Customer Reviews

The Wizard of Oz (BFI Film Classics)

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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.

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.

'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.

One of the first long pieces Salman Rushdie wrote after the fatwa issued against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini, this charming little 1992 study of THE WIZARD OF OZ is one of their most charming in the BFI catalogue, and tells us perhaps more about the workings of one of the most important living novelists (himself a kind of wizard exiled from home) as it does about the 1939 MGM classic. The monograph consists of two halves: an extended essay on THE WIZARD OF OZ itself, and Rushdie's by-now famous short story "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers," a fantasia on the famous early 70s purchase of one of the many pairs of slippers crafted for the film for what was then the unbelievable price of $15,000. The essay on the film brings up all kinds of intriguing departure points for Rushdie: he emphasizes its importance to his own imaginative work (the depiction of the Widow in MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN, he now realizes, owes much to the unforgettable appearance of Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West), offers surprising analyses of the film's treatments of exile and return, and compares it to the musicals of Bollywood. The essay disappoints only by being too short: you wish it would go on longer and tell you even more.

I stumbled accross this by accident in a video rental store a few years ago, with no prior affinity for Rushdie.

The book is an insightful and unpretentious short essay that explores what makes The Wizard of Oz emotionally important to viewers. It's written in a personal voice: Rushdie retraces how the various characters and scenes struck him at different times in his life, how certain things made sense and others never did to him. It's very unusual and one of my absolute favorite pieces of writing on any subject.

I didn't realize until now that this was an actual book and I haven't read the entire work, but I did read the "New Yorker" essay which I'm assuming takes excerpts.

Until reading that piece, Rushdie had only crossed my consciousness because of the death sentence and reading this essay was a revelation.

It is warm, passionate, witty, and filled with the sense of fear and wonder that are the gift of great movies. If you are like me, you will leave this work with an appreciation for why you were right to love the Wizard of Oz and an even more passionate desire to read more of Rushdie's novels and essays.

Watching a film armed with a "remote control zapper" can yield insights unknown to the non-stop viewer. After all, freeze frames, with their enviable power to stop time, allow for far more than infinitesimal nanoseconds of reflection. Using the "pause" trigger in this way arguably transforms it into an educational tool.

Salman Rushdie, who usually frolics in literature's realm, applies this method to one of America's most beloved and taken for granted films, 1939's "The Wizard of Oz." Many in the US have let this film sink into their collective cultural unconscious without questioning its presuppositions, implications and logic. Rushdie, wielding his wireless time control device, cuts to the essence. Insights spew from the paragraphs. Almost immediately, he equates the film's story, mood, and themes to the "Bollywood" movies he grew up on in India. One exception to this comparison remains the film's secular sub themes. He summarizes, "nothing is deemed more important than the loves, cares, and needs of human beings." It also had enduring literary influence on his very first and later works.

But he doesn't like the "cloying" ending and asks the almost heretical question: who would want to return to THAT Kansas? Those of us who absorbed the movie as children of course wanted, empathetically, to see Dorothy return to the safety of her parents and home. But, Rushdie argues, Dorothy's gray scale Kansas is no paradise: her parents seem impotent in the face of Miss Gulch's (aka "Wicked Witch of the West") threats against Toto (who annoys Rushdie; and in yet another probable heresy to fans, he writes, "Toto: that little yapping hairpiece of a creature, that meddlesome rug!"). So why would she want to return? Rushdie would have preferred a Dorothy who outgrows Kansas and remains in fully actualized Technicolor splendor. In the film she grows up and... goes back. Obviously, Hollywood did not want to encourage runaway fantasies. And the "there's no place like home" mantra delivers the much disseminated Great Depression message that "everything's okay. What you have is just fine." Still, he has a point about the ending's "mixed message." Longtime "Oz" fans may not appreciate this rumination, but Rushdie has never been one to please for the sake of pleasing (as his work and life more than manifest).

Rushdie includes other revealing tidbits. For one, simple geometric shapes symbolize home and safety, while the shapeless and twisted stands for evil. Not only that, the movie presents, like the "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" of today and the stage melodramas of yesterday, a strict visual and moral dichotomy of good and evil. The Good Witch Glinda's famous quote, "only bad witches are ugly," crystallizes this idea as only sound bites can. A tragedy was also averted: the producers almost removed "Over the Rainbow." Rushdie candidly calls this, "proof positive that Hollywood makes its masterpieces by accident, because it simply does not know what it is doing." In a sad revelation, the cast didn't seem to have any fun during the filming. Margaret Hamilton was injured, as was her double, and felt ostracized. Philandering Munchkins took Hollywood by storm. The film also resembles a postmodern "authorless text" by virtue of its voluminous screenwriters and recuttings. In spite of this, Rushdie heaps praise on the virtues of the film. He even calls it "art." Rushdie's deconstruction somehow makes the film more accessible and poignant. It emerges from this short essay, which also appears in Rushdie's2002 non-fiction collection "Step Across this Line" (though without pictures), as a strong and in no way emasculated masterpiece.

A short story was appended to the essay. Rushdie calls it a fictionalized account of the auction of the ruby slippers (a pair of which sold in 1970 for $15,000). It is much more than that. In near Vonnegut style, the story explores the less than desirable aura and implications of crazed fandom. The setting seems to be the future and the present; part macabre science fiction, part first person narrative description. It also appeared in Rushdie's 1994 short fiction collection "East-West." Like nowhere else, the best of both worlds collide in this tiny British Film Institute book. It showcases both Rushdie the essayist and Rushdie the storyteller. Those looking for a quick glimpse of one of today's most discussed authors may want to start here.

Most people don't realize that the film-making industry of India (called "Bollywood" by some Westerners) puts Hollywood to shame by sheer size and appeal. Having Rushdie, a student of Indian film and an infamous scholar, review "The Wizard of Oz" from his own unique point of view, is priceless. Rushdie spends more time than most going through the mythological meanings and symbolic imagery of the film, and leaves out much of the popular emphasis on MGM's prestige and the legacy of Judy Garland, which offers a refreshing perspective on the film. A highly recommended read, and one which will make you want to explore other BFI commentaries.

I first read this via the New Yorker version. For the first time I understood why this film, underneath its surface glitter and sentimentality, is haunting, bleak and beautiful. Read it and see the film again as if for the first time.

It's impossible to separate The Wizard of Oz from the deep emotion it inspires. The movie rapidly plunges a viewer back into childhood fears/dreams and the context in which one first saw it.

But by handing this topic to the improbable figure of Salmon Rushdie, an essay follows that persaudes open minds of how deeply personal and specific a movie becomes after one cathects it. For that I found the piece to be a revelation; as a way of opening a topic one thought as so general as to reject non-approved non-mass narratives; the deeply personal nature of a reading of a film; and the beauty/value of film writing to offer readers thoughtful personal associations. It changed the way I wrote about film.

This is the exact opposite of bad film-writing in which some self-christened film snob sits on his throne, beknighting utterly safe products because of their good taste and high production values, while appealing to some non-existant "objective" set of criteria. Inevitably the jackass will use the word "masterpiece" which is how you know he's a bad writer; Whenever you see the word in a review, just substitute "Don't question me, or my inability to use language to persaude you of this film's merit!"

P.U. You can keep the ninety percent of film writing that issues from that horrid, unpromising foundation. Rushdie's reminiscences go back to his childhood in India, which is both the last place you'd imagine a strong reading of this most American film to come from, and miraculously, yes, a vivid, strong analysis of The Wizard of Oz.