Dorothy, the Small and Meek.

Rating: 9/10 (9 November 2007)

A stark and bloody tragedy in which a young girl is whisked into a surreal landscape, kills the first person she meets, then teams up with three strangers to kill again.
Actually, a beautiful fantasy, unimpeachably realized. Dorothy is knocked out and dreams she is transported to the Land of Oz, where only the Wizard of the Emerald City can send her and her dog, Toto, back to her home in Kansas. Along the way, she picks up three companions who hope that their defects can be corrected by the Wizard. Ray Bolger is the Scarecrow, Jack Haley is the Tin Man, and Bert Lahr the Cowardly Lion. They are all hated and opposed by the Wicked Witch of the East, Margaret Hamilton. It ends happily.
Just a few comments. One is that the three companions are kind of interesting. The Scarecrow and the Tin Man are flawed in some way -- one needs brains and the other needs a heart -- but they illustrate a gentleman's model of interaction. "Oh, thank you very much." And, "I wouldn't want to be a burden." And, in truth, the Scarecrow doesn't seem so dumb. Look at the way he tricks the talking trees into giving up their apples. And the Tin Man shows no signs whatever of having no heart, except that his chest doesn't tick. They're charming without being particularly funny. But the Cowardly Lion is a different matter. He speaks for Everyman. Lahr is outrageously hammy. He has a working-class New York accent. He brags and threatens and he's a complete hypocrite, which the others definitely are not. He's given the best lines and songs too. "What makes the Hottentot so hot? Whadda they got that I ain't got?" (Steatopygeia, the Hottentot apron, and a language that doesn't seem designed for human speech organs, among other things.) He's our man in Oz alright.
Dorothy, of course, is the central figure, and Judy Garland plays her splendidly -- weak and winsome, with huge watery brown eyes. And what a voice! She's a small girl but she seems to sing from her abdomen. She's just about right, cute but not the sort of "cute" that rouses the pedophile in a normal man. She has high hips, rather shapeless limbs, and no neck to speak of. Later in life, strung out behind leapers and sleepers with a booze backer, she became an idol of the gay subculture. They loved her in her middle age. Every performance raised the question of whether she would finish the show or collapse on the stage.
Another thing that strikes me. As in some other films, and speaking as a one-time day laborer who showed up in the line on Warren Street in New York, who does the work around here? In the Emerald City, everybody wears bright green costumes. Who presses them all? And then there's that "horse of a different color." Who cleans up after that horse? The songs by Harold Arlen and Yip Harberg are just fine, and the incidental music was heavily influenced by Russian composers. The wardrobe is outrageous.
The four of the principals, or five, counting Toto, go through so many adventures and tribulations that when the end comes and it's time for Dorothy to leave, even the most sophisticated and mature among us must weep abjectly, like a child. Maybe Dorothy should have stayed in Oz, married the Scarecrow, served as First Lady and run the place instead of leaving behind a rather shaky political structure. Queen Dorothy. After all, things weren't so smashing back in Kansas. Aunt Em was a pretty cold fish, her husband was emasculated, and the three laborers treated her as a nincompoop. It might have been good to be the Queen.
Here's a final thing that struck me. I must have watched this thing a dozen times or more, usually with my kid. I just finished seeing it again for the first time in ten years or so, and this time on an HD TV on an HD channel with Dolby 5.1 sound. The difference was remarkable. I had never been able to see, for instance, that the Tin Man is blotched with small rust patches all over, until he's buffed bright and shiny in the Emerald City. And every stitch of the Scarecrow is visible.
This is one you can't really miss. Your cultural literacy depends upon it.