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I've watched a fair few Wizard of Oz-inspired fantasy movies down through the decades, but the very early one that I viewed on 27 October 2023 (in modern-day colorized format), namely the 1925 b/w silent film entitled The Wizard of Oz, directed by and also starring Larry Semon, is undoubtedly the weirdest that I've seen so far, and for a number of different reasons.
First and foremost: although it includes several of the original L. Frank Baum novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz's main characters (but neither Glinda the Good Witch nor The Wicked Witch of the West, amazingly enough), the story in which they appear bears scant resemblance to the novel's, having been changed almost out of recognition – and not for the better, either!
To begin with, the entire story is bookended between a couple of scenes featuring a grandfather (Larry Semon) telling the entire story one evening to his young, sleepy granddaughter. Once into the story itself, however, the first half presents a number scenes featuring slapstick mishaps on the Kansas farm where Dorothy (played by Dorothy Dwan) lives with her unpleasant Uncle Henry (Frank Alexander) and pleasant Aunt Em (Mary Carr).
These are interspersed with scenes in Oz where its evil prime minister, aptly named Kruel (Josef Swickard), and his sycophantic aides Ambassador Wikked (Otto Lederer) and Lady Vishuss (Virginia Pearson) have seized power in the mysterious absence of its rightful princess ruler, but now plan to track her down to prevent her from ever returning. Meanwhile, an ineffectual Oz nobleman named Prince Kynd (Bryant Washburn) – Kruel, Wikked & Vishuss vs Kynd, geddit?? – prances around doing little and achieving less, but remaining ever so noble and dashing and upright throughout.
The second half sees Dorothy and her friends dramatically arrive via tornado in Oz, where they do their darnedest to put things right, while the prince continues to be steadfastly noble, dashing, upright, and totally useless. Unexpectedly, the plot climaxes with a potentially tragic cliffhanger featuring the Scarecrow (Larry Semon again) – only for the scene to abruptly switch back then to the grandfather telling the story to the child, confirming that it was all just fiction, thereby bringing the movie to a gentle, happy end (except that Dorothy marries Prince Kynd – shame, you could have done so much better, Dorothy!).
Secondly: even some of the main characters from the novel that do appear in this movie behave very differently from their literary counterparts. Thus we encounter a traitorous, villainous Tin Man (played by a young Oliver Hardy), and a violently aggressive Uncle Henry. Also, the farmhands are not physically transformed into the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion in Oz – instead, they simply adopt those disguises once they arrive in Oz.
In addition, even the Wizard of Oz himself (Charles Murray) is at Kruel's beck and call, rather than being in control himself, as he was in the novel (though the fact that his magic is more of the carnival illusion variety than any type of serious sorcery does accord with the novel, for once!).
Dorothy, meanwhile, is 18 years old in this movie, on the cusp of adulthood, not pre-adolescent as in the novel. Moreover, once she arrives in Oz she is revealed to be none other than its long-lost Princess Dorothea! It turns out that she'd been abducted as an infant by Oz's power-hungry prime minster Kruel, who'd secretly taken her to Kansas and abandoned her on the doorstep of Uncle Henry and Aunt Em's farmstead, so that he could rule Oz in her stead, which he has done ever since. See, I told you it was different!
Thirdly: I'd previously read descriptions of this movie as being an early Laurel & Hardy feature film, but it definitely is not, as Laurel isn't in it. Having now watched it, however, I can certainly understand the confusion – because director Larry Semon, who also plays both the grandfather and the farmhand that disguises himself to become the Scarecrow when in Oz, is the absolute spitting image of Stan Laurel! See for yourself in the pictures included here. Moreover, even his mannerisms are those that we associate with Laurel.
So, because he and Hardy act together here in many scenes, it really does look for all the world like the famous Laurel & Hardy double-act that we all know so well. Yet in reality this is of course a total illusion, one that can actually be quite unsettling at times, especially knowing that when this movie was made, L&H had never even appeared together on screen, let alone made a full-length movie with one another.
However, Semon did work with both of them separately, which makes me wonder if Laurel developed some of what later became his own characteristic mannerisms from those of Semon while working with him.
Fourthly: over the years, this movie has been re-released with several different accompanying music scores, so I can only hope that the others are better than the version I suffered through, bearing in mind that it was not even remotely in keeping with what I was watching. Sometimes, for instance, when the scene on screen was slapstick or comic, the music playing was sombre, even funereal at times, whereas when the scene being shown was sad or dramatic, the music playing was often jaunty or frivolous.
Sadly, and in spite of it receiving great praise from film critics, this movie proved a flop at the box office, so much so that it bankrupted Semon (engaged by then to Dorothy Dwan who had starred as Dorothy in it). Moreover, it was widely speculated that the great stress resulting from this financial disaster for him actively contributed to Semon's premature death just three years later, in 1928, at the age of only 39.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that this early movie version of The Wizard of Oz is worth a watch for its curiosity value – but if you want to view a far more faithful cinematic rendition of Baum's original novel, you need to journey Over the Rainbow to the classic 1939 MGM movie musical of the same title starring Judy Garland.
If you'd like to watch this vintage movie in its entirety and in its original b/w format but tinted), please click here to do so for free on Youtube; or click here to view it in its entirety and again for free on YouTube but in a modern-day colorized format, which I did.
Finally: to view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
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