1939 is considered by many film historians to be the greatest year in American movie history. Gone with The Wind, Stagecoach, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, to name just three, all belong in the pantheon, but it is MGM’s The Wizard of Oz that holds a place in the hearts of generations of moviegoers. It could be the unforgettable music, the lavish, Technicolor world of Oz, or the beloved characters, but perhaps The Wizard of Oz’s timeless quality actually comes from how inarguably it represents the time it was made. L. Frank Baum’s original early 20th century stories have been called the first American Fairy Tales, and The Wizard of Oz represents the peak of Golden Age American studio filmmaking.
L. Frank Baum was a failed businessman when he wrote the first Oz stories, having had a short lived career producing theatre that literally went up in smoke, and a family business lost in an embezzlement scheme. Baum was known for spinning fairy tales for the neighbourhood children, which eventually became his seminal Oz novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, and went on to spawn 13 sequels.
Oz was first adapted to film in 1914, but producers were more interested in adapting the iconography of the world than the stories themselves, and the several silent film era adaptations were only moderate successes.
When producers Arthur Freed and Mervyn LeRoy began developing the MGM musical in the late 1930’s, they ultimately met the same pitfalls with their adaptation. They went through fifteen screenwriters and only found the shape of the story when they finally steered back towards Baum’s text, which was then brought to musical life by songwriters Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg.
The major beats of the story remain surprisingly faithful. Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) is whisked away by a tornado to the land of Oz, where she inadvertently kills the Wicked Witch of the East and takes her magic slippers—silver in the book, ruby in the film. She follows the Yellow Brick Road to the Wizard (Frank Morgan) to wish her way home to Kansas and meets the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), Tin Man (Jack Haley), and Lion (Bert Lahr) along the way. The Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) menaces our heroes, but is introduced in the book only after the Wizard sends Dorothy & Co. away to the land of the Winkies to kill her—which Dorothy does, with a bucket of water, but very much on purpose in the text, instead of a fateful side effect of trying to save the burning Scarecrow in the movie. The Wizard is revealed to be nothing but on old man pulling strings and levers, thus solidifying the ultimately very American, meritocratic theme of the story, that any magic we have actually comes from within ourselves.
That nose-to-the-grindstone attitude permeated the movie’s production itself: it went through five directors: Richard Thorpe, producer Melvyn LeRoy, George Cukor, Victor Fleming, and finally King Vidor.
A studio picture through and through, Arthur Freed cast MGM side player, Judy Garland (then nicknamed Louis B. Mayer’s “Little Hunchback”) as Dorothy Gale, over box office star Shirley Temple, who ultimately didn’t have the vocal range for the songs. MGM contractee Buddy Ebsen (later TV’s Jed Clampett) was cast as the Tin Man, but was replaced after the aluminum dust they used for the initial makeup coated his lungs.
The production had the largest cast of little people ever in the Munchkin troupe—116 to be exact—battled Culver City brownouts caused by the sweltering studio lights, and narrowly skirted disaster when a mistimed explosion caused 2nd degree burns on Margaret Hamilton’s face; but the crew trudged on. Even Terry the Terrier, who played Toto, was a dutiful company player, having appeared with our own Norma Shearer in The Women for MGM, also released in 1939.
So, at the end of the film, when Dorothy clicks her slippers together and recites, “There’s no place like home,” perhaps it’s the timeless comfort of Dorothy’s farmhouse that sticks in our hearts and minds and makes this movie a classic; but it’s also just as likely that home is the bustling wide-eyed optimism of the early 20th century, where fairy stories were set in Kansas, and movies were hard-earned magic, made by fearless, grease-stained hands, and timelessness is actually just the perfect capturing of a moment in time.