The Patchwork Girl of Oz

As a child, The Patchwork Girl of Oz was my favorite Oz book. This silent film version is a charming look at how Oz was envisioned by it's creator--L. Frank Baum produced the film. The story however does stray from the book and some of the scenes are a bit disjointed. Motion pictures were in their infancy in 1914--most films were stagebound dramas, so to see a fantasy film from this period is unique.

The Patchwork Girl or "Scraps" is played by French acrobat Pierre Couderc. The part where Scraps catches the eye of the Scarecrow is very amusing. Also, the Yoop character is a forerunner to the Winged Monkeys who terrorized Judy Garland 25 years later.

In the video version I saw, the pivotal scene where Scraps is brought to life and tips over the Liquid of Petrification, is missing or destroyed--but the rest of the film is intact however.

A young munchkin named Ojo (played by Violet MacMillan) and her Unc Nunkie decide to set out in search of a better life in the Emerald City of Oz. Along the way, they meet and befriend a magician and his family. The magician has long been at work on perfecting a magic powder of life, his wife having created a patchwork servant girl whom they hope to bring to life. Things go awry when the newly awakened patchwork girl accidentally spills a petrification fluid upon the Magician's wife and his future son in-law as well as Ojo's Unc Nunkie. Now our heroes (the Patchwork Girl, Ojo, the Magician and his daughter) must combine forces in search of the different, rare and hard to obtain ingredients necessary for a spell to undo the petrification process. Many unusual adventures, magical as only the world of Oz can be, await.

This delightful flight of fancy provides viewers with a fun escape from reality. The actors and actresses breathe such a wonderfully vibrant energy into their lively performances that they prove quite a joy to watch. Basically this starts off as a series of individual stories focused on a wide number of colorful characters. By the film's end however, all these different characters and their individual stories seem to merge together into one near epic tale. Of the three 1914 Oz film produced in part by L. Frank Baum himself, this one is clearly the best and most complete adventure story.

You really have to look at "The Patchwork Girl of Oz" in context, otherwise you'll just dismiss it as a dull and incomprehensible movie. But, back in 1914, it was a rather impressive tale--but one that even audiences back then probably struggled to understand unless they'd read the Frank Baum story. Heck, I tried watching it was was TOTALLY confused until I read a summary of the story on the internet! That's because the narrative is really scant--with almost no intertitle cards. Instead, it's shown as a series of tenuously connected vignettes which are described on the card and then acted out...as was the style up until about 1914 or a bit later. It comes off almost like a slide show that is acted out for the audience! This certainly is NOT all that entertaining and too often the characters just cavort about aimlessly or do acrobatics instead of acting--and it comes off pretty poorly. BUT, again, it was pretty much the style of the day. The ladies in the film and sets and 'magic' were pretty similar to the work done a decade earlier by the groundbreaking French film maker Georges Méliès. By 1914, these amazing effects and story telling really were a a bit passé--definitely on their way out--which might explain why the film was a critical flop--that, and the fact that the audience probably had no idea what was occurring on screen! Interesting from a historical perspective and having excellent production values for the time, but still very easy to skip unless you adore very early silent films.

The enjoyable story and characters in "The Patchwork Girl of Oz" makes it a fun movie to watch, and it is also pretty resourceful for its era. It does have a lot of rough edges and shows some signs of age, but its energy and creativity more than make up for those. As with all of the Oz features made by L. Frank Baum's own studio, it shows his influence in the way that the fantasy world of Oz is brought to life with enthusiasm.

As with most of Baum's Oz stories, it has plenty of oddball characters and offbeat developments. A couple of odd casting choices add to the curious feel, with Pierre Couderc making Scraps look much like a male, and Violet Macmillan making Ojo seem more like a young girl. But they and the rest of the cast give their characters plenty of life, which really is more significant in a movie like this. As in the other Oz movies in the series, Fred Woodward also gets to perform a number of his costumed animal characters.

The story is one of Baum's most creative ones, telling a complex story in which the agendas and motivations of many different characters come into conflict. This adaptation is imaginative in using a lot of different techniques to reproduce the look of the characters, the magical events, and the hectic activity.

Much of it works rather well, and all of it represents a very good attempt for its time. Very few film-makers of the era ever tried to make a full-length picture out of such challenging fantasy material, and even if it has a fair number of rough edges, it remains a worthwhile and entertaining effort.

L. Frank Baum himself produced and wrote this adaptation of his own Oz book, a full quarter century before Judy Garland strolled the yellow brick road. What survives is an intriguing artifact from cinema's infancy, antiquated in style and naive in sentiment, but compensating with plenty of charm for what it lacks in sophistication. The influence of theater can still be seen in the histrionic acting and static camera set-ups, but the affection Baum lavished on his creations (munchkins, magicians, 'hoppers', the 'woozy') is clearly evident, even today. His fertile imagination, reinforced by some clever (if primitive) camera tricks, makes this an enchanting fantasy with more than merely academic interest for students of early film history.