What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1939

The Year: 1939

What the Nominees Were: Dark Victory, Gone With the Wind, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Love Affair, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Of Mice and Men, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: That’s a pretty good list. I also love Destry Rides Again and, if we stretch to foreign films, The Rules of the Game.

What Did Win: Gone with the Wind

How It’s Aged: Terribly. It’s flat-out pro-slavery and pro-Klan. It’s still a stirring epic, with an admirably complex love story, and the best thing about it is the expressionistic art direction, but it’s not as watchable as you remember it. The entire second half of the film is forgettable and aimless. Even if you’re willing to overlook the movie’s massive moral failings, you still may want to turn it off at intermission.

What Should’ve Won: The Wizard of Oz
How Hard Was the Decision: Fairly hard, because there were so many great movies this year, and it’s hard to imagine the Academy existing in any form and not giving the award to Gone with the Wind, but The Wizard of Oz was also nominated, and, in retrospect, clearly should have won. It’s aged the best of any movie from the 1930s. 

Director: Victor Fleming (and other uncredited directors) (Fleming was also the credited director on Gone with the Wind, though that was also a case where he took over a troubled production)
Writers: Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf, based on “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum
Stars: Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger

The Story: Young Dorothy Gale and her dog Toto are swept away by a tornado from their Kansas farm to the magical Land of Oz and embark on a quest with three new friends to see the Wizard, who can return her to her home and fulfill the others’ wishes.

Any Nominations or Wins: It was nominated for six. It lost for Picture, Art Direction, and Special Effects. It won Best Original Song for “Over the Rainbow”, Best Original Score and an Academy Juvenile Award for Garland.
Why It Didn’t Win: Nothing could have stood up to the Gone with the Wind juggernaut, and certainly not Wizard of Oz, a notorious bomb that had lost a million dollars for MGM. For this book, I have something they didn’t have: the benefit of hindsight.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. This is just such a perfect time capsule of the golden age of Hollywood. Every time I watch it, I have to keep reminding myself that the movie, most of which takes place outdoors (whether in Kansas or Oz) shot every frame indoors, with studio lighting and dioramas in the background. Every flower and ear of corn is papier mache. And yet, even when I remind myself, I keep getting sucked into the perfect illusion and I forget again. This is the ultimate product of the dream machine at its peak.
   
   
   
2. But that doesn’t explain why this movie has aged better than any other movie of the 1930s. At the time of this writing, it’s showing at the Sphere in Las Vegas, for $100 a ticket. Of course, one reason is that so much of the movie is in glorious technicolor. It took me a long time to realize that there were three great color movies of the 1930s (this, GWTW and Robin Hood), but very few great American color films of the 1940s. It would take Brits like Michael Powell to remind America of its own brilliant invention and reignite America’s love of color ten years later.
3. Edgar “Yip” Harburg was a Socialist songwriter who often wrote songs to tug the public consciousness like “Hey Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.” His songs in this movie are less political than that, but his social conscious still infuses them with a bit more power than they might otherwise have.
4. The problem is that you’ve probably watched this movie so many times that there’s nothing I can say to get you to check it out again. But there’s so much you’ve missed! The Scarecrow has a handgun when they leave Oz’s palace the first time! (Then it disappears. He lost in the Jitterbug number that was cut)
   
5. It is absolutely crazy how long this movie goes in Kansas: It doesn’t turn to color until 19 minutes in. The studio had a solution: Cut “Over the Rainbow”. But that would of course have been a huge mistake. In fact, the 19 black and white minutes is the secret of this movie’s success. Readers of the book are surprised to find that the idea that Kansas was grey and colorless is right there on the page. The more time Dorothy spends in her colorless, bleak world, the more we long for that explosion of color we know is coming, and the more we appreciate it. (The Sphere, by the way, abridges the movie and cuts most of the black and white out. You can’t expect to see a whole movie for just $100.)

Ah, 1939: