7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great Oz, Great Rushdie book, February 21, 2004
This review is from: The Wizard of Oz (BFI Film Classics) (Paperback)
A great book for Rushdie -- one can feel the limitations perhaps set by the editors on him -- usually Rushdie runs on, but here all of his insight and enthusiasm is pared down into an economical essay one can enjoy in less than an afternoon. Oh, it's a wonderful book on the Wizard movie, too.
Rushdie, as outsider/insider, helps one return to the joy of first seeing the movie; he also provides some of the more delicious gossip and facts about this movie -- unlikely as I am to ever read a full book the film, Rushdie captures surely some of its best behind-the-scenes stories (yes: midgets, sweating, original actors, and the slippers).
This book is a great read: the author is able to remind us how so many good elements (the visual storytelling, Garland's voice, the lyrics, the political incorrectness) bleed together into this wonderful movie.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rushdie at his best - an essential guide to the Wiz, March 14, 2001
This review is from: The Wizard of Oz (BFI Film Classics) (Paperback)
The Wizard of Oz is a central piece of Twentieth Century mythmaking. It's hard to imagine the history of cinema without it. And yet I have often told people (adults, that is) it's one of my favourite films, only to be met with blank incomprehension or wry amusement. After all, what's an adult doing admiring a film so obviously aimed at children?
This short book by Salman Rushdie (author of Midnight's Children and The Ground Beneath Her Feet) goes a long way towards showing exactly why The Wizard of Oz is so important to our culture. I particularly liked Rushdie's analysis of Dorothy as a migrant in a strange land - the quintessential experience of so many 'new' Americans.
He is also excellent on the juxtaposition of colour and black & white, and on the nature of good and evil in the film. There is plenty of fascinating film 'trivia' here too, enough to make this book a must for film buffs. In fact it's a paragon of film criticism. I can recommend the other books in this series from the BFI, but none are as essential as this one.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A lovable companion to take with you to 'Oz'., January 28, 2002
This review is from: The Wizard of Oz (BFI Film Classics) (Paperback)
'The Wizard of Oz' is a miraculous rarity in the history of cinema. It is an intricately structured work, whose themes, images, narratives and characters echo and refract each other across its story. Surely for this to be possible, we would expect the over-arching organising sensibility of a Great Auteur, a Hitchcock or a Hawks. But 'Oz' has none - neither the writer of the source novel, L. Frank Baum; nor the many scriptwriters usually at each others' throats; nor the producers Mervyn Leroy or Arthur Freed; not the directors, credited and uncredited, can claim the honour of solely creating this masterpiece. Out of a series of accidents came a near-perfect work, just as out of the Big Bang, the intricacy of living organimsms, 'simply happened'. As Salman Rushdie remarks, 'Oz' is 'an authorless text'.
Rushdie's many insights into this film - which is so far beyond labels such as 'great' or 'art' or 'important' that it has shaped the cultural consciousness of audiences the world over for decades - are more literary than cinematic. After a charming introduction, in which the for-its-time-spectacular-and-fantastic 'Oz' is considered quite routine for a child who grew up with the excesses of Bollywood, he sits down at the TV with a notebook in hand, throwing out ideas and interpretations as he goes along. His main idea is that, in spite of the sell-out ending (as he perceives it), the film's message is not 'there's no place like home', but that once you undertake the kind of journey Dorothy makes, you can never go back, you must make your own homes, your own destiny (Rushdie, in hiding from the Ayotollah and his fatwa when the book was written, remakes Dorothy in his migrating image). The film up to this point has been so radical and liberating, that Rushdie sees the ending as the usual Hollywood moralising.
I've always thought that if your theory has to reject some of the text, than it's not much of a theory; but Rushdie is persuasive. His description of monochrome Kansas as hell-on-earth; his account of Dorothy's growth and the wonder of colourful Oz; his charting the rites-of-passage that reveals to Dorothy the inadequacy of adults; are intelligent and witty. His reverie on the fate of movie stand-ins, the audience's relationship to stars and film, and on the conflict between the idealism of a film and the reality of its making; is beautifully, philosophicallly moving. His singling out genius wordsmith Yip Harburg and that unforgettble witch Margaret Hamilton, is generous.
On the downside, his short-sighted cavilling over inconsistencies sees him miss the point on a few occassions; and the appendix, a short story 'At the Auction of the Ruby slippers', which with laboured and long-winded 'humour' fails to ape the post-modern, culture-conscious fantasy of Angela Carter (to whom the mongraph is dedicated), is unreadable.
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