That Vulgar Wizard

As I sorted through a box of papers, aiming to keep photocopied research but recycle old drafts of manuscripts and so on, I came across a photocopy of page 52 of the August 19, 1939 issue of The New Yorker.

I found the issue at an Ohio yard sale and purchased it because of the review of “The Wizard of Oz.”  An at-the-time friend collected Wizard of Oz things so I gave the magazine to her, but I copied the review.

The review is so grouchy!  “Fantasy is still Walt Disney’s undisputed domain. Nobody else can tell a fairy tale with his clarity of imagination, his simple good taste, or his technical ingenuity.” All these are lacking in “Wizard,” says the writer, who deplores the movie's vulgarity. (Unfortunately I didn’t record the author, but it would be easy to go back to old issues and find it.)

“I will rest my case against ‘The Wizard of Oz’ on one line of dialogue. It occurs in a sense in which the wicked witch is trying to persuade Dorothy… to part with a pair of magic slippers. The good witch interrupts them….whereupon the wicked witch snarls, ‘You keep out of this!’ Well, there it is. Either you believe witches talk like that, or you don’t. I don’t. Since ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is full of stuff as bad as that, or worse, I say it’s a stinkeroo.”

I don’t have a strong sense of how witches are supposed to talk, so that particular example is kind of funny. I suppose the author means that the dialogue should be more original and imaginative than such a prosaic response as "You keep out of this!" The point where the Wizard says the wicked witch was "liquidated" is the example provided of the movie's bad gags.

That’s not to say “Wizard” is above criticism just because it’s so popular. But the review is fun to read as a contemporary evaluation long before the movie became such a favorite on TV. The "raw, eye-straining Technicolor” and the film’s “vulgarity” are deplored. “I don’t like the Singer Midgets under any circumstances, but I found them bothersome in Technicolor,” the author writes, and, “Bert Lahr, as the Cowardly Lion, is funny but out of place. If Bert Lahr belongs in the Land of Oz, so does Mae West. This is nothing against Lahr or Miss West, both of whom I dearly love.” Those are the only performances the reviewer mentions (other than complaints about the script): nothing about Judy Garland.  

Interestingly, the photocopied page includes an ad for the show “Yokel Boy” with Buddy Ebsen, who had initially been in the movie’s cast. Other ads include the then-popular play by Robert Sherwood, "Abe Lincoln in Illinois," an Andy Hardy movie with Mickey Rooney, as well as the film "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" with Robert Donat.  In 1939, a 5-room apartment on East 85th Street was $1700, and a 14-room home in Greenwich, with a three-car garage and 3/4 acres, was going for a "sacrifice price" of  $32,000.