It's the least respect that I can pay to the film and the filmmakers. No plot synopsis here; I don't have the gall to assume that anybody out there hasn't seen the movie before. But if through some incredible chance you haven't, all I can say is: do so immediately.
Make this the very next movie you watch. Literally, unless you're reading this right before going out to the theater. Put it at the top of your Netflix queue, borrow it from a friend.
It's not the best film ever made, but nobody's knowledge of film history is even plausibly complete without it. There's a convoluted bit of history involved that many of us already know, but forgive me: Louis B.
Mayer wanted a musical fantasy of his own to get back at that Walt Disney fella, and since MGM had the rights to all of L. Frank Baum's Oz stories, that made for an obvious choice. After a number of false starts on the screenplay, cast changes, and even a handful of directors, Victor Fleming was handed the reigns, and he shot all of the color footage before being called away to serve as yet another new director on the benighted Gone with the Wind.
The remainder of the script - the opening and closing sequences in Kansas - was handled by King Vidor, once a great silent director whose career started stumbling artistically in the s and went more or less to hell after The Wizard of Oz.
That said, he was in his best form here, shooting the soundstage version of the Midwestern prairies with the same affection for the farming life that informed his last great work, 's Our Daily Bread.
All this is another way of saying that the sequence which opens The Wizard of Oz was filmed very near the end of its production, and Vidor took advantage of that by setting up in the first shot a visual motif that would be repeated throughout: a road stretching out into the distance, with a character walking away from us towards the horizon: We'll see variations on this image over and over again throughout the movie, especially in its first hour: And nearly every one of those shots is paired with its exact opposite: the characters facing the camera, walking towards it.
These shots tell the other half of the story: to go someplace new, you have to come from someplace old, and by always setting the two points of view in opposition, the film is cautioning us to always remember where we came from.
Tellingly, the only exception to this rule of pairs is the very opening shot, in which Dorothy is traveling back home; even there, she turns briefly to watch for Toto, and thus faces the camera for a moment.
This is the visual representation of the duality that defines The Wizard of Oz : the desire to be someplace else, but the recognition that at the end of the day, there's no place like home. At first, mirroring Dorothy's journey, the desire to find someplace new is dominant: it's the same urge that underpins the justly-beautiful "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", the song that encapsulates the movie for so many viewers.
Over the rainbow, beyond the horizon, anywhere else but here: the primacy of the shots of the road stress over and over again that whatever is coming up is something you really want to find, and the beauty of the song often cited as the best ever written for the screen - debatable, but there's a lot of truth to it only adds to that feeling. Of course, the Kansas sequences - by far the most accomplished in the film from a directorial standpoint - do make that farm seem like quite a beautiful place to be.
Vidor's camera - I'm sure that cinematographer Harold Rosson had something to do with it, but it really does just reek of Vidor - frames the quaintly run-down sets with the greatest of care, and that sepia-tone monochrome gives the whole thing a rich, inviting quality. Besides that, there's the film's transition of colors: at the beginning, when Oz is a marvelous new place, everything is bright and beautiful. But the further along we go, the more color is leached out the Emerald City may be lovely, but it's so oppressively green!
By this point, everything visually appealing about Oz has been stripped away: the yellow brick road replaced by omnipresent greys. Over the course of the film, Dorothy realises that she wants to go back to her farm, and the gradual degradation of the color palette follows her arc.
Ah, color! Three-strip Technicolor was a new technology in , but not absolutely brand spanking new: it was first use in a feature in 's Becky Sharp , a film with very little else to recommend it.
By , there had already been at least two truly great films that made excellent use of the splashy excess of the process - Disney's animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs released at the tail end of , and Warner's The Adventures of Robin Hood , from the summer of - but I'd wager that it was with The Wizard of Oz that we had our first outright color masterpiece; that is, a film that doesn't just use color as a snazzy gimmick, but as a storytelling element in it's own right.
Not that the gimmickry isn't there, and still damn snazzy 70 years on: the shot where Dorothy walks out of her sepia colored house into the rich, garish colors of Oz is a magnificent bit of sleight-of-hand involving an double in a miscolored dress, and the transition is still enough to amaze all but the crabbiest viewer. But that's just razzle dazzle. I'm talking about actual, legitimate uses of color as a tool, and The Wizard of Oz does this in subtle, virtually unnoticeable ways.
Take Dorothy's celebrated gingham dress, with its white and blue checks. Once we leave Munchkinland, her dress is virtually the only source of blue to be found. We could write a whole article about the ending, which on the surface looks pretty straightforward.
After clicking her heels together three times, Dorothy wakes up in bed at home. Apparently, it was all a dream…. Or was it? Granted, on the surface, the signs are pretty clear, but on the other hand we're dealing with magic here.
Couldn't the slippers have restored things at the Gale farm by making everyone think she had hit her head? That would avoid a lot of awkward questions like, "where did you go? Why does that matter? Well for starters, there's the tricky question of what happened to Miss Gulch we presume she's gone, but have no way of knowing. More importantly, it raises the question of whether anything actually happened to Dorothy. If she just dreamed it all, it suggests that her entire journey is completely invalid, which is a bit of a cheat and could leave some people feeling cranky and upset.
The deeper you push on the issue, the more troubling logic questions arise, which kind of puts a damper on the whole thing. But as we said, it might be more than a dream, which leaves "Miss Gulch" dead back in Oz and Dorothy's adventures as concrete as the Kansas prairie. Both the book and movie have been recognised as classic literature for children and adults alike. Although they share the same concept, there are a few important differences between the novel and the film.
In the movie: It tells the story of a girl named Dorothy, who ends up in a tornado and gets hurled away. The Wizard of Oz acts as a rubber-band on my heart snapping me back to twinkles of emerald green and ruby red. At a young age, this movie had always been my favorite. Dorothy, a farm-girl who escapes her abnormally gray town, Kansas, is guided by the amiable Professor Marvel back home just in time for her to take a tornado ride to a colorful, magical land of buoyant little people. The good witch, Glinda, appears and advises her to make her way to the Emerald City, where the mysterious Wizard of Oz.
The film was released in and is also a musical. The music was written and composed by Herbert Rosson. Frank Baum.
0コメント