Fleming was a solid if marginal talent, and yet here he directed one of the classics of modern cinema. This gets her some ruby slippers, and then midgets, the Lollipop Guild, Glenda the Good Witch (Billie Burke), the Scarecrow (Bolger), the Tin Man (Haley), the cowardly Lion (Lahr), the Wicked Witch of the West (Hamilton), the Wizard of Oz (Morgan), flying monkeys, torture, water, no place like home.ĭirected by Victor Fleming the same year he also helmed Gone with the Wind, Wizard of Oz, moreso than Casablanca, suggests that the Hollywood system is transcendent of the auteur theory. Dorothy runs away, and runs into Professor Marvel (Frank Morgan), who reads her future, but then a tornado comes and Dorothy is sucked away to the land of Oz, where she accidentally kills the Wicked Witch of the East. Dorothy's aunt Em (Clara Bandrick) and Uncle Henry (Charley Grapewin) are her custodians, but on the farm there's also some hired hands (Roy Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley). Wizard of Oz, in that sense, encapsulates everything that is great about movie-going, as we are allowed to escape into fantasies but return home at the end, untouched, perhaps wiser for the effort.ĭorothy (Judy Garland) is a Kansas girl mad at her neighbor Elmira Gulch (Margaret Hamilton) because she wants to kill Dorothy's dog Toto. And yet that simple message that there is no place like home, that desire to return to one's family is pretty profound in the movie. We love our family, but the imagination is stirred by everything that happens when not at home, when not in a safe place. Ironically, what people remember most is the vivid Technicolor of Oz more than the sepia toned world of Kansas.