Walt Disney's Snow White, Hollywood first animated feature-length film, was released in 1937 and was a big hit. Its success was part of MGM's motivation for putting The Wizard Of Oz into production a year later. It's instructive to look at the two films together because, while both are fantasies aimed at a family market, kids and adults, they inhabit radically different aesthetic universes.
It's not just that one is animated and one is live-action. Snow White enchants us by transporting us into a coherent fantasy universe. The Wizard Of Oz enchants us by transporting us into sound stages in Hollywood, USA. Snow White is pure cinema. The Wizard Of Oz is what André Bazin would call mixed cinema -- cinema which derives from the theater and transposes the methods of theater into cinematic terms.
In a certain sense The Wizard Of Oz is about theater, almost a metaphor for the magic of theater. It reminds us constantly of its theatrical nature, to the same degree that Snow White tries to make us forget that it's made up of thousands of two-dimensional drawings. Disney's artists wanted to so dazzle the eye that audiences would read the world of Snow White as a real place. Those who made The Wizard Of Oz wanted to dazzle us, too, while showing us the man behind the curtain, operating the machinery of the illusion -- they wanted us to appreciate the magic of his skills in spite of being let in on the gag.
The Wizard Of Oz gets its juice from the tension inherent in any theatrical illusion -- our willingness to be fooled, our love of believing in something we know to be humbug. Once we accept the basis of the illusion in Snow White, animated drawings, we can afford to forget it, to surrender to the visions it delivers. But The Wizard Of Oz will not let us forget its essential artificiality. The ruler of Oz is, at heart, a medicine-show hustler. Dorothy's friends and protectors are vaudeville headliners, their heroism is the heroism of inspired shtick, honed and perfected in a lifetime of playing tough rooms.
The sets of Oz look like sets, built in front of obviously painted backdrops. Even the matte paintings, combined with live action by an optical process, have a stylized, painterly quality, evoking the painted backdrops of the stage. Contrast this strategy with the strategy of a modern "live-action" fantasy like The Lord Of the Rings, where Peter Jackson uses every resource of modern technology to convince us that his environments are real places in an unreal world.
The Wizard Of Oz is a celebration of the resources of a movie sound stage, of real people in real spaces on Washington Boulevard in Culver City, California, of virtuosos who have spared no effort or cost to take our breath away. This is not by any means anti-cinematic. As Bazin argues in his two brilliant essays on theater and cinema, when movies seek to evoke theatrical effects in cinematic terms they must call upon their subtlest and most powerful means.
In Snow White, Disney takes us into the heart of the fairytale universe. In The Lord Of the Rings, Peter Jackson takes us into the heart of Middle Earth. In The Wizard Of Oz, MGM takes us into the heart of a Hollywood studio of 1939 . . . and shows us that it is no less fantastic a place than "once upon a time" or Mordor. Bazin says that when we watch live theater we never entirely forget the backstage machinery that makes its illusions possible -- we agree to discount it conceptually for the purposes of the play. So it is with The Wizard Of Oz. We agree to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, but we never forget that he's there, and we love the genius and generosity of his sublime hokum.
Both Mervyn LeRoy, the producer of The Wizard Of Oz, and Arthur Freed, his unbilled assistant, took credit in later years for talking MGM into doing the film. Whatever the case, Freed's sensibility is stamped all over the production. Freed was a song lyricist at MGM who dreamed of becoming a producer. Oz was his try-out and he took a pay cut to get the shot. The film was a collective effort, going through fourteen writers and four directors before it was done, but the film's songwriters, Harold Arlen and E. Y. "Yip" Harburg, were part of the production almost from the start, and Harburg had a lot of input on the script. It was Freed who selected Arlen and Harburg for the assignment.
Arlen (above) and Harburg wrote all the songs in the movie and the songs were closely integrated into the story, playing a crucial role in revealing character and advancing the plot. That kind of involvement by songwriters was very rare in Hollywood musicals of the time, when studios would buy Broadway hits and replace numbers in them at will. Numbers were just that, and little more -- excuses for a star turn, or a chance to promote songs owned by MGM.
It was the Freed Unit at MGM which changed all that, eventually, and Freed's rapturous sentiment about the theater, and especially the world of vaudeville where he cut his teeth, was always central to his vision throughout his subsequent years as MGM's premier producer of musicals. The sensibility of the Freed Unit was in place already in The Wizard Of Oz, whether Freed put it there or found it there, and received an even clearer expression in the next film he worked on, Babes In Arms, starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland -- Freed's first assignment as full-on producer.
Babes In Arms was a surprise hit -- it cost much less and made much more than The Wizard Of Oz, at least on its initial release. Its success paved the way for Freed's producing career at MGM. In a future post I'll take a look at Babes In Arms and its underlying themes, which offer essential insights into Freed's art.