The Wizard of Oz

The Wizard of Oz

1939

Director: Victor Fleming

Starring: Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, Margaret Hamilton

The Wizard of Oz is what I call an “exception” movie.  People who don’t like musicals tend to like The Wizard of Oz, despite the fact that it’s a musical.  People who say they don’t like old movies tend to like The Wizard of Oz, despite the fact that it’s 75 years old.  It’s a film that has transcended its origins and become a part of the national film lexicon.  Everyone and their dog knows, and most likely loves, The Wizard of Oz.

The story revolves around Kansas farm girl Dorothy (Garland) who is dissatisfied with her simple life and longs for more.  When a tornado picks up Dorothy’s house with Dorothy inside it and drops her in the magical land of Oz, it seems like Dorothy’s wish has come true, but she is quick to realize that you need to be careful what you wish for.  Dorothy soon wishes that she can return home to her family and friends in Kansas, and enlists the aid of the Scarecrow (Bolger), the Tin Man (Lahr), the Cowardly Lion (Lahr), and the Wizard himself (Morgan) to battle the evil Wicked Witch of the West (Hamilton) so she can find her way back home.  After all, there’s no place like home.

Now here’s where I make a pretty darn big confession: I am not in love with The Wizard of Oz.  And more than that, I never have been.  (Did I just quote Gilbert and Sullivan? Yes I did. Bonus points to those who can tell me which operetta I just referenced.)

Let me explain a bit more: I do not think The Wizard of Oz is a bad or inferior film.  I think it’s great that so many people know and adore this film.  It just never found its way into my heart the same way it apparently has with the rest of the Western Hemisphere.  And before y’all go screaming at me about having ice in my heart for not being enamored of this film, try to give me a chance to explain.  And stop judging, because that’s not very nice.

I have a theory why this isn’t a personal favorite of mine, and it has a lot to do with my disposition as a young Siobhan.  Like pretty much everyone else, this movie was screened quite a bit when I was a child.  I remember watching it over and over and over again. 

A significant fact you must know about me: young Siobhan was a sissy. 

I hated scary books, scary cartoons, and scary movies.  I remember going to a sleepover in elementary school where one of the other girls was hell bent on us watching A Nightmare on Elm Street and I practically had a panic attack from the very THOUGHT of us watching a horror movie.  I watched Star Wars: A New Hope for the first time when I was six, and the trash compactor scene terrified me so deeply, I pointedly refused to watch Star Wars again for another eight years.

And I think the reason I don’t love The Wizard of Oz is because it scared me too much as a kid, but my family kept on watching it anyway and I couldn’t tell anyone.

So, what parts of The Wizard of Oz traumatized me?

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

1. Miss Gulch trying to take Toto away from Dorothy.  I’ve always had an affinity to animals, even as a youngster, and to watch Dorothy as her beloved pet is forcibly removed from her hands broke my heart.  I didn’t like that, no I didn’t like that one bit.

2. Dorothy being locked out of the storm shed.  As I mentioned early on, I’ve seen this film many many times, but I still got anxious every single time the tornado comes.  It’s as if I thought that hoping Dorothy would reach safety would somehow change the plot of the film.  Just one time, just ONE time, I’d love it for Dorothy to not be stuck outside in a natural disaster. 

3. The first arrival of the Wicked Witch of the West.  SHE APPEARS FROM NOWHERE IN A PUFF OF ORANGE SMOKE.  AND THEN SHE IMMEDIATELY TRIES TO KILL DOROTHY.  The Wicked Witch of the West wholeheartedly deserves her spot as one of the greatest villains of all time because she basically scared the crap out of me as a child, and she is so very frightening from the very beginning on.

4. The moving trees that throw apples at Dorothy when she meets the Tin Man.  It’s how they stand stock still and then start mercilessly beating on Dorothy and the Scarecrow.  I mean honestly, this is the stuff of my nightmares.

5. When the Wicked Witch of the West throws fire balls at the Scarecrow.  HE’S MADE OF STRAW.  SHE’S TRYING TO KILL HIM.  Do you know how horrible it is for a six year old to imagine a beloved character burning to death?  Because that’s what went through my head in that scene.

6.  The scary forest when we meet the Cowardly Lion for the first time.  The set designers did their job when they made this incredibly creepy forest, and every single time Dorothy entered this place, I wanted to look away.

7. The poppies.  The goddamned poppies.  The Wicked Witch drugs our gang to try to stop them.  What’s truly frightening in this scene is how she manages to do this from far away in her castle, nowhere near the Emerald City.  She’s incredibly powerful and insidious in her methods. 

8. “Surrender Dorothy.”  Because nothing says frightening like death threats in the sky.

9. Approaching the Wizard of Oz for the first time.  THERE ARE FIREBALLS AND A GIGANTIC DISEMBODIED HEAD WHO YELLS AT EVERYONE.  THIS IS NOT SOMETHING THAT MADE ME HAPPY AS A CHILD.  Y’know the Cowardly Lion in this scene?  Yeah, that was me.

  10. The forest surrounding the Wicked Witch of the West’s castle.  Again, I think I hate the set designers of this film. 

   11.  Flying monkeys.  Fuck no.  Stop giving me nightmares.  “Fly, my pretties!” What you just heard was the sound of child Siobhan running away from this movie. 

12.  The hourglass with red sand ticking away the remaining moments of Dorothy’s life when she’s trapped in the Wicked Witch’s castle.  Having that kind of time limit put on her life made me so anxiety-ridden as a child.

13. When the Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow go undercover as the guards to break into the Witch’s Castle.  The music (which is heavily pulled from Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, a genuinely frightening classical music composition), the costumes, the dark lighting and dangerous set, all made this a big pile of “NOPE” to me.

14. The death of the Wicked Witch.  You’d think that by this point in the picture, I’d be overjoyed to watch the villain die.  Nope, not scaredy cat little Siobhan, oh no.  I found her death traumatizing, watching her shrivel and burn away as if she is being corroded by acid. 

Yep.  This movie basically scared the pants off of me as a kid.  And I had to watch it over and over and OVER again.  So you’ll pardon me if it’s not a personal favorite.

Now, having made that rather exhaustive list, you can perhaps understand why this film, frankly, filled me with terror as a young child and why I never quite managed to fall in love with it.  And while the things on that list don’t really scare me anymore, I had to watch this movie SO many times as a child and I didn’t have the nerve to tell my parents that it scared me so heartily that I made myself sit through this frightfulness too many times to ever develop an emotional affinity for the film.  

I told you I was a sissy when I was a kid.  Seriously, you don’t understand just how much everything scared me.

Which isn’t to say there weren’t parts of this film that I enjoyed.  The stand out setpieces are easily the Munchkinland sequence and the arrival the Emerald City.  These two scenes are still my favorite parts of The Wizard of Oz, and I DO love them, very much.  Both are happy parts of the film, which meant I wasn’t cowering behind my hands as a youngster.  Both are towering examples of brilliant uses of Technicolor to achieve a fantasy look.  The colors are rich and luxurious, and both scenes are filled with a multitude of interesting side characters.  I love the costuming and set design of both of these lands.  It’s the rotund, Seussian, illustration-feel of Munchkinland, and the sleek art deco design of the Emerald City, all sophistication and smooth lines, that I really love.  Add on top of that two fantastic songs that leave you humming the tunes for the rest of the day and yeah, for sure, these are my two favorite parts of the film.

The Wizard of Oz will always be considered a great film, and rightfully so.  It’s a visual achievement with a heartwarming message, full of indelible characters and charming songs.  But it’s not my favorite.  It’s basically the first horror film I ever saw, and because I was terrible at communicating my fear as a child, I was forced to watch it time and time and time again.  No, it doesn’t scare me anymore, but it’s really too late to reverse the damage.  I appreciate The Wizard of Oz and I can appreciate its stature in the film world, but it will never be a personal favorite.

Arbitrary Rating: 8/10.  Again, I think this is a legitimately good film, full of so many iconic film moments.  But… JESUS it scared me as a kid.

ETA: I will always remember Margaret Hamilton going on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and getting dressed in the Wicked Witch costume in order to show young children that the Wicked Witch was just a character and not a real monster.  

Additional ETA: and yes, I've seen Return to Oz.  And I rather like it, even as a kid, despite the fact that it's exponentially creepier than this film.  The difference was that everyone around me acknowledged that Return to Oz was a scary film and didn't make me watch it unless I wanted to.  I couldn't vocalize my fear of Wizard, so my parents just kept... putting it on.  

Night of the Living Dead

Night of the Living Dead

1968

Director: George A. Romero

Starring: Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Karl Hardman

So I’ve been incommunicado for the past few days.  Why?  Because my friend Angie came to visit me.  Who cares, and why are you telling us, you might think.  First of all, I have been online friends with Angie since 2006 but this was the first time we’ve ever met in “real life,” (AND IT WAS AWESOME AND AMAZING AND FULL OF FANGIRL FLAILING) so that was significant, but Angie also came to visit for a second specific reason.  Angie was into zombies before zombies were de rigueur.  Angie wrote her undergraduate thesis on socio-political constructs in zombie films.  Angie is THE expert in all things zombie.  And the Dryden screen Night of the Living Dead this past weekend.

Thank you, Dryden, for bringing my friend to me and allowing us to meet and talk about classic zombie films in person.

The story of Night of the Living Dead is straightforward.  A young woman, Barbra (O’Dea), is visiting a cemetery to put flowers on her father’s grave when she sees a slowly moving body coming towards them.  The thing kills her brother and Barbra flees for the safety of a nearby farmhouse, where she is quickly joined by Ben (Jones).  Ben barricades the house and has phenomenal survival skills, especially compared to catatonic Barbra.  They are eventually joined by a handful of other survivors and tensions rise among the group when Cooper (Hardman) clashes continually with Ben.  Details of the reason for what we now call a zombie attack slowly leak to the people in the house.  Can the group survive the night?

  

So much of what makes Night successful comes down to its resolution, so I will say right now that if you are somehow, amazingly unspoiled on this horror film classic, stop reading then go watch the movie. 

It is very difficult to overstate just how significant this film is in horror movie canon.  I am not a horror movie buff, I seldom choose to watch horror movies (because I’m a wimp at heart), but I’ve seen many of the “significant” horror films thanks to 1001 Movies and I feel like I have a decent grasp on the evolution of the genre.  Just as the French New Wave revolutionized standard Hollywood filmmaking in the late sixties, the effect of Night of the Living Dead was to take so many “standard” classic Hollywood horror tropes and rip them up, spin them around, and usher in a new philosophy of fright.  When you tack on the staggering fact that Romero also manages to make this into an insidious socio-political commentary, you’ve got something that is nothing short of game-changing.

 

Consider first how Night compares, in terms of sheer concept, to the “monster flicks” of the thirties, forties, and even fifties.  Instead of posh sets and elegantly articulate actors, realism (due to budget constraints) reigns supreme.  This is not a monster pic in the world of some gothic Victorian village, this is real people in the real world facing a threat.  Although I very much enjoy Lon Chaney Jr.’s The Wolf Man in particular, Night refuses to create that kind of posh, elegant horror movie.  What’s more, consider the threat itself.  Angie is always quick to point out that zombies have a significant distinction from other classic horror monsters in that zombies are ourselves.  Vampires, Frankenstein, werewolves, these are all horror monsters that have some element of separation from humans.  But zombies, ah, they are different.  As Night eventually says, anyone who dies during this zombie attack from any cause will then turn into a zombie themselves.  Even setting itself apart from the monster films of the fifties like The Blob and Them!, with whom Night shares the concept of some sort of foreign attack closing in on a group of characters, the central threat in Night cuts a little too close to home.  Zombies are not killer ants from outer space, they are us.  They are humanity itself.  Current settings and a monster threat that manages to be both supernatural and too close for comfort at the same time rewrote many of the rules for classic horror.

To me, this is interesting from a historical aspect, but what makes Night even more significant is its tone.  Yes, there had been monster invasion movies popular in the fifties, but none of them had the streak of utter, unrelenting nihilism running through them that Night has.  Our group of survivors in the farmhouse numbers seven total (Ben, Barbra, Cooper, Cooper’s wife, Cooper’s daughter, and young couple Tom and Judy), and not a single damn one makes it out alive.  What… what is going on here?  What did Romero do?  That’s not right.  We’re supposed to have at least one member of our band of gallant fighters live through the night.  Sure, we might not expect everyone to survive, but we certainly don’t expect everyone to die.  Even by today’s standards, killing off every damn one of our protagonists is a gutsy move.  It’s a game changer.  “You can’t do that,” someone must have said to Romero.  “Watch me,” he undoubtedly replied. 

  

It is this unrepentant nihilism that completely changed my perception of Night the first time I watched it.  I remember watching it through, unspoiled, with a sense of “Well, this is nice.  I can somewhat see why this movie is a big deal.  It’s fine.”  The film reached its climax and Ben survived.  “Great, cool, Ben survives, alright, movie over, large death toll but we have the survivor.”  Nope.  When Ben died, it was one of the few moments in film that actually made me gasp and clap my hands to my mouth.  I couldn’t believe that had just happened, and in that one brief, cruel moment, Night of the Living Dead went from “nice” to “yeah, okay, WOW, I *completely* understand why this movie is a big deal.  Holy crap.” 

And speaking of Ben, how can I not.  Famous for casting a black man in a movie filled with white characters and without the intention of making him black (Duane Jones simply gave the best audition, Romero said) is nothing short of groundbreaking.  Making that character the most resourceful and level-headed person in the film, even better.  And then unceremoniously shooting him in between the eyes, killing the character not by zombie attack, which Ben is smart enough to survive, but by the rescuers who assassinate anything that moves, is nothing short of heart-wrenching.  I cannot imagine living in an America in 1968 that had just lived through the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. mere months prior to having Night unleashed on them.  Racial tensions were notoriously high, and along comes a horror film, of all things, that zeroes in on them and splays them across the screen for all to see.  As my friend Angie knows with far more authority than I, Romero is a director dedicated to providing positive portrayals of both women and people of color in his films; he just happens to make his profound social statements through the medium of zombie films instead of academic articles.  The discontent of the American populace is somehow distilled down and incorporated, making the horror film not just mindless entertainment but a gauge of public attitudes.

  

Although filmed on a scant budget and looking like it (with some gawdawful performances, as Angie was constantly sniggering at Tom and Judy), Night of the Living Dead retains its power over time through its innovative storytelling and its fearlessness to confront social issues.  Although it might perhaps seem formulaic for a zombie film by today’s standards, you must remember that this is the film that WROTE that formula.  It’s not formulaic if you invent it yourself.  This is a film that deserves its place in history.

Arbitrary Rating: 8/10

PS – ILU, ANGIE!!!!!!!!

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

1971

Director: Mel Stuart

Starring: Gene Wilder, Jack Albertson, Peter Ostrum

Who didn’t love this movie as a kid?  Filled with chocolate and candy and the most bizarre factory ever committed to film, it’s a child’s dream.  The opening credit sequence, with shot after shot of ooey gooey chocolate, is enough to make my mouth water just from the thought.  However, unlike most movies that you love as a kid, this one manages to stand up to the transition to adulthood.

Charlie Bucket (Ostrum) is very poor.  When the fantastic and reclusive candy maker Willy Wonka (Wilder, in perhaps his most iconic role) announces a contest to win admittance to his factory and free chocolate for life, Charlie is elated, and after being initially disappointed, finds one of the five elusive Golden Tickets.  He and his Grandpa Joe (Albertson) encounter a myriad of wondrous and terrible things in Wonka’s strange factory, but ultimately, Charlie proves he is a good child, pure of heart, and wins Wonka’s final prize.

  

Based on the famous children’s novel by Roald Dahl, Dahl also penned the screenplay for this, the first adaptation of his work.  Dahl’s novels, favorites of mine when I was young (really, who DIDN’T love his work?), are all bizarrely supernatural stories, where everyday children somehow become involved in extraordinary events.  What sets his stories apart from all the other children’s novels about the supernatural, though, is Dahl’s supremely honed sense of the sinister.  Dahl’s works don’t shirk from fear, realizing instead that it is important children encounter safe manifestations of their fears in order to learn to deal with them.  I was fascinated by Dahl’s work for that very reason.  He wrote the best villains.  The Witches is indelibly inked in my mind, despite the fact that I haven’t read the work for two decades, because of its completely terrifying and thus effective villains. 

I mention all of this to make a point about Willy Wonka.  It’s a children’s movie that transcends most other children’s movies because of the fear, the threats, the sinister nature of the film.  Wait, isn’t it about candy?  Well, yes, but it’s more than that.  Willy Wonka focuses on a fantasy world that happens to be built around candy.  Unlike most children’s films’ fantasy worlds, this is a world where the rules are not only capricious but possibly vicious.  There is evil and danger lurking even in the most beautiful, candy-colored room, which, in turn, creates an atmosphere of unease.  There is great delight in the film - I don’t want to paint this as an evil movie – but the delight is heavily counterbalanced by a palpable sense of danger.  The psychedelic and dangerous boat ride is proof enough of that, let alone the fact that Charlie is initially approached outside Wonka’s factory by a man with a cart full of knives!

The danger, the unease, the viciousness are all embodied and channeled through the film’s main character, Willy Wonka.  In this role, Wilder fully inhabits his character in the most unnerving of ways.  It’s telling how strong of a performance it is when you consider that Wonka himself does not appear until nearly halfway through the film.  He is absent at first, but then his presence is so conspicuous, so all-consuming, that you leave the film thinking he was in absolutely every scene.  Wilder’s Wonka is an evil genius, an insane criminal mastermind, but one who cloaks his crimes under the pretense of selecting morally good people over morally bad people.  When a criminal selects for the good and against the bad, we don’t consider him a criminal, but when selecting against bad people involves plunging them down pipes, sending them off to a gigantic juicer, or pushing them through to an incinerator that may or may not be fired up that day, he’s still a criminal.  Wilder’s Wonka is wily, slippery, and profoundly temperamental.  He is singing one moment, and yelling the next.  He has next to no patience for his guests, and is supremely unconcerned about any negative consequences of their actions.  How odd that he is the star, then.  He is far more a puppet master than a hero; but, after all, that is what makes this movie so interesting.  A dark, mischievious Puck-like figure at the helm of an entire world is wonderful, thrilling, and frightening, all at the same time.  

  

Undoubtedly, Wonka is the central figure of the film, but as mentioned earlier, he does not make his first appearance until about 45 minutes in.  The first portion of the film, often overlooked in favor of the bizarre candy factory segment, deals with the world’s search for Wonka’s Golden Tickets.  This section of the film is undeserving of its relegation as “second best” half, as it’s uproariously funny.  A series of absolutely delightful vignettes about the fervor of the search paint a portrait of a world absolutely obsessed with Wonka and his candy.  A rich woman’s husband has been kidnapped, and the ransom demand is a box of Wonka chocolates; she must think about it.  A computer expert designs a program to tell where the Golden Tickets are, only to have the program tell him he is cheating.  A psychiatrist is disdainful of his client until the client says he dreamed the location of a Golden Ticket.  All these whimsical mini-stories, completely unrelated to the overall characters’ stories, serve as charming build-up to the entrance to the factory.

I am now telling the computer EXACTLY what it can do with a lifetime's supply of chocolate...

The songs in the film are almost all ear-worms of the worst kind, guaranteed to be stuck in your head all evening long.  “Who can make the sunshine?” you’ll hum, imagining Bill the candy merchant in his wonderful little corner candy shop.  Or maybe you’ll joyously sing along with Grandpa Joe when he exclaims, “I’ve got a Golden Ticket!”  Then there’s the Oompa-Loompas, the charming yet also slightly fiendish workers at Wonka’s factory that serve as the Greek Chorus of the film, singing “Oompa, Loompa, Doompity Doo.”  Or best of all, sing along with Wilder as he belts out, “If you want to view paradise / Simply look around and view it!” in the beautiful “Pure Imagination.”  Infinitely singable, and very fun.

The sets are pure whimsy.  Wonka’s factory was constructed entirely on backlots, lending a superficiality to it which works.  There isn’t meant to be anything natural about Wonka’s factory, so it’s fitting that it all looks fake.  The colors are bright and bold, and there are oddities around every corner.  The lickable wallpaper (“The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!”), the seizure-inducing room full of angles and dizzying walls, and the shrinking room are only shown for a few moments, but they’re more than memorable.  And, it’s worth mentioning, this was all achieved without reliance on CGI special effects.

  

Last November, the Dryden showed Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; that, in and of itself, is not so unique.  What was special was the fact that Peter Ostrum, aka Charlie Bucket, attended the screening and spoke about his experience making the movie in Munich.  Ostrum is currently a large animal veterinarian living and working in upstate New York; Willy Wonka was the only film he ever made.  He struck me as a very humble man, and at the conclusion of the evening said, “I was only in one film, but what a film it is!”  He was very appreciative of everyone who helped him on the set of the film, but also never regretted the decision to leave acting.  

Ostrum told us the white goop in this scene was flame retardant foam from fire extinguishers.

The crowd that night at the Dryden was one of the largest I’ve seen in the six or seven years I’ve been going there.  People were pumped to see this movie; much more than for typical movies.  The excitement in the air was palpable.  The audience actually applauded when the film started – unusual, even for the Dryden.  Everyone watching the movie was SO into it, SO happy, SO excited, that the entire audience broke out in spontaneous cheering and whooping when Charlie found the golden ticket.  It’s an easy bet to make that the majority of audience members had seen the film before, and therefore knew what would happen, but everyone – myself included – was so much more excited about Charlie finding his golden ticket!  It was a magical movie moment, just a part of an evening that ranks high in my “Top Movie Theater Experiences” list.

  

I loved this movie as a child, and I love it as an adult, and not purely for sentimental reasons.  It holds its own as a legitimate film, full of whimsy and menace, musical merriment and threatening danger.  Children can handle danger if adults let them, and more often than not, they’re better for it.  After seeing all the horrible things that happen to the horrid, obnoxious little children in this film, I know I was more inspired as a child to be good like Charlie Bucket, because maybe, just maybe, I’d get to see Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory!

Arbitrary Rating: 10/10