-strip process originated in a black-and-white stock made this easier.
For these reasons production occurred entirely indoors on the sound stages of MGM. Because of the large set, as many as nine cameras hidden in bushes or potted plants would be used to film one scene. The hidden cameras took close-ups, while the main camera, used to capture the whole scene, was on the end of a boom and was constantly moving. The extensive lighting equipment necessary for Technicolor photography in 1939 is very apparent in these behind-the-scenes shots. Banks of lights lined the floor of the stages and the catwalks above the actors and made the set uncomfortably hot, especially for the actors wearing heavy costumes.Because the film was studio-bound, a lot of responsibility fell on the special effects department. Mattes were used extensively to give depth to the Kansas landscape, and a sense of distance to the Land of Oz. Intricate trick photography was employed to allow a bicyclist and a man rowing a boat to float helplessly in a tornado.
