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Review: "The Wizard of Oz" (1939)
13 years ago
With all the buzz I've always heard about the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz, with it being constantly praised for decades as "the best fantasy film evah", I decided to finally see it.
Now, the fantasy genre relies for a great deal on special effects, production and set design, and I've always heard people rave about this movie exactly for that. I was appaled to see how cheap it actually looked, even for the time when it was made. Did they blow most of their budget on the Technicolor process? The contemporary Gone with the wind (1939) looks much more lush, vast, whimsical, and cinematic in comparison, and so does Münchhausen (1943). With the poor production design, special FX, and tiny plastic sets, I constantly felt like I was really watching an overlong episode of Welcome to Pooh Corner ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcom.....to_Pooh_Corner ). Photography was accordingly cheap and TV-like as well, with only two Dutch angle shots of the evil witch in her castle looking mildly ambitious enough to be of interest.
Most of the acting was bad enough it could've fit into an Ed Wood movie. Judy Garland looked like James Cagney with a wig put on him throughout the movie. Although I instantly recognized thousands of dialogue snippets from pop culture, I was surprised that they'd made it into the public culture mostly due to this movie, as the plot seemed as thin as a leaf of toast with only one side to it and made me laugh out loud several times with its ridiculous, inconsequential deus-ex-machinas. So at one time, it seems like you can call for help wherever you are in Oz and the good witch will help you, at other times she seemingly turns a deaf ear to your woes for no reason given whatsoever. The way the evil witch just waved an hourglass to scare Dorothy, with how it wasn't even pronounced in any way by any remotely-talented photography or special FX made it a pure trash scene that had me rolling on the floor because of how bad and amateurish it was.
Countless other ridiculous plotholes, technical weaknesses, and acting failures like that that I'd never expect from such a "timeless classic", even if you call it a movie for kids. There's much more timeless charm and brains in many Disney cartoon shorts to begin with. The cheesy acting reminded me of another ridiculous desaster: The recent 2011 TV adaptation of Marcel Proust's In search of lost time where the director thought, hey, the novel is all subjective perception anyway, so let's make everything as cheesy, uninvolving, obtrusive, amateurish, and superficial as possible! Other than The Wizard of Oz, she was given good set design and lighting appropriately reminiscent of Luchino Visconti at least, though that might have been due to misunderstandings of the technical crew and not caring on the director's side anyway.
Bottom line: It may be a nice past-time experience for 3-year-olds used to TV shows such as above-mentioned Welcome to Pooh Corner and Teletubbies, but with its cheap production design and thin plot it certainly will have lost its charm for kids aged 8 or above. The film seems notably to me mostly for its catchy tunes and the nice technicolor, but that's pretty much all.
One curious thing about the production caught my interest though: At least 80% of the movie looked deliberately undercranked to me, where the film was obviously shot silent at somewhere between 12-16fps, and then edited, dubbed, and scored in post-production at 24fps playback speed, making all the movements, whether in Oz or the b/w real world, look jerky and fast on closer examination.
The musical numbers in-synch with choreographies don't contradict this observation: The dwarf songs sound like they're played back at double speed anyway, and the other songs heard at normal speed and pitch must have been played back at something like half-speed (depending on whether the shooting framerate was 12 or 16fps) during shooting for the actors to mime at. It's a technique very common in music videos since at least the early 80s. Also, many of the choreographic stunts during songs in the movie look much more physically plausible and humanly possible when played back at somewhere between 12-16fps.
Shooting with silent cameras running at 12-16fps, then adding audio in post-production at 24fps playback was a technique common with early talkies that can also be seen in all the entries of the 1939-1946 series of Sherlock Holmes films (where all the scenes were shot like that), in most of the insert shots aka cut-aways without dialogue in Fritz Lang's M (1931), and I think also throughout all of the Thin Man films (1934-1947). For example, if we were to slow down the Sherlock Holmes films to something like 12-16fps, the movements would be normal again (as that was the original shooting framerate), but the audio (being added later at a 24fps playback speed) would be much too deep in pitch.
So does anyone know what framerate The Wizard of Oz was actually shot at?
Now, the fantasy genre relies for a great deal on special effects, production and set design, and I've always heard people rave about this movie exactly for that. I was appaled to see how cheap it actually looked, even for the time when it was made. Did they blow most of their budget on the Technicolor process? The contemporary Gone with the wind (1939) looks much more lush, vast, whimsical, and cinematic in comparison, and so does Münchhausen (1943). With the poor production design, special FX, and tiny plastic sets, I constantly felt like I was really watching an overlong episode of Welcome to Pooh Corner ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcom.....to_Pooh_Corner ). Photography was accordingly cheap and TV-like as well, with only two Dutch angle shots of the evil witch in her castle looking mildly ambitious enough to be of interest.
Most of the acting was bad enough it could've fit into an Ed Wood movie. Judy Garland looked like James Cagney with a wig put on him throughout the movie. Although I instantly recognized thousands of dialogue snippets from pop culture, I was surprised that they'd made it into the public culture mostly due to this movie, as the plot seemed as thin as a leaf of toast with only one side to it and made me laugh out loud several times with its ridiculous, inconsequential deus-ex-machinas. So at one time, it seems like you can call for help wherever you are in Oz and the good witch will help you, at other times she seemingly turns a deaf ear to your woes for no reason given whatsoever. The way the evil witch just waved an hourglass to scare Dorothy, with how it wasn't even pronounced in any way by any remotely-talented photography or special FX made it a pure trash scene that had me rolling on the floor because of how bad and amateurish it was.
Countless other ridiculous plotholes, technical weaknesses, and acting failures like that that I'd never expect from such a "timeless classic", even if you call it a movie for kids. There's much more timeless charm and brains in many Disney cartoon shorts to begin with. The cheesy acting reminded me of another ridiculous desaster: The recent 2011 TV adaptation of Marcel Proust's In search of lost time where the director thought, hey, the novel is all subjective perception anyway, so let's make everything as cheesy, uninvolving, obtrusive, amateurish, and superficial as possible! Other than The Wizard of Oz, she was given good set design and lighting appropriately reminiscent of Luchino Visconti at least, though that might have been due to misunderstandings of the technical crew and not caring on the director's side anyway.
Bottom line: It may be a nice past-time experience for 3-year-olds used to TV shows such as above-mentioned Welcome to Pooh Corner and Teletubbies, but with its cheap production design and thin plot it certainly will have lost its charm for kids aged 8 or above. The film seems notably to me mostly for its catchy tunes and the nice technicolor, but that's pretty much all.
One curious thing about the production caught my interest though: At least 80% of the movie looked deliberately undercranked to me, where the film was obviously shot silent at somewhere between 12-16fps, and then edited, dubbed, and scored in post-production at 24fps playback speed, making all the movements, whether in Oz or the b/w real world, look jerky and fast on closer examination.
The musical numbers in-synch with choreographies don't contradict this observation: The dwarf songs sound like they're played back at double speed anyway, and the other songs heard at normal speed and pitch must have been played back at something like half-speed (depending on whether the shooting framerate was 12 or 16fps) during shooting for the actors to mime at. It's a technique very common in music videos since at least the early 80s. Also, many of the choreographic stunts during songs in the movie look much more physically plausible and humanly possible when played back at somewhere between 12-16fps.
Shooting with silent cameras running at 12-16fps, then adding audio in post-production at 24fps playback was a technique common with early talkies that can also be seen in all the entries of the 1939-1946 series of Sherlock Holmes films (where all the scenes were shot like that), in most of the insert shots aka cut-aways without dialogue in Fritz Lang's M (1931), and I think also throughout all of the Thin Man films (1934-1947). For example, if we were to slow down the Sherlock Holmes films to something like 12-16fps, the movements would be normal again (as that was the original shooting framerate), but the audio (being added later at a 24fps playback speed) would be much too deep in pitch.
So does anyone know what framerate The Wizard of Oz was actually shot at?
The whole movie was shot in the studio and i think that was deliberately done.