His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz

AKA: His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz

In this dip into the Oz universe, is Princess Gloria, stuck in one of those classic situations, where the King wants her to marry the rich old guy, but she is in love with someone else. Meanwhile, another girl, named Dorothy, is captured and made a prisoner in the castle. Also, a scarecrow is put up in one of the local fields. To thwart the Princess' love for Pon, the King has the wicked witches (in really bad costumes), freeze her heart. The scarecrow comes to life and falls in love with Gloria. Since her heart is frozen, Gloria now wanders around like a unemotional zombie not caring at all. The evil witch Mombi beats all the hay out of the Scarecrow and he needs to be rescued by Dorothy and Pon.

The actor portraying the Scarecrow looks like he is a clown performer, in fact, the Scarecrow looks more like a clown than a scarecrow. Probably another reason why early audiences didn't like these films, bad costumes and make-up. After Gloria wanders off, the rest of the crew runs into the tin woodsman, who is in a much better costume then anyone else, even though parts of him look like they are about to fall off. Then he cuts off Mombi's head. Next up is the Cowardly Lion. Who actually looks kind of cool, but still a guy in a lion costume. They do attempt some effects in this film, such as the Scarecrow underwater. Not bad attempts for 1914.

As the film rolls along in its totally unorganized fashion, we also see another reason why audiences didn't react well to this film. They shot these films in the forests, streams and lakes that can be found just about anywhere. All they were giving the audience was people in bad costumes running around in someone's back yard, not visiting an enchanted world. This dizzying story, fraught with strange little dancing skits, doesn't give the audience of the day what they were looking for. This film was re-released after its initial run a second time as the New Wizard of Oz and it actually did better just because of a title change, because the Scarecrow is not a very exciting character in this film and that part gets lost by the time you get to the end. No wonder it did better. This kind of storytelling needed some more time for the artform of filmmaking to grow some more. It needed to wait until 1939.

4.4 (E- MyGrade) = 5 IMDB.

Baum's inept adaptation of a couple of his Oz books is a sad sight indeed. Shots are poorly framed, often excluding some of the actor's faces from view. The plot is moronic and the acting stale. The cast is much too large and he seems to throw in characters just to throw them in. The special effects are cheesy, especially when the Tin Woodsman chops off the Witch's head.

However, this silent film does feature an excellent performance by the man playing the Wizard and the young woman playing the Princess Ozma. There's a good, melodramatic concept, this young woman walking around with everyone left and right falling in love with her, and she being incapable of loving them back-- it makes for a good visual. But the rest of the film is just so incompetent that's it obscures its good points.

When his daughter Princess Gloria refuses to marry the courtier Googly-Goo he selected for her because she's in love with the Gardener's Boy Pon, wicked King Krewl takes the Princess to the evil witch Mombi in hopes the witch can cast a spell and destroy his daughter's love for Pon, a boy he considers beneath her station. Well, the Wicked Witch does eventually succeed in freezing the Princess's heart to all potential suitors. In the meantime, the Gardener's Boy Pon having followed the King's trail to Mombi's hut meets and befriends Dorothy (Violet MacMillan), a little Kansas girl taken prisoner by Mombi, helping her escape. Eventually the two, in their continued effort to escape and elude the Wicked Witch, meet up with the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman and eventually the Wizard of Oz. Together they try and devise a plan to deal with the Wicked Witch and remove King Krewl from power.

While it's truly fun to see so many of the most familiar Oz characters participating in a new story, this one feels all over the place it's so lacking in terms of good direction. In fact, this often feels as though they were deciding what was going to happen next as they were doing it. It's way too hard to keep track of all the different characters and there's way too many unnecessary sub-plots. The best and funniest scenes in this one tend to revolve around Old Mombi the Witch (as played by Mai Wells) and her continual pursuit of our heroes. How's she dealt with time and time again proves more and more creative each time around.

This was, of course, one of the early movies, and special effects were not an issue, for which we may be thankful in this day and age when many movies look more like video arcade games.

The plot is bizarre, to say the least. It borders between dream state and LSD trip. It would be interesting to know what early twentieth century audiences thought when they viewed this.

There a motley group of characters, and really, no one takes center stage all the time. People traipse aimlessly, meeting strange characters, and unique situations. Indeed, the wall of water would be a fresh idea as of the day of this critique.

There is a strange sexuality to this one. Super sexy witches dance around very sensually, and would be the envy of the scantily clad girls in today's movies. They are quite beautiful and striking. Again, audiences in this day must have been affected some way. It is too bad that the sexuality seems to be equated with witches, though. Sort of false advertising.

The music is probably too lame for today, and you may want to play your own while watching. Viewable mostly from an artistic perspective or in a social situation, and not as a sit down and watch movie.

This is the third and final film in Baum's personally produced Oz trilogy of 1914. The three pictures are all essentially the same childishness--with magic, a journey and animal costumes. The camera-work and pacing are static and primitive even by 1914 standards, while the performers are quite the opposite--both of which can get annoying and boring. We get poor framing, from a generally stationary position, and the shots linger on much longer than they should, while the performers, except for the literally cold-hearted princess, are in constant motion, mostly broadly gesticulating and doing some knockabout nonsense. Most of it has nothing to do with anything imaginative or with adventure, and I don't see how it could be humorous to anyone but a child. There is some trick photography, but nothing new; in fact, these tricks (superimpositions, stop substitutions, a fish tank between characters and the camera to represent being under the sea, a tilted camera to make them appear to be going up and down stream) had been in use for near a decade or more even by then. At least, the makers of this Oz trilogy put some care and energy, albeit a nauseating excess of it, in front of the camera although not behind it.

I wonder how popular these films were, although, apparently, they weren't popular enough, because Baum's production company was short lived. There doesn't seem to have been many movies back then which were so specifically targeted at children. The industry at the time, which was even before "The Birth of a Nation" (1915), was still struggling even to attract middle and upper class women to theatres. Times have certainly changed.