The wonderful wizard of oz5/17/2023 ![]() ![]() The nimble Tin Woodman is played by Alvin Wyckoff, who later became a movie cameraman. The charming and delightful Dorothy in this silent film, as I was pleased to discover, is Bebe Daniels, who later did much to inspire British radio audiences during the Blitz. Elsewhere in this 1910 film, we see that Oz has some black residents. (He directed Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli in 'In the Good Old Summertime', among other credits.) One tableau sequence in this silent movie puts Dorothy and the Scarecrow in a forest where the trees have sinister faces I wonder if this sequence inspired the talking-tree sequence in the MGM film. I was astounded to learn that this acrobatic Scarecrow was Robert Z Leonard, a vaudeville performer who'd worked with Lon Chaney, and who later had a long successful career as a film director, well into the talkies era. The Scarecrow does a very impressive back handspring, made even more impressive because he immediately segues from this into a weird crawling dance with the animal actors. (After starring in this stage musical, Montgomery died young Fred Stone went on to play Katharine Hepburn's father in 'Alice Adams'.) Here in this silent film of the stage musical, there's not much singing, but we do see the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman performing a comical dance. In the stage musical based on 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz', the star performers were the comedy team of Fred Stone and David C Montgomery as the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman they sang comic songs such as "Hurrah for Baffin's Bay" and performed specialities, notably a 'black art' routine in which Stone assembled the various pieces of Montgomery's disconnected Tin Woodman. Refreshingly, Dorothy is actually played here by an age-appropriate little girl (more about her later), rather than a too-old teenage Judy Garland in a bust-suppressor. Toto appears very briefly as a real dog, to be transformed almost immediately by Glinda into an actor in a dog cozzie, courtesy of a Melies-style jump cut. In this movie, we see several 'animals' (including Imogene, and the Cowardly Lion) which are very obviously played by actors in costumes. Instead, for the stage musical, Dorothy's companion in the cyclone ride from her Kansas farm to Oz was Imogene the cow, played by two panto-style actors in a cow costume. In the stage musical (unlike MGM's version), it was impractical to have a trained dog performing various cues, so Toto was written out. In the novel, Toto's single most important function is to be a sounding-board for Dorothy, so that she can express her thoughts aloud without talking to herself. More significantly for historical purposes, this silent film preserves some aspects of the hugely popular 1903 stage musical based on 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz', which deviated significantly from both the novel and the later MGM movie. And in some ways, this silent version (made while L Frank Baum was still alive and writing more Oz novels) is more faithful to Baum's source novel (and its sequels) than the MGM movie was. In some ways, I found this 1910 silent version of 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' more entertaining than the big-budget MGM remake. ![]()
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