Seventy years ON,Going down Yellow Brick Road

If MGM epitomised the studio system,The Wizard of Oz,its most ambitious project,represented the Golden Age of Hollywood in all its glory. The Hollywood movie factories had been perfected by the mid-30s. The Great Depression was being beaten back and America hadnt yet entered the war. At $2.77 million,the films budget was almost three times the average budget of movies at the time,trumped only by MGMs own Gone With The Wind ($4 million) at the end of the year.

Seventeen-year-old Judy Garlandthe little girl with the great big voiceplayed the vulnerable and lonely orphan Dorothy while Bert Lahr played the cowardly lion,Jack Haley the Tin Man (after Buddy Ebsen,the first choice for the role,nearly died of aluminium poisoning from his tin armour) and Ray Bolger the scarecrow. Margaret Hamilton was cast as the wicked witch of the West and Frank Morgan the legendary wizard who is the shining light at the end of the yellow brick road. Terry,a cairn terrier,played Dorothys beloved Toto and was paid $125 a week,probably as compensation for regularly being blown off the set by the powerful wind machines. Though Victor Fleming directed most of the movie,George Cukor (My Fair Lady,The Philadelphia Story) was the first to sit in the directors chair. Fleming then took over from him until he was called to the sets of Gone with the Wind to replace none other than Cukor and it was King Vidor who wrapped up Oz.

Though Judy Garland went on to become one of MGMs most bankable stars (Meet Me in St Louis,A Star is Born) before her tragic death,it was as Dorothy that she lived on as in public memory. For most other members of the cast,it was probably their only brush with stardom.

Billed as a triumph of technicolour,Oz lent itself perfectly to the then-revolutionary process known for its hyper-realistic,saturated levels of colour. Beginning in sepia Kansas,it explodes into a riot of colour once Dorothys ruby (silver in the book) slippers,the yellow brick road and the emerald city come into play. The movie was a big step in the evolution of the Hollywood musical,with the songs being pre-recorded in a studio before the filming for the first time. Over the rainbow,that dreamy,magical tribute to the human spirit,outlived its Oscar to become not only Judy Garlands signature song but perhaps the most famous song written for an American film. Oz was also the most complicated movie of its time in terms of special effects. The crew pulled off fantastic stunts like the sky-writing sequence and Dorothys house being lifted clear off the ground by the twister with the help of the local hardware store and just plain common sense. Margaret Hamilton suffered severe burns after her exit in a cloud of smoke went wrong.

But at the heart of this technical wizardry lay a fable so movingly and simply told that you could not judge it harshly if you tried. The tinman in search of a heart,the cowardly lion in search of courage,the scarecrow in search of a brain and a little girl who wants to find her way homethey must,in the end,turn to their courage and self-belief to find their hearts desires.

Success,however,did not come easy. Up against a string of classics released the same year,it opened to mixed reviewsRussell Maloney in The New Yorker called it a stinkeroo… which displays no trace of imagination,good taste or ingenuity. It did not do well at the box office. The advent of television in 1956 gave the movie a new lease of life. First telecast in 1956,then in 1959 and hence once every year,it went on to become the most-watched film in history according to the Library of Congress. On its 25th annual airing in 1983,it had raked in $6 million at theatre box offices and $13 million in payment from CBS and NBC to MGM. The Wizard of Oz had made a triumphant entry into the annals of film history. America was paying tribute,at last,to the most enduring magic of allthe power to tell a story the old-fashioned way. Dorothy,it seems,had finally found her way home.