Posted on 08/15/2019 7:02:29 AM PDT by 4Runner
The script scoffs at the idea that power and prosperity come to those who merit them, even when it is dealing with Dorothy herself. She kills one Wicked Witch by crash-landing a house on her, and kills another (Margaret Hamilton) by splashing her with water. In both cases, the killings are accidents, the results of pure chance rather than Dorothy’s bravery or virtue. (Any water-soluble witch who leaves buckets of the stuff sitting around her castle is asking for trouble.) But in both cases, Dorothy is instantly hailed as a conquering heroine, just as the Wizard was when he touched down in Oz. The message is that people will march behind any authority figure who makes a splash, however undeserving they may be. It’s a subversive message in 2019, and it was even more pointed in 1939, when fascist dictators were stomping across Europe.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
In the book Dorothy is about 10 or 11 years old.
That Judy Garland was in her 20’s gives a peculiar vibe to the film.
TWOO would have been so much better with Nick Cage or Christopher Walken in there somewhere.
That movie gave me a lifelong fear of monkeys.
:)
Garland was 16.
As a child, I enjoyed all of Baum’s Oz books, and whichever other authors’ Oz books I could find.
All of Baum’s are here...
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Baum%2c%20L%2e%20Frank%20%28Lyman%20Frank%29%2c%201856%2d1919
Garland was 16 when they filmed that in 1938. She was born in 1922.
“she does travel from the barren middle-American countryside to a glittering urban centre, only to discover that it is ruled by fakers and populated by fools. It’s significant, too, that the Emerald City of Oz isn’t the turreted faux-medieval Ruritania where Snow White lives, nor is it the Istanbul-ish collection of domes and spires drawn by WW Denslow in the original book’s illustrations. Instead, it is a modernist mass of neon-striped skyscrapers – and, like almost everything else in the land of Oz, it is blatantly artificial. The film doesn’t send audiences over the rainbow to a mythical past, but to a garish parody of the noisy, industrialised present.”
I always thought it was just a movie....
Judy was either 16 or 17.
They had to make-do with flying monkeys to do surveillance on people while we now have the FBI.
This makes no sense.
Typical fake intellectual lunacy.
LOL!!! Cue up Pink Floyd at just the right moment...any moment, flip on the DVD and magical things happen...maybe!
OK...but even at 16, that is a long way physically from a 10 or 11 year old and it was difficult to reconcile the movie from the book, which I read many years after seeing the film.
It’s still a great film....not suggesting it isn’t. But in hindsight after reading the book, the film just had a strange vibe.
I knew an econ professor who said the Oz books were all really about economics—fiat currency vs the gold standard. Baum wrote some of them at the Hotel Coronado in San Diego where they have some of his things on display.
The power of the man behind the curtain ( deep state and MSM ) is an illusion.
This is ridiculous stuff.
The earlier theory about the Gold Standard/Silver Standard is more plausible but also probably just an intellectual’s fancy.
That one (for those who don’t know) has the yellow brick road (gold) taking you nowhere useful. But the silver shoes (ruby in the movie) can actually take you where you really want to be. The Munchkins are the oppressed farmers, the Winkies are the oppressed factory workers. The wicked witch of the East is the Bankers, the wicked witch of the West is the Railroads. The Cowardly Lion is William Jennings Bryan, and on and on and on.
It’s a detailed parable, but quite debatable if L. Frank Baum really meant to tell that story. Some intellectual from the 1960s thought he did.
Love that site! All of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books are there as well. Both Baum and Burroughs are wonderfully entertaining.
She was 16
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