The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Victor Fleming · a film · 1939 · about 101 minutes · from the novel by L. Frank Baum · songs by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg
Mode
Musical fantasy; the fairy-tale quest told as a child’s dream, with a sepia frame around a Technicolor dream
Mythos
The child carried out of the world by a storm; the road and the three companions, each lacking one faculty; the good witch and the bad; the sealed city with a hidden god; the way home found on the girl’s own feet
Phase
From a farm in Kansas, through a cyclone, along a road to a city and a castle, and back to a bed in a farmhouse, the figures of the farm returning in Oz as its people
Presentation
Feature film, about 101 minutes, as released in August 1939; the Kansas scenes in sepia-toned black and white, the Oz scenes in three-strip Technicolor; eight principal songs or song sequences by Arlen and Harburg
Register
Tender in the barnyard, broad comedy on the road and in the city, nightmare in the castle; saturated colour under studio light, painted vistas, a cyclone of muslin
Scale
One girl, one farm, three companions, one city and one witch, inside a dream
Governing Proposition
A girl on a Kansas farm, whose dog is about to be taken by law, is carried off by a cyclone into a land in colour, walks a road with three companions who each lack one faculty of a person, finds that the god of the sealed city is a man at levers, and comes home to be told that there is no place like it. The wager of the film is that the change from monochrome to colour can be the threshold of a fable, that a dream can be built from the farm’s own people, and that a studio musical can make its songs the means by which its figures say what they are.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in sepia. On a farm in Kansas, Dorothy Gale, played by Judy Garland, lives with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry and three farmhands, and with her dog, Toto. Toto has bitten Miss Gulch, a neighbour who rides a bicycle, and Miss Gulch has an order from the sheriff to take him. The adults are busy with the hogs and the chickens and have no time to hear about it. Everything in this prologue is set up to be paid later: the woman on the bicycle, the three men at the hog pen, the threat to the dog.
Sent off to find a place where she will not get into trouble, Dorothy sings “Over the Rainbow” in the barnyard, a girl of sixteen held mostly in one setting, against the indifference of the farm and the warrant of the law. It is the film’s first summit and its premise: a longing for elsewhere, stated in a song written for the scene. Miss Gulch takes Toto in her bicycle basket; Toto escapes and runs home; Dorothy runs away with him, meets a travelling showman, Professor Marvel, who reads her future in a crystal ball and sends her back, and is still outside when the cyclone comes across the plain.
Victor Fleming directed the film for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and it was released in August 1939, about 101 minutes long. Mervyn LeRoy produced it; Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf wrote the screenplay from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900); Harold Rosson photographed it; Blanche Sewell edited it; the songs are by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg, the score adapted by Herbert Stothart. Richard Thorpe shot first and was replaced, George Cukor advised on Garland’s look and playing, Fleming directed the bulk of Oz, and King Vidor directed the Kansas scenes, including the song, after Fleming left for Gone with the Wind. All of it is one work.
Movement II
The cyclone is a funnel of muslin against a painted sky, and it still frightens. It lifts the farmhouse with Dorothy inside, and through the window the figures of Kansas go by in the storm, Miss Gulch on her bicycle among them, turning into a witch on a broom. The house falls. Dorothy goes to the door and opens it, and the film passes from sepia into colour.
The cut is made without a word, and it is the film’s thesis. The medium’s newest means, three-strip Technicolor, is made the threshold between two worlds: the drab one she has left and the vivid one she has entered. From here on the colour rule holds strictly, Kansas in monochrome and Oz in colour, and the film’s ambivalence lives in it. Whatever the ending will say about home, the audience has seen that Oz is more alive.
In Munchkinland the little people sing that the witch the house fell on is dead, and Glinda, the good witch, played by Billie Burke, comes in a bubble. Then the bad witch arrives in red smoke, Margaret Hamilton with a green face, the same actress who played Miss Gulch. The slippers, turned to ruby for Technicolor, are on Dorothy’s feet. She is told to follow the yellow brick road to the Emerald City, where a wizard may send her home.
Movement III
The road has a rule of addition. At each stop Dorothy meets a companion who lacks one faculty of a person, and each declares himself in a song that is his whole character: the Scarecrow, Ray Bolger, without a brain; the Tin Man, Jack Haley, without a heart; the Lion, Bert Lahr, without courage. The song has its variants for each, and the march that takes them on, “We’re Off to See the Wizard”, gathers them up. Nothing on this stretch could be lost.
The three are the three farmhands of the prologue, played by the same actors, and the doubling is the film’s construction: Oz is not a separate place but Kansas dreamed, its archetypes the farm’s own people transfigured. Adrian’s costumes and Jack Dawn’s makeup let the three comics act through straw, fur and tin, and Garland plays the centre straight, which is what holds a film of comics together.
Across the poppy field the Emerald City appears for the first time, green and grand. The Witch puts the travellers to sleep among the poppies, and snow wakes them. It is a delay the Witch’s plot barely needs, and the first point at which the film waits on itself.
Movement IV
In the city the film turns to revue: a song of the merry old land, a horse of a different colour, the travellers groomed and polished, and the Lion’s song of what he would do if he were king. These are vaudeville turns and the story waits through them. Then the audience with the Wizard: a great head in fire and smoke, which sets the impossible task, to bring back the Witch’s broomstick.
The winged monkeys pour from the Witch’s tower and carry Dorothy off. In the castle the Witch turns an hourglass of red sand, the measure of Dorothy’s life, and in the crystal Aunt Em’s face appears, calling for her, and turns into the Witch’s. It is the film’s height of dread, and its source is in the same frame: the terror of the dream is made from the farm, from a girl who ran away and the aunt she left.
The companions come for her, and on the way the film shows what the Wizard will later be unable to give: the Scarecrow makes the plan, the Tin Man feels for her, and the Lion, afraid, goes in. Cornered, Dorothy throws a bucket of water, and the Witch melts. The bad witch is killed by water, by accident, by a child.
Movement V
Back in the city, Toto pulls aside a curtain, and behind it is a man at levers, working the great head; the voice goes on commanding after it is seen (“Pay no attention”). The god of the sealed city is a man, played by Frank Morgan, who also played Professor Marvel and several figures of the city. Authority is apparatus, exposed and then excused.
What the Wizard can give the companions is the tokens: a diploma, a medal, a testimonial. They already have what they sought, and the film has shown it in their actions; the tokens are what institutions give to certify qualities they do not create. The Wizard leaves in his balloon without Dorothy, and Glinda tells her that the way home was on her own feet from the first. She clicks the heels of the slippers and says the moral, “no place like home”.
She wakes in sepia, in her bed in the farmhouse, with the farmhands at its foot and Professor Marvel at the window, and tells them that they were there. The frame says it was a dream, and the farmhands’ presence says that it was and was not. The moral is spoken in a monochrome room after the audience has seen Oz, and the film does not reconcile the two: it says home, and it has shown colour.
Act III · The Twelve
The Kansas prologue is lean: every element is set up to be paid in Oz, Miss Gulch on her bicycle, the three hands, the crystal ball, and the threat to Toto that sends Dorothy running and so keeps her out of the cellar when the cyclone comes. The road has a rule of addition, one companion and one song at each stop, and nothing on it could be lost. What fails the subtractive test is the middle. The Emerald City sequence, with its song, its horse of a different colour and its grooming, and the Lion’s song of what he would do as king, are vaudeville turns the story waits through; the poppy field is a delay the Witch’s plot barely needs. Necessary at both ends and on the road, assembled in the city.
Score: 7.8 / 10
What the film brings into the open is stated, and stated in image. The Wizard is a man at levers behind a curtain, and the great head is his projection: authority as apparatus, exposed and then excused. The second disclosure is sharper. The companions already have the brain, the heart and the courage they seek, shown in what they do on the road and at the castle, and the Wizard can give them only the tokens, a diploma, a medal, a testimonial, by which institutions certify qualities they do not create. That holds as a true statement about recognition. The third, a girl’s longing for elsewhere, is rendered with great force but resolves into a moral of home that the film’s own colour contradicts and does not examine. Real disclosure, simply drawn, of a fable’s size.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The film rises often and in every register the axis allows. Warm: “Over the Rainbow” sung in a barnyard by a girl of sixteen, held mostly in one setting; the door opened from sepia onto colour, one of the purest moments of transport the cinema has, made without a word. Dreadful: the cyclone advancing across the plain; the Witch’s arrival in red smoke in Munchkinland; the hourglass of red sand in the castle, with Aunt Em’s face in the crystal turning into the Witch’s; the winged monkeys pouring from the tower. Grand: the first sight of the Emerald City across the poppies, the head in fire and smoke. The height is high and the frequency real through the first two thirds. What holds it: the comedy of the city, and a last stretch where elevation gives way to farewell.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myth is built and bears the whole weight. A child carried out of the world by a storm, set on a road, gathering three companions who each lack a faculty of a person, mind, feeling, courage; a good witch and a bad one; a sealed city with a hidden god; a quest given as an impossible task, to bring back a broomstick; the bad witch killed by water, the god unmasked as a man, and the way home found to have been on the girl’s own feet from the first. The doubled cast makes it a dream-journey in the strict sense: the archetypes are the farm’s own people transfigured. The film made several of the images by which the myth is now known, the slippers turned to ruby for Technicolor, the green-faced witch, the curtain. Held below the top because the structure is Baum’s and drawn in a child’s clear strokes.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is Baum’s book and its earlier versions, the stage musical of 1902 and the silent film of 1925; Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), whose success prompted the purchase; the studio musical; and the colour sequences and Technicolor features already made by 1939. The turns are real. The change from sepia to Technicolor is made the threshold of the fable, so that the medium’s newest means carries the story from one world to another. The songs are written to the scene and move the story more than the revue numbers of the decade’s musicals did. The cast is doubled across the two worlds, so the dream is legible as dream. What holds the figure: the stake, large as it was, was a wager on a path Disney had just proven, by a studio at the height of its means, and the dream-frame and the fairy-tale musical were not new.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Make it all in colour, or all in black and white, and the passage from a drab world into a vivid one and back cannot be shown; the film’s whole ambivalence, that it tells the girl home is best while showing the audience that Oz is more alive, lives in the colour. Remove the doubled casting and Oz is a separate place, not Kansas dreamed, and the farmhands at the bedside at the end mean nothing. Remove the songs and the companions have no means to say what they lack, since each declares himself in a song that is his whole character. The form is the instrument, which is unusual in a studio film. What holds it: the city stretch is revue in form, and its numbers could be exchanged for others without the film knowing less.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The evidence of return is broad and long: eighty-seven years of viewing, much of it repeated, in childhood and again in adulthood, which is rarer evidence than criticism. The film has borne readings that change what is seen: the Wizard as political humbug; the companions’ tokens as a satire of credentials; the colour set against the moral; Garland’s Dorothy and her song taken up as an emblem by gay audiences in the decades after; Salman Rushdie’s monograph for the British Film Institute (1992), which reads it as a film about leaving home that pretends to be about returning; the dream as a child’s working-through of the threat to Toto. These yield on return. What limits the well: the formal depth is less than the semantic, the making is clear on first viewing, several readings are brought to the film more than found in it, and some of the yield is the book’s.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Released in 1939, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1930s. The intrinsic force is a synthesis more than a reorganisation: it fused the Technicolor spectacle, the integrated song and the fantasy narrative into the model of the live-action family fantasy, and made colour a meaning rather than an ornament in one decisive cut; it changed what films would try more than what they could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the annual network broadcasts from 1956 into the 1990s made it a ritual for generations of American viewers; its images and lines entered common speech, the man behind the curtain, “not in Kansas anymore”; it is reworked in The Wiz, Return to Oz, Lynch’s Wild at Heart and Wicked; it set the pattern of the portal fantasy. Much of that reach is presence rather than redirection of the medium, and the figure stays below the gate.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eighty-seven years. The form survives whole as released, and its restorations are repair. The one charge is that for some four decades the reissue and television prints replaced the sepia of the Kansas scenes with plain black and white; the alteration of the version in circulation was real, but it did not take the threshold away, since the change from monochrome to colour still read, and the sepia has been restored since 1989. Presence is as wide as any film’s: theatrical reissues, decades of annual broadcast, every home format, the first year of the National Film Registry in 1989, and use far beyond the cinema in song, costume and speech. The surface, a sound-stage musical, does not age as fashion, since it never pretended to the real world.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight throughout: Harold Rosson’s Technicolor, saturated and controlled under the light the process then demanded; A. Arnold Gillespie’s cyclone, a muslin funnel against a painted sky that still frightens; Cedric Gibbons’s sets and the painted vistas of road and city; Adrian’s costumes and Jack Dawn’s makeup, through which Bolger, Lahr and Haley act in straw, fur and tin; Arlen and Harburg’s songs, the best score written for an American film of the decade, threaded by Stothart’s underscore; Garland, sincere at the centre of a film of comics; Hamilton’s Witch. The costs: a film made by four directors shows its joins in tone; the painted backings read as such; Lahr plays to a theatre audience. It sits half a point below The Third Man and Chinatown.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Lahr’s vaudeville in the Emerald City, and the hourglass scene in the castle with Dorothy crying for Aunt Em. One is music hall, the other nightmare. They obey the same law, because both are a child’s dream, which mixes the comic and the terrible without apology, and the doubled cast ties every figure of Oz to a figure of the farm. The colour rule holds strictly: Kansas monochrome, Oz in colour, with no leak either way. The range is wide and mostly lawful. Where the law strains: the frame says it was a dream, while the last scene and the farmhands at the bed insist both that it was and that it was not; and the Wizard’s turn from fraud to benign uncle in one scene softens the castle’s danger after the fact.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Judged on what a fable of about 101 minutes holds. The family, in an orphan girl raised by an aunt and uncle on a working farm; labour, in the hands at the hog pen and a farm too busy to hear her; the law and property, in Miss Gulch’s order from the sheriff, which can take a dog; the natural order, in the cyclone; power and the state, in the Wizard’s city and its hidden machinery; consciousness, in the whole of Oz as a dream. They are held in one structure by the doubling, so this is integration, not a list. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the scale at which they are held: the farm is never seen in its economy, the law is a single spinster, the state is a humbug, and history and the sacred are absent.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, The Archetypal Deep at 8.6, The Made at 8.5. A film whose presence is as wide as any film’s, across eighty-seven years; a myth built and load-bearing, whose images the film itself made; a making carried by colour, cyclone, songs and makeup.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: family, labour, law, nature, the state and consciousness are held in one structure, at the scale of a fable, without economy, history or the sacred. Above it, The Inevitable, The Unconcealment and The Swerve at 7.8: a city stretch the story waits through, a moral of home stated and not examined, and a wager placed on a path already proven.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.5, The Living Form at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 falls short, and The Unconcealment at 7.8 and The Swerve at 7.8 fall well short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.8, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by the Epochal Gate, on three of its five axes, and by its aggregate, 8.1 from a sum of 97.5, against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Wizard of Oz as released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in August 1939, about 101 minutes, with the Kansas prologue and epilogue in sepia tone as first exhibited and the Oz scenes in three-strip Technicolor, in English: directed by Victor Fleming, with work by Richard Thorpe, George Cukor and King Vidor counted as part of the one film; produced by Mervyn LeRoy; screenplay by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf from L. Frank Baum’s novel; photographed by Harold Rosson; edited by Blanche Sewell; songs by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg, score adapted by Herbert Stothart; art direction under Cedric Gibbons, costumes by Adrian, special effects by A. Arnold Gillespie. The 1949 and 1955 reissues and most television prints for decades replaced the sepia with plain black and white; the sepia was restored on home video from 1989 and stands in current restorations, and the sepia version is the one judged. Material cut before release, among it the “Jitterbug” number and a Kansas reprise of “Over the Rainbow”, was never part of the released film and is neither judged nor charged as a loss. No print, script or recording was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and otherwise described. Figures that could not be verified, among them the exact division of the footage among the directors, the length of the Kansas prologue, the shot count, the average shot length and the share of dialogue, are not given.