The Wizard of Oz

A cultural touchstone for generations, MGM’s musical adaptation of Frank L Baum’s turn of the century fantasy novel is so deeply embedded in the popular imagination that some critics have suggested you can find its traces in almost every American movie made in the latter half of the 20th Century. Certainly it reverberates through the work of David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Salman Rushdie has said the movie was his first literary inspiration. Not bad for such a famously troubled production, the most expensive MGM had ever made to that time. Concerned at its running time, the studio lopped all the songs out of the second half and even considered axing Over the Rainbow (which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Song that year).

Sixteen-year-old Judy Garland is Dorothy (MGM had wanted Shirley Temple), a Kansas farm girl who is transported by a tornado to the Technicolor world of Oz, where she is befriended by a cowardly lion, a brainless scarecrow and a tin man without a heart. En route to rendez-vous with the Wizard who, they trust, will fulfill their dearest wishes, they must first vanquish the Wicked Witch who hates Dorothy for squishing her sister.

Into by Mike Archibald

Incredibly lavish, and there’s a lot of pleasure to be got these days watching money being spent on other things than war.

Graham Greene, The Spectator (1939).