Step Across This Line (3 page)

The tornado that I’ve suggested is the product of the Gale in Dorothy’s name was actually made of muslin stiffened with wire. A props man had to lower himself into the muslin tunnel to help pull the needles through and push them out again. “It was pretty uncomfortable when we reached the narrow end,” he confessed. The discomfort was worth it, because that tornado, swooping down on Dorothy’s home, creates the second genuinely mythic image of
The Wizard of Oz
: the archetypal myth, one might say, of moving house.

In this, the transitional sequence of the movie, when the unreal reality of Kansas gives way to the realistic surreality of the world of wizardry, there is, as befits a threshold moment, much business involving windows and doors. First, the farmhands open up the doors of the storm shelter, and Uncle Henry, heroic as ever, persuades Auntie Em that they can’t afford to wait for Dorothy. Second, Dorothy, returning with Toto from her attempt at running away, struggles against the wind to open the screen door of the main house; this outer door is instantly ripped from its hinges and blows away. Third, we see the others closing the doors of the storm shelter. Fourth, Dorothy, inside the house, opens and shuts the doors of various rooms, calling out frantically for Auntie Em. Fifth, Dorothy goes to the storm shelter, but its doors are locked against her. Sixth, Dorothy retreats back inside the main house, her cries for Auntie Em now weak and fearful; whereupon a window, echoing the screen door, blows off its hinges and knocks her cold. She falls upon the bed, and from now on magic reigns. We have passed through the film’s most important gateway.

This device—the knocking out of Dorothy—is the most radical and in some ways the worst of all the changes wrought to Frank Baum’s original conception. For in the book there is no question that Oz is real, that it is a place of the same order, though not of the same type, as Kansas. The film, like the TV soap opera
Dallas,
introduces an element of bad faith when it permits the possibility that everything that follows is a dream. This type of bad faith cost
Dallas
its audience and eventually killed it off. That
The Wizard of Oz
avoided the soap opera’s fate is a testament to the general integrity of the film, which enabled it to transcend this hoary cliché.

While the house flies through the air, looking in longshot like a tiny toy, Dorothy “awakes.” What she sees through the window is a sort of movie—the window acts as a cinema screen, a frame within the frame—which prepares her for the new sort of movie she is about to step into. The effect shots, sophisticated for their time, include a lady knitting in her rocking chair as the tornado whirls her by, a cow standing placidly in the eye of the storm, two men rowing a boat through the twisting air, and, most important of all, the figure of Miss Gulch on her bicycle, which transforms, as we watch it, into the figure of the Wicked Witch of the West on her broomstick, her cape flying out behind her, and her huge cackling laugh rising above the noise of the storm.

The house lands. Dorothy emerges from her bedroom with Toto in her arms. We have reached the moment of color.

The first color shot, in which Dorothy walks away from the camera toward the front door, is deliberately dull, to match the preceding monochrome. But once the door is open, color floods the screen. In these color-glutted days it’s hard to imagine a time when color films were still relatively new. Thinking back once again to my Bombay childhood in the 1950s, when Hindi movies were all in black-and-white, I can recall the excitement of the advent of color. In an epic about the Grand Mughal, the emperor Akbar, entitled
Mughal-e-Azam,
there was only one reel of color cinematography, featuring a dance at court by the fabled Anarkali. Yet this reel alone guaranteed the film’s success, drawing in the crowds by the million.

The makers of
The Wizard of Oz
clearly decided they were going to make their color as colorful as possible, much as Michelangelo Antonioni, a very different sort of filmmaker, did years later in his first color feature,
Red Desert.
In the Antonioni film, color is used to create heightened, often surrealistic effects.
The Wizard of Oz
likewise goes for bold, expressionist splashes—the yellow of the Brick Road, the red of the Poppy Field, the green of the Emerald City and of the witch’s skin. So striking were these colors that, soon after seeing the film as a child, I began to dream of green-skinned witches. Years afterward, I gave these dreams to the narrator of
Midnight’s Children,
having completely forgotten their source: “No colors except green and black the walls are green the sky is black . . . the Widow is green but her hair is black as black.” In this stream-of-consciousness dream sequence a nightmare of Indira Gandhi is fused with the equally nightmarish figure of Margaret Hamilton: a coming together of the Wicked Witches of the East and West.

Dorothy, stepping into color, framed by exotic foliage with a cluster of dwarfy cottages behind her and looking like a blue-smocked Snow White, no princess but a good demotic American gal, is clearly struck by the absence of her familiar homey gray.
Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.
That camp classic of a line has detached itself from the movie to become a great American catchphrase, endlessly recycled, even turning up as an epigraph to Thomas Pynchon’s mammoth paranoid fantasy of World War II,
Gravity’s Rainbow,
whose characters’ destiny lies not “behind the moon, beyond the rain” but “beyond the zero” of consciousness, where lies a land at least as odd as Oz.

Dorothy has done more than step out of grayness into Technicolor. She has been
unhoused,
and her homelessness is underlined by the fact that, after all the door-play of the transitional sequence, she will not enter any interior at all until she reaches the Emerald City. From tornado to Oz, Dorothy never has a roof over her head.

Out there amid the giant hollyhocks, whose blooms look like old His-Master’s-Voice gramophone trumpets; out there in the vulnerability of open space, albeit open space that isn’t at all like the prairie, Dorothy is about to outdo Snow White by a factor of nearly fifty. You can almost hear the MGM studio chiefs plotting to put the Disney hit in the shade, not just by providing in live action almost as many miraculous effects as the Disney cartoonists created, but also in the matter of little people. If Snow White had seven dwarfs, then Dorothy Gale, from the star called Kansas, would have three hundred and fifty. There’s some disagreement about how this many Munchkins were brought to Hollywood and signed up. The official version is that they were provided by an impresario named Leo Singer. John Lahr’s biography of his father, Bert, tells a different tale, which I prefer for reasons Roger Rabbit would understand—i.e., because it is funny. Lahr quotes the film’s casting director, Bill Grady:

Leo [Singer] could only give me 150. I went to a midget monologist called Major Doyle. . . . I said I had 150 from Singer. “I’ll not give you one if you do business with that son-of-a-bitch.” “What am I gonna do?” I said. “I’ll get you the 350.” . . . So I called up Leo and explained the situation. . . . When I told the Major that I’d called off Singer, he danced a jig right on the street in front of Dinty Moore’s.

The Major gets these midgets for me. . . . I bring them out West in buses. . . . Major Doyle took the [first three] buses and arrived at Singer’s house. The Major went to the doorman. “Phone upstairs and tell Leo Singer to look out the window.” It took about ten minutes. Then Singer looked from his fifth-floor window. And there were all those midgets in those buses in front of his house with their bare behinds sticking out the window.

This incident became known as Major Doyle’s Revenge.
*3

What began with a strip continued cartoonishly. The Munchkins were made up and costumed exactly like 3-D cartoon figures. The Mayor of Munchkinland is quite implausibly rotund, the Coroner (
and she’s not only merely dead / She’s really most sincerely dead
) reads the Witch of the East’s death notice from a scroll while wearing a hat with an absurdly scroll-like brim;
*4
the quiffs of the Lollipop Kids, who appear to have arrived in Oz by way of Bash Street and Dead End, stand up more stiffly than Tintin’s. But what might have been a grotesque and unappetizing sequence—it is, after all, a celebration of death—instead becomes the scene in which
The Wizard of Oz
captures its audience once and for all, allying the natural charm of the story to brilliant MGM choreography, which punctuates large-scale routines with neat little set-pieces like the dance of the Lullaby League, or the Sleepy Heads awaking mobcapped and benightied out of cracked blue eggshells set in a giant nest. And of course there’s also the infectious gaiety of Arlen and Harburg’s exceptionally witty ensemble number, “Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead.”

Arlen was a little contemptuous of this song and the equally memorable “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” calling them his “lemon-drop songs”—perhaps because in both cases the real inventiveness lies in Harburg’s lyrics. In Dorothy’s intro to “Ding, Dong,” Harburg embarks on a pyrotechnic display of A-A-A rhyming (
the wind began to switch / the house to pitch;
until at length we meet the
witch, to satisfy an itch / Went flying on her broomstick thumbing for a hitch;
and
what happened then was rich . . .
). As with a vaudeville barker’s alliterations, we cheer each new rhyme as a sort of gymnastic triumph. Verbal play continues to characterize both songs. In “Ding, Dong,” Harburg invents punning word-concertinas:

Ding, Dong, the witch is dead!

—
Whicholwitch?

—The wicked witch!

This technique found much fuller expression in “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” becoming the real “hook” of the song:

We’re off to see the Wizard,

The wonderful
Wizzardavoz,

We hear he is a
Whizzavawiz,

If ever a
whizztherwoz.

If
everoever a whizztherwoz

The
Wizzardavoz
is one because . . .

Is it too fanciful to suggest that Harburg’s use throughout the film of internal rhymes and assonances is a conscious echo of the “rhyming” of the plot itself, the paralleling of characters in Kansas with those in Oz, the echoes of themes bouncing back and forth between the monochrome and Technicolor worlds?

Few of the Munchkins could actually sing their lines, as they mostly didn’t speak English. They weren’t required to do much in the movie, but they made up for this by their activities off-camera. Some film historians try to play down the stories of sexual shenanigans, knife-play, and general mayhem, but the legend of the Munchkin hordes cutting a swathe through Hollywood is not easily dispelled. In Angela Carter’s novel
Wise Children
there is an account of a fictitious version of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
that owes much to the Munchkins’ antics and, indeed, to Munchkinland:

The concept of this wood was scaled to the size of fairy folk, so all was twice as large as life. Larger. Daisies big as your head and white as spooks, foxgloves as tall as the tower of Pisa that chimed like bells if shook. . . . Even the wee folk were real; the studio scoured the country for dwarfs. Soon, true or not, wild tales began to circulate—how one poor chap fell into the toilet and splashed around for half an hour before someone dashed in for a piss and fished him out of the bowl; another one got offered a high chair in the Brown Derby when he went out for a hamburger.

Amidst all this Munchkining we are given two very different portraits of grown-ups. The Good Witch Glinda is pretty in pink (well, prettyish, even if Dorothy is moved to call her “beautiful”). She has a high, cooing voice, and a smile that seems to have jammed. She has one excellent gag-line. After Dorothy disclaims witchy status, Glinda inquires, pointing at Toto:
Well, then, is
that
the witch?
This joke apart, she spends the scene simpering and looking vaguely benevolent and loving and rather too heavily powdered. It is interesting that though she is the Good Witch, the goodness of Oz does not inhere in her. The people of Oz are naturally good, unless they are under the power of the Wicked Witch (as is shown by the improved behavior of her soldiers after she melts). In the moral universe of the film, only evil is external, dwelling solely in the dual devil-figure of Miss Gulch / Wicked Witch.

(A parenthetical worry about Munchkinland: is it not altogether too pretty, too kempt, too sweetly sweet for a place that was, until Dorothy’s arrival, under the absolute power of the Wicked Witch of the East? How is it that this squashed Witch had no castle? How could her despotism have left so little mark upon the land? Why are the Munchkins so relatively unafraid, hiding only briefly before they emerge, and giggling while they hide? The heretical thought occurs: maybe the Witch of the East
wasn’t as bad as all that
—she certainly kept the streets clean, the houses painted and in good repair, and, no doubt, such trains as there might have been running on time. Moreover, and again unlike her sister, she seems to have ruled without the aid of soldiers, policemen, or other regiments of oppression. Why, then, was she so hated? I only ask.)

Glinda and the Witch of the West are the only two symbols of power in a film which is largely about the powerless, and it’s instructive to “unpack” them. They are both women, and a striking aspect of
The Wizard of Oz
is its lack of a male hero—because for all their brains, heart, and courage, it’s impossible to see the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion as classic Hollywood leading men. The power center of the film is a triangle at whose corners are Dorothy, Glinda, and the Witch. The fourth point, at which the Wizard is thought for most of the film to stand, turns out to be an illusion. The power of men is illusory, the film suggests. The power of women is real.

Of the two witches, good and bad, can there be anyone who’d choose to spend five minutes with Glinda? The actress who played her, Billie Burke, the ex-wife of Flo Ziegfeld, sounds every bit as wimpy as her role (she was prone to react to criticism with a trembling lip and a faltering cry of “Oh, you’re
browbeating
me!”). By contrast, Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West seizes hold of the movie from her very first green-faced snarl. Of course Glinda is “good” and the Wicked Witch “bad,” but Glinda is a trilling pain in the neck, while the Wicked Witch is lean and mean. Check out their clothes: frilly pink versus slimline black.
No contest.
Consider their attitudes to their fellow-women: Glinda simpers upon being called beautiful, and denigrates her unbeautiful sisters; whereas the Wicked Witch is in a rage because of her sister’s death, demonstrating, one might say, a commendable sense of solidarity. We may hiss at her, and she may terrify us as children, but at least she doesn’t embarrass us the way Glinda does. True, Glinda exudes a sort of raddled motherly safeness, while the Witch of the West looks, in this scene anyhow, curiously frail and impotent, obliged to mouth empty-sounding threats—
I’ll bide my time. But you just try and keep out of my way
—but just as feminism has sought to rehabilitate old pejorative words such as “hag,” “crone,” “witch,” so the Wicked Witch of the West could be said to represent the more positive of the two images of powerful womanhood on offer here.