We're off to see the wizard. The excuse this time is the 70th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz, the 1939 classic that begins with Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) singing Over the Rainbow in black-and-white Kansas and evolves, courtesy of a tornado, into her adventures in Technicolor Oz.
It could have been quite a different film. In L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel, Dorothy was 5 rather then 12, she inherited silver shoes rather than ruby slippers, the Wizard was exposed early on as a fraud, and the Cowardly Lion was rescued from the poppy field not by a cold snap but by an army of mice. MGM executives wanted Shirley Temple as Dorothy. Even when they hired Garland, they dolled her up in a curly blond wig to match the description in the book, until wiser heads prevailed and Dorothy was allowed to reach Oz as a brunette. Buddy Ebsen (later to play Jed in The Beverly Hillbillies) would have accompanied her, but he lost the role of the Tin Man after his lungs were damaged by the aluminum dust used to dye him silver. When Jack Haley got the part, the makeup was changed to aluminum paste.
MGM wanted to scrap Over the Rainbow because the song slowed the film. The little people who played the Munchkins were billeted at a hotel where, producer Mervyn LeRoy recalled, "every night there were fights and orgies and all kinds of carryings-on." The antics inspired a terrible 1981 farce, Under the Rainbow, with Chevy Chase and Carrie Fisher.
The Wizard of Oz has always looked super on home video, and each release has brought a richer helping of bonus features: discarded scenes with Ebsen, earlier silent and sound versions of The Wizard of Oz, packed commentaries and segments on the special effects (the tornado was a silk stocking blown by a fan). Next Tuesday's two-DVD set will include many previously released extras, but if you want new stuff you'll have to spring for the "Ultimate Collector's Edition," available in a four-disc DVD or two-disc Blu-ray box.
Beyond a working Wizard of Oz watch and a replica of a 1939 promotional book, the boxes include two more silent Oz films, The Patchwork Girl of Oz and The Magic Cloak of Oz (based on the book Queen Zixi of Ix), both from 1914 and running about 45 minutes each. They're in decent shape, though they are truly silent - not even the hint of a score. Although Baum's own production company made the films, The Patchwork Girl of Oz failed at the box office because adults wrote it off as a kids' film, and The Magic Cloak of Oz couldn't even find a distributor until 1917. Both are whirlwinds of costumes, spectacle and people dressed up in animal suits. Typical intertitle: "And then, by the aid of the Magic Cloak, the Rolly Rogues were all driven out of Noland."
Also in the "ultimate" set is The Dreamer of Oz, a 1990 made-for-TV biopic written by Richard Matheson and starring John Ritter as Baum and Annette O'Toole as his wife. Fans of director John Cameron Mitchell ( Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Shortbus) can see him as the reporter whose 1939 interview with Baum's widow (Baum died in 1919) frames the film. Alas, the movie doesn't cover Baum's career after the publication of the first Oz book, so there's no insight into those 1914 hiccups.
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MOVIES
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The Queen and I (2009)
The nominal subject of this documentary is Farah Diba, widow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was shah of Iran until the Islamic revolution removed him. Diba lives in Paris and still styles herself as the exiled shahbanu (empress, queen). Filmmaker Nahid Persson Sarvestani, Iranian but now in Sweden, took part in the overthrow of the shah because of the regime's torture and oppression, but is no happier about the regime that followed. Her mixed emotions about Diba are the film's engine. W.C.
BLU-RAY
Monsters vs. Aliens (2009)
The "monsters" are the good guys. Fifty-foot Susan (Reese Witherspoon), a blob named Bob (Seth Rogen), Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie) and other comic echoes of 1950s sci-fi films are assigned to ward off an alien invasion. The computer animation and the 3-D effects (glasses are included) are impressive, but The Globe's two-star review was less impressed with the script, "a committee job that trots out variations on stock characters to spin a familiar tale with a pillow-soft moral."
Labyrinth (1986)
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TV
How I Met Your Mother Season 4 (2008-09)
The tease is that some day we'll learn the identity of "your" mother - the woman whose child the narrator (older Ted, the voice of Bob Saget) is talking to. But the sitcom is still about the high jinks of Ted's younger self (Josh Radnor) and friends Robin, Marshall, Lily and superstud Barney (the ubiquitous Neil Patrick Harris). Expect wacky incidents, clever punchlines and downtime at the bistro where, for example, the gang lists 50 reasons to have sex (Barney: "The condoms are about to expire"). The Patty Duke Show Season 1 (1963-64)
One of the perks of winning an Oscar for playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker was that Patty Duke got her own self-titled sitcom. In a variation on the 1961 Hayley Mills film The Parent Trap, Duke plays identical cousins: Patty, an outgoing American girl, and Cathy, a Scottish lover of the classics who bunks in with Patty's New York family (William Schallert plays the amiable father). Best part is the theme song: "They laugh alike, they talk alike, at times they even walk alike. ..." W.C.