Oz the Great and Powerful: Good, not great. We liked the China Doll

​Via Disney

​By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

March 12, 2013

Oz was always too big for L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s novel.

Baum himself enjoyed years of success thanks to the traveling musical show based on his work, replete with dancing girls and romantic subplots that were intended more for adults than for children. The 1939 MGM film masterpiece transformed Oz by giving the picaresque tale of Dorothy’s adventures a villain, the Wicked Witch of the West, who had only been a minor nuisance for the one short chapter in the original book. And Broadway gave the Witch a back-story in Wicked.

But now, we have a new back-story. Oz TG&P gives us the Wicked Witch as a woman scorned after a romantic tryst with none other than. . .you guessed it, the Wizard. Hell hath no fury. Wicked gave us a Witch who was an outcast because “it’s not easy being green.”  But Oz TG&P ups the ante on sheer witchiness, because she’s got something to be really mad about this time, and something the droves of teens in the audience can sink their teeth into. This witch’s problem is that she gave it up too easily to the man from Kansas, a wizard unready for romantic commitment, and now she’s regretting her hastiness. She’s gone from green at love to green with a flying broomstick.  

The Wizard, a hapless cad from Kansas, charlatan magician and con man, finds himself in Oz by way of tornado while trying to flee his romantic and other entanglements in Kansas. But instead of escaping such things, he finds himself smack dab in the middle of a three-way witch fight. There is a fair bit of magic, with the good witch Glinda making bubbles, and the two baddies throwing fireballs and Emperor-of-the-Galaxy-style green lightning. Still, I couldn’t help but feel like this was really just a chick flick with magical trappings, a film about three sisters fighting over a dude who is afraid to commit, only he grows up in the course of the story to recognize which sister is worthy of his affection, and in the end he is ready to settle down and start a family with her, only in this case he is settling down to rule the country of Oz from a throne in the Emerald City and the family is one little china doll who needs new parents.  

Speaking of the china doll, Oz TG&P does have a few treats for fans of the Baum books.  The china town was in Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” but it was left out of the 1939 movie. It is charming to see it show up in the new movie. The flying monkeys were in the book too, but they were only evil because the Wicked Witch had control of the wishing cap that forced them to grant her three wishes. After they escaped the thrall of the Wicked Witch, they were good monkeys. Oz TG&P features one of those good monkeys, presumably in the days before the Wicked Witch of the West gets control of his kinfolk.  

The film makes him into a new character named Finley who becomes the Wizard’s valet of sorts.  He makes for an endearing addition to the story, dressed in a bellhop uniform that is very similar to some of the pictures of the monkeys in W. W. Denslow’s original illustrations for “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”  

True Oz fans may bristle at the departures from Baum’s vision (in the book, for instance, the china people freeze into statuettes when they leave their village, but in the movie the china girl stays animated after leaving home to go on the voyage.) But, overall this version of Oz is a fair representation of what the Oz books were all about. They are certainly no farther from the Oz vision than some of L. Frank Baum’s own spin-offs of his fantasy world, like the Oz musical or the films from 1914.  

The main failing of Oz TG&P is really not anything that you can blame on this film or its makers.  The main failing is simply that it isn’t a timeless classic. But how can you top or even match a film like the 1939 Wizard of Oz where every moment of that film, every visual, every line of dialogue has become iconic?  Simply put, you can’t. As for me, I’m just happy that Disney has pulled off a qualified success a couple times now in the Oz arena, and in both instances was reasonably respectable to the source material.  

I refer, of course, to the 1985 Return to Oz which did a nice job of folding the second two L. Frank Baum Oz books into one movie. 

Finally, a comment on the 3-D. Oz TG&P was made for 3-D, not retrofitted after the fact for 3-D.  Starting with the old-fashioned stereoscope style title sequences and on into colorful Oz, this film’s 3-D absolutely pops. Go see it in IMAX 3-D, if at all possible. A little technology goes a long way toward making this less than timeless film a little more of an experience.  

The Wizard, all smoke and mirrors, the man behind the curtain, can relate.  

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Oz the Great and Powerful

Walt Disney Pictures

Director: Sam Raimi

Featuring:  James Franco, Mila Kunis, Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams. . .

Film: Eyes Without a Face, the French 'Psycho'

A great source the masterpieces of world cinema is The Criterion Collection.  “Eyes Without a Face” is featured as #260 in the series.  Also featured on the disc is Franju’s utterly shocking and utterly realistic 1949 documentary about the slaughterhouses of Paris, “The Blood of the Beasts (Le Sang des Betes)”  The film draws more on fantastic elements, while the documentary is appallingly real in every respect, even fantastically real.  It’s an interesting contrast in works within one director’s output and back to back on one DVD.  

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

January 12, 2013

Editor’s Note: Every few weeks, we plan to review important or overlooked films from world cinema, specifically ones relate

d to the popular lit genres of science fiction, mystery, suspense, detective, love, romance, western, and others.

The library’s collection covers the gamut of film history from the 1890s to the present day, but we’ll start in the middle. Our first film is from the 1950s — director Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face from 1959. 

In many ways, Eyes Without a Face is the French Psycho. 

Quite independently of each other, Hitchcock and Franju arrived at the same kind of film, in the same year.  Both films draw on pulp crime and film noir influences. They both feature psychologically tormented protagonists. They both capitalize on the ability of black-and-white to convey terror in a subtler and more mythic way than color ever could. And in both films, there is a series of graphic murders or attempted murders of young, beautiful women. 

There are three main characters in the movie, while the rest of the supporting cast are either victims or associates and police who run around in circles not managing to solve the mystery of the young women’s disappearances. Dr. Génessier (played stiffly but effectively by Pierre Brasseur) has accidentally caused the disfigurement of his daughter’s face in a motor vehicle wreck.  He has been doing organ transplantation experiments on dogs, and when the action of the film commences, he has just botched an attempt to transplant the face onto his daughter of an innocent girl he has kidnapped and killed in order to harvest the transplantable face, the “heterograft.” 

His assistant in the lab and his lure for the girls is his loyal hench-woman, Louise (played by Alida Valli). The daughter, Christiane, is the waif-like ingénue who fuels this drama.  Seen mostly wearing a white mask and having very few lines, she offers up the most memorable images in the film. The role was the career peak of actress Edith Scob, and she is unforgettable, even though you only see her real face in a succession of very short scenes when one of the heterografts (briefly) succeeds. She is an elfin beauty. Much of the power written into her role comes from the contrast between the icy emotionlessness of her masked and the few moments of emotion we get to see with her unmasked. In one affecting scene, she cries with teardrops running down the mask, and in another series of scenes we see the vacant despair in her eyes as her facial transplant fails. 

In the final moments of the film, when she finally takes action to stop the horrific events unfolding around her, she moves like an expressionless avenging angel, without saying a word, without being able to grimace or crack a smile through her mask.  Earlier in the film, we are shown a painting of her, when she had a face, with a white bird perched on her finger, reminiscent of Snow White. In the final frame of the film she is shown surrounded by white birds, still in her mask, but finally emotionally free from its bondage.

Both Eyes Without a Face and Psycho are disturbing works and would have been considered bloody and shocking in their day. But, while the bloodiness is no longer their main fascination, there is still a lot left to fascinate about each film. In fact, the chief impression one is left with after viewing Eyes Without a Face is its haunting imagery. Franju painstakingly sets up the kind of moments that live on as still frames in your memory: Dr. Génessier lifting the heterograft off the face of his victim; Christiane freeing the tortured dogs; and always that emotionless white mask with two holes for the faceless girl’s eyes. 

One leaves the film feeling disturbed, but it takes a while to figure out why. Maybe it’s just that a story like this has no heroes.  Pierre Boileau, of the writing team Boileau-Narcejac who wrote the adapted screenplay, explains that they were intent on creating a new kind of crime story.  The old mold for crime stories involved a mystery that was then solved by a clever detective, and the emphasis was on the cleverness and intricacies of the crime plot and its solution.  In this new type of story, the police can’t and don’t figure out the mystery. Boileau-Narcejac were responsible for either the novel basis or the screenplay for a triumvirate of masterpieces in the late 1950’s, all psychological suspense stories: Clouzot’s Diabolique, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and Franju’s Eyes Without a Face.  These are quirky, disturbing stories, more about aberrant psychology than about solving mystery puzzles. 

As for moral ambiguity, how can one imagine a trio of persons more conflicted than the ones in this film? Dr. Génessier is motivated by love for his daughter, but he has no qualms about sacrificing innocent girls for their faces in order to save her. But there is a part of him that is still a caring physician.  One scene depicts him caring for a child in the hospital and, out of concern, concealing the gravity of his disease from the boy’s mother.  He acknowledges that he must succeed in his quest to perform a successful facial transplant, because he knows how much he has crossed the line by sacrificing innocent lives. And yet, his greed to achieve scientific conquest and his love for his daughter have become so obsessive that he goes right on torturing dogs and killing young women.

Likewise, the doctor’s assistant Louise is driven by blind love and devotion to the doctor, to the point where she is oblivious to the evils she is committing.  She is grateful that Dr. Génessier successfully reconstructed her damaged face, and now she is apparently in love with him. She is so convinced that she is doing the right thing for the doctor and his daughter that when the daughter finally turns on her in the final moments of the movie, Louise’s wide-eyed expression of disbelief and confusion shows you how deeply her emotions have led her astray. 

Finally, the daughter, Christiane, is so desirous of a new face that she is willing to turn a blind eye to her father’s transgressions on her behalf. What haunts the audience is that her emotionless mask seems to have stolen her sense of morality. When she briefly gets a new face, she is at her coldest and cruelest, because she has stolen it from another girl.  The apotheosis of character development that caps this film is when Christiane manages to find her heart and soul, and her sense of moral purpose, after being forced back into the mask.  The film ends with a masked Christiane among the white birds, paralleling the Christiane of the painting earlier in the film holding a white dove.  She has regained her face, even as her father has failed to give her a successful heterograft. 

These characters aren’t your traditional crime story villains. There are no heroes solving puzzles, only unanswered questions. But isn’t that the way it is in actual crimes?  There is no Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot or Ellery Queen to wrap things up into a neat little explanation. And there is often no justice to be found. The children of Sandy Hook will go unavenged, and, likely, nobody will ever truly understand their killer’s motives.

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Eyes Without a Face (Le Yeux sans visage)

1959, in French with English subtitles

Directed by Georges Franju

Produced by Jules Borkon

Screenplay adaptation by Pierre Boileau & Thomas Narcejac, Jean Redon, Claude      Sautet, from a novel by Jean Redon.

Music by Maurice Jarre.

Cast: Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Edith Scob

Weep for Me: From the glory days of "men's fiction"

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

December 3, 2012

This book is exceedingly hard to find.  It went through two printings, and then Mr. MacDonald would not let his publishers reissue it, although all but one other of his books remained in and out of circulation for the rest of his life.

I read Weep for Me voraciously when I first acquired it, partially because I was curious why the author, John D. MacDonald, wouldn’t let it be reprinted. I found it to be a wholly satisfying page-turner. In fact, I loved it and I couldn’t put it down. The story of a mild-mannered bank clerk seduced by a femme fatale to rip off the bank and go on the lam from the law is told with a cinematic sweep.

When I read it, I was all the while mentally designing the scenes for the movie version.  I couldn’t imagine why MacDonald suppressed this book. Now, I find in my Internet searches that the implication is MacDonald felt like the book was an unsatisfying attempt to mimic the style of James M. Cain of The Postman Always Rings Twice. However, I felt like the book spoke clearly with MacDonald’s voice (which is pretty unmistakable and one of the reasons his readers are so fiercely loyal), and I didn’t pick up on any attempts to copy Cain. I think MacDonald was being too hard on himself.

I would love to see Weep for Me revived. I think MacDonald’s heirs still hold the keys to this. The perfect venue would be Charles Ardai’s Hard Case Crime series. Ardai would do justice to this nearly forgotten but very worthy book.

These early Gold Medal paperbacks are eminently collectible. The original Gold Medal publishing model was to do all paperback originals. There were no paperback editions of hardcover books, and most of the Gold Medal books were written specifically for that very first edition, many of them never to be reprinted.  Therefore, most of the early Gold Medals are unique, collectible items.   

Also, they are very charmingly rooted in the 1950’s. These days, when the large majority of novel-readers and book buyers are women, we forget that there used to be a market specifically for men’s fiction. Really, one of the only holdovers from those days iis the subtitle of Playboy magazine: “Entertainment for Men,”  a slogan which seems prejudicial or even misogynistic today. But it made sense in the publishing milieu of the early 1950’s.  

Of course, Playboy still publishes fiction that should at least theoretically appeal to men, but people tend to forget that there used to be a big market for the fiction, even in the absence of the nudie pictures. Gold Medal’s books of the 1950s exemplify that type of publishing program.  

It is deliciously retro to re-discover the Gold Medal lineup of suspense, science fiction, crime and war stories, and salacious male-oriented potboilers.

About this copy

I acquired my copy about a decade ago in an eBay auction through some frantic last-minute bidding. I probably paid about $90. The book is a very rare find and there are still a lot of MacDonald fans. An AbeBooks.com search reveals only one other copies — of very good condition — for sale, priced at about $395.

This is one of my most prized vintage paperbacks. My copy is in very good to fine condition. It has been very carefully read, so there are no spine creases. The lamination on the cover is still intact.  The glue on the old Gold Medals tends to dry out and be very fragile, so these books often fall apart. There are a few pages of our copy which are starting to loosen, but they are still intact. This copy is the first edition, 1951. There was one later printing, which was actually a second edition.  I read somewhere that the second printing featured the same cover painting by a different artist.