The Wizard of Oz Review

MGM's costliest film yet went through several directors, lost its first Tin Man to aluminum dust poisoning and set Margaret Hamilton's makeup on fire, and none of it shows. Victor Fleming, who shot most of it before leaving for Gone with the Wind, gives the fable a clean shape: Kansas in sepia, Oz in three-strip Technicolor, and the door Dorothy opens between them is still the best argument anyone has made for color.

Judy Garland was sixteen, older than Baum's Dorothy, and she sings Over the Rainbow as if she already knows what the song costs. Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion is a vaudeville master class, and Hamilton's witch placed fourth on AFI's list of screen villains. Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg's songs and a script full of lines people still quote pack in more pleasure than almost any film. Roger Ebert thought it lasts because it stirs the deepest insecurities of childhood and then settles them.

Its first run lost money; it became what the Library of Congress calls the most seen film in history through television from 1956 on. The New Yorker called it a stinkeroo. Some effects creak, and what the studio did to Garland off screen has since come out. On screen it is as close to perfect as a family film gets.