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movies
We have a Fios subscription, primarily for the Internet, but it comes with a few hundred channels of TV that we typically turn on for the Thanksgiving Day parade and the Oscars, and not much else. A few nights ago on a whim we turned on the TV to see whether anything interesting was on any of the hundreds of channels, and we tripped over the TCM channel, where a host was just introducing "The Last Picture Show", the 1971 coming-of-age movie that introduced Cybill Shepherd and Randy Quaid and gave Cloris Leachman a rare non-comic (and Oscar-winning) role. So we watched that -- we'd both heard of it, and neither of us had seen it before. It's very well-done, and bleak and depressing.
So last night, again in a "wonder what's on?" mood, we turned on the TV. It was still set to TCM, and was a few minutes into "The Wizard of Oz", which we had both seen multiple times but not in several decades, so we watched that. I noticed a few scenes that I didn't remember ever seeing before, as though they'd been omitted from TV cuts of the movie (or maybe I just forgot them), such as one near the beginning in which the three farm-hands (played by the same actors who do the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion) foreshadow the latter characters' attributes: Ray Bolger's farm-hand character is accused of "having a head full of straw", and Bert Lahr's bravely rescues Dorothy when she falls into a pig-pen, then is teased for being terrified after the fact. Also some other things I hadn't noticed before:
After "The Wizard of Oz" was over, the TCM host pointed out that the producers had originally wanted Shirley Temple for the Dorothy role, but Temple was under contract to a different studio, where she starred a year later in a weirdly similar movie, "The Bluebird". So that was on next;![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shalmestere had heard of it but never seen it, and I'd never seen it, so we watched that too. Like "Wizard", "The Bluebird" has an unsubtle moral of "find happiness in your own back yard". Like "Wizard", it opens with a framing story shot in sepia-tone, followed by a fantasy section shot in Technicolor, although the return to the framing story is in Technicolor too to indicate the protagonist's new appreciation of home. (It never actually uses the phrase "the bluebird of happiness", and the title character, once you finally see it, is not an actual bluebird, which has a red breast, but some other kind of bird dyed blue.) Like "Wizard", it has a young female protagonist with three sidekicks (her brother, her loyal magically-humanized dog, and her self-centered, devious, magically-humanized cat). It has less (and less-memorable) music than "Wizard", partly because Temple wasn't as good a singer as Garland. And although Temple acts well, the movie as a whole is dreadfully sappy, treacly, heavy-handed. It ends with the line "Now we know where to find it," then just in case you didn't get the point before, Temple breaks the fourth wall and addresses the camera: "don't we?". Apparently critics and audiences hated the movie, and it was the beginning of the end of Temple's film career.
So last night, again in a "wonder what's on?" mood, we turned on the TV. It was still set to TCM, and was a few minutes into "The Wizard of Oz", which we had both seen multiple times but not in several decades, so we watched that. I noticed a few scenes that I didn't remember ever seeing before, as though they'd been omitted from TV cuts of the movie (or maybe I just forgot them), such as one near the beginning in which the three farm-hands (played by the same actors who do the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion) foreshadow the latter characters' attributes: Ray Bolger's farm-hand character is accused of "having a head full of straw", and Bert Lahr's bravely rescues Dorothy when she falls into a pig-pen, then is teased for being terrified after the fact. Also some other things I hadn't noticed before:
- I remembered the dramatic shift from B&W to Technicolor when Dorothy emerges from her house in Oz. This cut of the movie had the Kansas scenes in sepia, rather than B&W; Wikipedia says the original release was sepia, and they switched to B&W in 1955.
- Munchkin houses look like mushrooms.
- Munchkins are oviparous: during "Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead" there's a brief shot of a rooftop nest with a bunch of large eggs, from which baby Munchkins emerge.
- The three Munchkin dancing girls from the Lullaby League, one of whom looks quite young (say, eight? hard to tell with Munchkins), dance on full point.
- At the beginning of the apple-tree scene, there's a toucan in one of the trees.
- The Wicked Witch, in sending her winged monkeys out to capture the protagonists, tells them "They won't cause you any trouble. I'm sending a little insect to take the fight out of them." This isn't followed up in the movie, but Wikipedia says it refers to a deleted scene that contained a song "The Jitterbug".
After "The Wizard of Oz" was over, the TCM host pointed out that the producers had originally wanted Shirley Temple for the Dorothy role, but Temple was under contract to a different studio, where she starred a year later in a weirdly similar movie, "The Bluebird". So that was on next;
shalmestere had heard of it but never seen it, and I'd never seen it, so we watched that too. Like "Wizard", "The Bluebird" has an unsubtle moral of "find happiness in your own back yard". Like "Wizard", it opens with a framing story shot in sepia-tone, followed by a fantasy section shot in Technicolor, although the return to the framing story is in Technicolor too to indicate the protagonist's new appreciation of home. (It never actually uses the phrase "the bluebird of happiness", and the title character, once you finally see it, is not an actual bluebird, which has a red breast, but some other kind of bird dyed blue.) Like "Wizard", it has a young female protagonist with three sidekicks (her brother, her loyal magically-humanized dog, and her self-centered, devious, magically-humanized cat). It has less (and less-memorable) music than "Wizard", partly because Temple wasn't as good a singer as Garland. And although Temple acts well, the movie as a whole is dreadfully sappy, treacly, heavy-handed. It ends with the line "Now we know where to find it," then just in case you didn't get the point before, Temple breaks the fourth wall and addresses the camera: "don't we?". Apparently critics and audiences hated the movie, and it was the beginning of the end of Temple's film career.
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I expect we have "The Wizard of Oz" in our TCM library right now. I remember some of the points you raise, like being surprised by the sepia tone (and seeking out Wikipedia to look it up), but I don't remember anything about the Jitterbug. :-) It's been a long time; maybe it's time to go watch it again.