The Wizarding World of Non-Oz-Sense.

It’s Judy Garland’s first ever head trip! A victim of prescribed, mind-altering drugs later in her career, maybe she was just trying to recreate her glory days in THE WIZARD OF OZ?

It was 1939 and the Hollywood studio system was churning out so many “musicals” that singing irrelevantly amidst the storyline had become not only passé but expected. Keep in mind THE WIZARD OF OZ rose above the engine-pit of Hollywood dreck purely on the strength of its re-releases and television reruns. At the time of its theatrical release, it was box office mud. Though a lot of care was admittedly put into the production, it was “just another musical,” adapted from the children’s book by L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

The Tin Cuke

Now it’s a classic. And although it’s a fun romp through a mine field of hallucinogenic surrealism, barring a few memorable performances and iconic moments, most of THE WIZARD OF OZ is outdated, overacted and under-thought. It was voted one of the “20 Most Overrated Movies Of All Time” by Premiere Magazine. And this surreal cucumber concurs: in the sense that it has its moments, but is only a must-see childhood film because parents are indoctrinated to force it onto their kids at some point in their wretched upbringing. Entering the bloodstream at an early age, it becomes impossible to flense its influence on our credulous baby minds and view WIZARD for what it is; a mediocre musical with kooky characters and preposterous platitudes. It has become impossible to – ironically – pull back the curtain…

Dorothy (Judy Garland), a young farm girl in a sepia-toned rural Kansas, and her little dog Toto, are transported via a twister to a magical land of Oz (which hits us like a Technicolor Molotov cocktail), where she befriends three insecure characters, a Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), a Tin Man (Jack Haley) and a Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr), and they all journey down the yellow brick road to see the purportedly omniscient Wizard of Oz to ask him to grant their wishes; Dorothy’s wish: passage home.

Scarecrow wants “a brain,” Tin Man wants “a heart,” Cowardly Lion wants “the nerve.” These three cut-ups are the backbone of WIZARD, and rightly so, with such well-crafted makeup and solid characterizations, that it’s a safe bet they were doing the best drugs on set.

When Dorothy first meets Scarecrow, he advises to go down one road, then down another, then adds, “Of course, people do go both ways!” Well, you should know, fruity straw guy…

All three get a chance to sing probably the least gay song in the movie, If I Only Had A Brain, replacing the words as necessary to their idiom (Tin Man: a Heart, Lion: the Nerve – or, as he pronounces it, the “noive”). Lahr’s eccentric, mincing Cowardly Lion steals the show (he even gets an extra solo spot to vibrato comedically, If I Were King Of The Forest), and we see where those Warner Bros. cartoons we love so much cribbed a lot of their inspiration, with his twitchy oafishness and Edward G. Robinson accent.

And Toto the dog pulls one of the best animal performances ever committed to screen; a sedately cute little doggie-thesp amidst all that flummery and hullabaloo. The filmmakers don’t try for cuteness by making Toto do precious things in cutaways – everything he does is in the master shots without any specific focus on him. That’s why he’s so cute. He was trained and blocked so well that they didn’t need closeups to punctuate his actions; like dutifully following Dorothy around the spiral beginnings of the yellow brick road, whilst all those loud-colored munchkins flollop around singing and dancing like M&Ms on crack; like patiently sitting on a plough and putting his paw out to be shaken while Garland croons her signature tune, Somewhere Over The Rainbow. He even plays a pivotal part in rescuing Dorothy when he escapes the witch’s castle to find the three mincing doofuses back in the forest and lead them to the castle.

And let’s not forget: Toto is the one who exposes the Wizard! The kid’s priceless!

At every opportunity, the gang bursts into We’re Off To See The Wizard (one of the film’s many iconic songs), and traipse gaily down the yellow brick road – cutting just before they smack their noses on the painted cycloramas across the back of the sound stage.

Frank Morgan (as the Wizard) actually plays five roles, including Marvel the Magician in Kansas, a conman with a heart, as he poignantly tricks the runaway Dorothy into wanting to return home.

But it’s too late. The tornado hits the farm and Dorothy’s whole house is blown away with her in it, landing in Oz and apparently killing a “Wicked Witch of the East,” whose ruby slippers were the envy of every hooker in Munchkinland.

When it is taken for granted the movie as a whole is “delightful,” I think people are forgetting that the whole Munchkinland sequence, populated with kaleidoscopic dwarfs singing treacle in chipmunk-tweaked voices, should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention as torture. (In this respect, Charlie Smalls and Quincy Jones should be commended for updating the musical numbers in their 1978 “blaxploitation” remake THE WIZ. Most musical films become dated after the passage of years, as musical styles buck and trend – look at The Village People’s CAN’T STOP THE MUSIC (1980) – became dated as it was being edited! Anyone still doing The Shake? The Milkshake, The Milkshake – Do The Shake!)

Like “Play it again, Sam,” Dorothy’s quote about not being in Kansas anymore has been defiled to the point of obscurity. The correct quote: “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

As her eyes try to adjust to the ocular raping, a good fairy appears – no, not Freddie Mercury – Glinda (Billie Burke), the blonde, bubble-headed “Good Witch of the North,” with a voice that makes you want to take a crowbar to her skull. In that insufferable mewling, she asks Dorothy whether she is a good witch or a bad witch for killing the East Si-eede wiccan. Dorothy counters that she isn’t a witch at all and compliments Glinda that she didn’t know there were beautiful witches such as her, to which Glinda replies, “Only bad witches are ugly.” Which Dorothy should have read as the veiled insult it was: So you had to ASK whether I was a good witch because I’m that close to bad-witch-ugly? (Through her life, Garland would have self-esteem issues over her looks; did they subliminally start with this insensitive witchbitch?)

But though Glinda proclaims herself “good,” we realize her moniker of “Good Witch” is merely agitprop, as throughout the movie she watches idly as Dorothy endures hell to reach the Emerald City, telling Dorothy right at the end – in a deus ex machina appearance – that Kansas was two seconds away all the time! Capping it with a sophistic platitude on why she never lifted a finger to shorten the torturous journey:

GLINDA: “You always had the power to go back!”
SCARECROW: “Why didn’t you tell us?!”
GLINDA: “Because you wouldn’t have believed me!”
Someone call the Good Lawyer of The North – I’m gonna sue the wand right out from under this bitch’s dirndl skirts.

Perfectly cast as the green-skinned, cackling Wicked Witch of the West – Margaret Hamilton, who, as the phrase goes, definitely hit every branch of the ugly tree on her way down… Divorced by the time she did this movie and never remarried, one can only imagine the torment her ex endured bedding down with that horse’s face every night, and waking to that trollish, hook-nosed thing on the pillow every morning. Shudder. The story goes that a lot of Hamilton’s Witch performance was too terrifying for little kids of the time, and edited out, but it wasn’t her “performance” – it was that viridian alien fugliness that not even Captain Kirk would tap.

Humbugged as her countenance may be, Wicked Witch is no more evil than you or I when claiming our rightful inheritance. Her dead sister’s ruby slippers are magically bestowed on Dorothy by that whinnying blonde witch – stolen! – and when we examine Wicked’s actions throughout this movie, all she really wants are her family heirlooms back. Under what authority did Dorothy and Glinda snatch them up?

Even as a kid I used to wonder how Wicked was done in with water to the face. Not being as gullible as my kindergarten peers, I considered maybe it was acid, or that they foreshadowed earlier that she had some aversion to liquids – but no. When the plot calls for it, there’s a convenient bucket of water thrown over her and she “melts.” For its illogical suddenness, anything could have sufficed; you may as well throw a pillow at her or a towel or a set of decorative plates and achieve the same result with the same non-explanation as to why it was fatal to her… (The Wizard would remark “So you liquidated her” and my little child-mind connected “liquid” with “water” and I thought it best to accept that tenuous connection and keep my mouth shut because it was obvious all the grownups around me knew better, and they were telling me this movie was “delightful.”)

If anyone was evil in Oz, it was the Wizard. He promises to grant them their wishes (even though he is a charlatan who can do no such thing) if they would kill the Wicked Witch and bring back her broomstick, knowing full well he is sending them to their deaths to protect his charlatanism!

When Wicked captures Dorothy, she doesn’t kill her immediately to get the ruby slippers, rather, sets an hourglass on how long Dorothy has to live – then she rushes off to a meeting to help write the chapter in the Batman Villain Handbook on “Delaying People’s Deaths Arbitrarily.”

When you really think about it: both Glinda and Wicked have real magical powers (they can fly, appear and disappear at will, create poisons and antidotes, spy on you from afar), yet the Wizard (whom they regard with obeisance, taking it for granted he is “great and powerful”) is a mere mortal with smoke and mirrors. Have these actual witches no discernment? Wouldn’t they have tested their powers against his, or at the least requested an audience with him to curry favor, and then inadvertently exposed him when they were chatting over the latest Eye of Newt spells?

All that pouting and theatrical overacting like Shirley Temple (who was considered before Garland) doesn’t disguise the fact that Garland is a little too old for the role; 16 and playing it like a coy 10-year-old. Even her farmhands (Bolger, Haley and Lahr in human form) treat her like a girl not worth wasting askew glances on, but those strapped-down chest buds make me wonder why none of them were trying to get her into more trouble so they could “rescue” her by carrying her out of the pigpen or the horse barn or one of their farmhand nesting places…

When overacting was the ONLY acting…

Dorothy’s last monologue to Glinda is aimed squarely at 10-year-olds who won’t realize it’s pap-on-ice nonsense: “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look further than my own backyard because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.” And when someone figures out exactly what that means, I’ll eat my couch.

As Dorothy is lamenting that she shouldn’t have left home because everyone loves her there, all I could think of was the opening portion of the film where Auntie Em (Clara Blandick) and Uncle Henry (Charley Grapewin) didn’t give her the time of day, and gave up Toto to the horse-faced man-thing threatening them with legalities (Margaret Hamilton playing Miss Gulch), and where the three farmhands had nothing but directives for her, “use your brain,” “stay out of trouble”… which is the reason why she ran away in the first place.

Upon our return to Kansas, the audience realizes that Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion are the same actors playing her farmhands, and that in Oz they represented Dorothy’s fevered fantasy, so we must ask, Are those her deep-rooted perceptions of her farmhands; that one is brainless, one is heartless and one is gutless?

But why would she think that anyway, as it is subtly shown that each of the doofuses exhibits the exact traits that he desires? Scarecrow uses his brain to get out of jams, Tin Man cries like he’s got a breaking heart and Lion dives into the heart of danger for her. So who’s the real psychological head case here?

Dorothy vows, “And I’m not going to leave here ever, ever again!” Well, until my schizophrenia kicks in again and I perceive that I’m the only sane one around here surrounded by retards…

Five directors would eventually have a hand in the production of WIZARD (including Richard Thorpe, George Cukor, the film’s producer Mervyn LeRoy, and King Vidor), but Victor Fleming would be credited as the director who brought this glossified puling to the screen. Blame E.Y. Harburg for the fruity lyrics and Harold Arlen for the hinky-bippity music.

For 1939, it was quite effects-laden: the tornado scene with visions outside Dorothy’s window; the witch dissolving from riding her bike to a broom; both the witches’ entrances and exits; the flying monkeys, which I imagine would have been magnificently terrifying in their day.

WIZARD is revolutionary in many aspects, and it has entered human culture indelibly, but I find it hard to envision today’s youth, inured as they are with the eye-candy of TRANSFORMERS, the soul-sucking wraiths of HARRY POTTER, or the dinosaurs of KING KONG 2005, batting an eyelid over the supposedly scary flying monkeys, Wicked’s supposed disturbing performance, or the cardboard and matte majesty of the Emerald City.

Older generations who insist that WIZARD still works its wonders on modern kids have no idea what kids five generations below them are attracted to. Recently I saw a 2-year-old sitting in her father’s shopping cart playing with an iPad. I don’t even own an iPad and this little girl was tooling around on it like she was directing the sky traffic in ATTACK OF THE CLONES. If WIZARD-philes are brave enough to put their “delightful to all generations” theory to the test, sit a group of kids down to view it and see how long it takes before they plug in a Blu-Ray Disc less than three years old, start IM-ing their friends or updating their facebook pages.

I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.

END

Pure as the driven ho.

Politicians are whores. This we know to be fact.

So what makes anyone think the idealistic Mr. Smith in MR SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON would not buckle at the knees and subscribe to the corruption inherent in the system, were his career drawn out long enough?

Alan Grayson, the real life Democratic Florida senator in the 2009 Health Care Reform battle, is being called Mr. Smith. He swoops into a fray where his own party has exhibited such gutlessness, that for simply telling the truth, he is being called an “idealist.”

Director Frank Capra‘s MR SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON is a paean to idealists. If it weren’t for Mr. Grayson illustrating that idealists still skulk the dread halls of Congress, MR SMITH would look like pure fantasy…

No sex, no violence, no swearing, we wonder whether this is a tale involving congress at all. Then we see how a spineless governor is forced into appointing a junior senator to be a puppet of the Senate and we see that politics back in 1939 (before they invented sex, violence and swearing) worked a lot like it does these days.

When we see how the spineless governor appoints the junior senator – through a coin toss – we realize it’s exactly how politics works these days.

James Stewart is Jefferson Smith, the young, naive senator (hard to imagine James Stewart as “young” but he was also human once – like all of us). When he gives his acceptance speech, he shocks his senior senator, Joseph Paine (Claude Rains), by proclaiming, “He probably doesn’t remember me but he worked with my father.” But wouldn’t Smith’s lineage be one of the first things vetted before they swear him into office? Wouldn’t Paine think to ask, “Is Jefferson Smith related to that OTHER Smith that worked with me?” Politics then, as politics now: Before they bought her $150,000 wardrobe and threw her in the national arena to be one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the American Presidency, did anyone check the half-governor of Alaska for ethics and underage sex scandals?

When Smith arrives in Washington D.C., it’s Idealism City, as he goes tramping through a montage, visiting the landmarks: the Liberty Bell, the Capitol Building, the Constitution, the White House, the Lincoln Memorial with its inspiring words carved into a wall, that mean absolutely nothing to modern politicians. Patriotic themes, American flags superimposed flying proudly over the montage…

Smith’s reaction is that of a mildly retarded yokel, and when he is skewered in the newspapers for his naiveté, he goes around punching out all the offending reporters. Frank Capra may be a renowned director, but how childish is this cringe-tastic scene? Not one of the reporters who smeared Smith thinks to further smear him for his lunatic reaction of spending all day hunting them out in pubs and punching them.

Idealistic Smith meets his secretary, the smug Saunders (Jean Arthur), who educates him in the cynical ways of Washington. This is probably the only film where discussing how a bill goes through congress is foreplay. After Saunders describes the near impossibility of shepherding a bill through congress (like then, as now), Smith is idealistic/stupid enough to reply, “Shall we start writing it now or after dinner?” His cause becomes lobbying for funding for a Boy’s Camp – unlike today, the politicians who lobbied for underage boys back then were never caught with their hands down those boys’ pants.

Saunders does dissuade Smith for a moment – until he gives her Obama Speech Number 21 (that inspiring one) and she goes into soft focus so much the filmstock nearly deteriorated, until they started working on that sexy bill, bodies writhing in sensual penmanship.

Of course, bills do get passed in Congress – but never for idealistic reasons. Yet Smith annoyingly insists on being so Luke Skywalker about it, which becomes understandable once we realize his character is as much a fantasy as Skywalker. (But there’s that Alan Grayson thing…)

Smith discovers his hero and mentor, Senator Paine, is part of the corrupt system that he rails against, and is so crushed he goes into idealism overdrive for his Boys Camp funding. Until Paine double-crosses him and Swiftboats him before Swiftboating was invented.

When Smith sees 50,000 letters protesting him, his overacting goes into orbit to combat the corruption. To combat Smith’s overacting, Paine steps up his own overacting, storming into Congress and shouting a confession at the top of his voice on the “rotten political corruption of the state.” You’d have more chance of destroying a Death Star by firing into a vent no bigger than a womp rat than hearing an American congressman calling himself and the system corrupt.

MR SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON is lauded as one of the great American films. But it is embarrassing idealistic idiocy. Without any solutions. It relies on the age-old tactic of being a drama queen to get through the armor of corrupt politicians. But real world politicians do not ignore laypeople because they are too busy or too corrupt or even because they hold laypeople beneath their contempt. Laypeople appeal to ideals and morals and ethics that politicians had to shunt aside to get to their positions in the first place. You appeal to qualities and virtues that are not in the politician’s vocabulary any more. They are bereft of those ideals laypeople appeal to. THAT is why they do not listen to you – you are speaking antelope, and they are speaking lion.

Let me tell you one more thing about Alan Grayson: They’re calling him “Mr. Smith” – as an insult. That should tell you everything you need to know about Washington.

END