Return to Oz (1985)

Return to Oz (Walter Murch, 1985) In 1980, when Walter Murch talked to Disney about working on a project, the subject of L. Frank Baum's "Oz" books came up. Disney had acquired the series in 1954 and some filming had been done on an adaptation of later stories, but it was never completed, and the company's rights to do anything with them were about to expire. Murch and writer Gill Dennis started work on a screenplay based on threads and characters from later books in the series. When filming began, things turned contentious with a change in executive producers (Gary Kurtz out and Paul Maslansky in), Murch being fired for a time—and rehired with the assurances of George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg, and a regime-change at Disney which lost any interest in promoting the film as something different from what an audience saturated with memories of the 1939 musical would expect.

The result was a fascinating film, truer to Baum, but far different in tone from M-G-M's The Wizard of Oz.

The thing is, the films' DNA are so similar, it's the presentation that's very different.

Six months after Dorothy Gale (Fairuza Balk—10 years old at the time) survived the terrible twister that decimated her family's farm, she is still having sleepless nights and talking incessantly about her friends visited in another land far away from the flat colorless expanse of Kansas, even prattling on that a key she has found with what she interprets as the word "Oz" in the bow fell with a shooting star to tell her that they're in trouble. For her folks, Aunt Em' (Piper Laurie) and Uncle Harry (Matt Clark), who have troubles of their own and are still re-building and trying to scratch together a farming existence, this is not only impractical, but troubling. Perhaps it's time to see a specialist. An advertisement in the local paper gives Em' a possible solution.

Dr. J. B. Worley (Nicol Williamson) runs a local asylum and boasts great success using electroshock therapy ("It's the 20th Century! The age of electricity!") and, after some condescending questions about "Oz" and how she got back from there ("Where are those ruby slippers now?" "I lost them!"), he is only too quick to prescribe strapping Dorothy down and zapping her fantasies away. But, before the procedure can be performed, an electrical storm causes a power black-out, and Dorothy is saved by another little girl who escapes with her until they stumble in the dark and Dorothy falls into the river, a chicken coop providing her only life-line.

The next morning, she wakes up in Oz, but not the Oz she remembers—Munchkinland is in ruins, the yellow brick road is just rubble and everyone in the city of Oz, including the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Woodsman, has been turned to stone and King Scarecrow is missing! With the help of her favorite Kansas farm-chicken, Billina—who has followed her to Oz and can now talk—Dorothy manages to avoid capture by a roving pack of malicious "Wheelers" and uses her "Oz" key to open a door when she's trapped in a hallway to escape them.

She finds one of Oz's mechanical soldiers and reads the instructions how to start him up. Its name is "Tik-Tok" and with its help, Dorothy captures one of the Wheelers and they're told what has befallen the emerald city: Oz was attacked by the Nome King, who took the Scarecrow captive, turned all of the Ozians to stone and has plucked every last emerald from the city to his mountain-lair across the Deadly Desert, which will kill anyone who dares to walk across it. Dorothy is desperate to find the Scarecrow and the captured Wheeler tells her that Princess Mombi (played by three actresses—Jean Marsh, Sophie Ward, and Fiona Victory—for a reason), who lives now in Oz, can tell him what happened to the Straw-King.

The little party travels to the only part of Oz that hasn't fallen to ruin, where the Princess lives, and are informed that the Scarecrow has been taken captive by the Nome King. They also find out that Princess Mombi collects heads, and switches hers out whenever the fancy strikes her, bringing them to life with her Powder of Life (naturally...or unnaturally). Meeting Dorothy, she finds she has a good head on her shoulders, so she locks her up in her attic until Dorothy is old enough to be usable. Out the window attic, Dorothy can see the mountain of the Nome King, where the Scarecrow is held captive, enticingly in the distance across the Deadly Desert.

But, one finds all sorts of interesting things in attics—for example, there's Jack Pumpkinhead, who has been "powdered" into existence by Mombi, and together, he and Dorothy devise a plan to escape, using Jack's height and agility, a couch, a couple of plants and the mounted head of a Gump, but only if she can get downstairs and get the Princess's Powder of Life. Jack gets the door open, and starts to assemble their transport, while Dorothy sneaks down to Mombi's quarters while the headless princess sleeps. She is able to find the Powder, but not without waking up one of the heads, and while the Princess scrambles to find her head—or any head—Dorothy runs back up to attic, and just in the nick...she and her companions are able to hop on their Gump-plane and crash through their attic-prison window. It's off to the Nome King's mountain. 

More perils ensue, and Dorothy must play a game of wits with the Nome King if she wishes to save her friends, the Princess is after Dorothy after her escape, and there's also the matter of the mysterious girl who saved her back in Kansas. Dorothy must muddle through and save the day, before she can earn her reward to go back home, having made new friends and dispatched troubles and enemies.

Return to Oz did not perform well at the box office, perhaps due to the differences from the 1939 M-G-M musical with its dependence on sprightly songs and fantasy characters portrayed by heavily made-up (but easily recognized as) human actors with a distinctly vaudevillian approach to the material. There were also rumblings of the film being too scary for children, despite being given a "PG" rating (the more restrictive PG-13 rating had been available since Summer 1983), with its threatened electroshock therapy, scary characters like the Wheelers, a headless Princess Mombi, and decidedly evil Nome King (without the theatricality of, say, the Wicked Witch of the West).

This is is a bit disingenuous, as M-G-M's film also had a lot of traumatizing aspects, such as the flying monkeys, a liberal use of very real fire against the Scarecrow, and the intense hour-glass scene as Judy Garland's Dorothy is forced to watch her life run out.

To say nothing of a tornado that imperils Dorothy and crushes a character on its crash-landing in Oz; Baum's initial "Oz" books are rife with ingenious ways to traumatize Dorothy enough to get her back to her safe, if constantly jeopardized, fantasy-land. Let's be real about the fantasy—Oz is a sublimating dream-land caused by physical peril that helps Dorothy deal with the vagaries of real life (amplified in the movies, as in the original film, the Scarecrow, Woodsman and Lion all have Kansas counterparts as field-hands and the Wicked Witch is Kansas' worst-neighbor-in-the-world Elmira Gulch, and in Murch's follow-up, the Nome King is a manifestation of Dr. Worley and Mombi is his less-than-empathetic nurse).

Murch's cherry-picking of elements from Baum, particularly his sequels "The Marvelous Land of Oz" and "Ozma of Oz" is seamless, but complicated, and the added electroshock therapy peril is an ingenious way to threaten to "cure" Dorothy of her dreams, and a particularly cruel one, given their therapeutic value to the girl and, thus, the transposition of Worley with the Nome King is inspired (Baum used earthquakes and being swept off ocean liners as traumas in the books but the doctor intends to rob the girl of her "safe-place" making the cure worse than the disease).

Murch's presentation might also be somewhat disturbing, but in a very basic way: the 1939 "musical" was all done on sound-stages, even the Kansas scenes, giving the film a safer, artificial look, but in Return to Oz, things are filmed on location outside, giving a heightened sense of reality—even the ruined Oz is filmed with natural light, which might have had a subliminal effect on the reality of the movie, making it more menacing.

Perhaps that's an overreach, but the reaction to Murch's Oz film was more in its relationship to the musical version of Oz than to itself as its own adaptation of Baum (and one should remember that, although a critical success, The Wizard of Oz was not considered a box-office success that year, only making back its costs with a 1949 re-release). And, that is a big factor. M-G-M's version had traumatizing elements, sure, but sublimated it with a happy tune every 10 minutes in a constant bi-polar yin-yang of emotion—danger/release-danger/release.

Return to Oz didn't have that steady stream of emotional tonic to off-set the troubles, merely showing the resolution of those troubles in the story-line. Without the constant insulin-drip of song cluing audiences in to how people were feeling, The Wizard of Oz would be alarming, as well, inspiring folks to look for a soothing poppy-field somewhere.

I remember Roger Ebert's review of The Phantom Menace, where he wrote: "If it were the first 'Star Wars' movie, 'The Phantom Menace' would be hailed as a visionary breakthrough. But this is the fourth movie of the famous series, and we think we know the territory" By comparison to the earlier films (and, more importantly, our memories of them), The Phantom Menace came up short. But, taken on its own, it's still an amazing movie—it just didn't have all the inter-species hugging and celebrating of A New Hope.

And that may be the issue: Return to Oz is an amazing, smart intricate little film that actually does right by Baum, even improving on his spare style a bit. But its charms are ones of the intellect, rather than the Garland musical vehicle, wearing its heart on its sleeve.

It really should come as no surprise, really, that we would find more endearing the Tin Woodsman, always in danger of rusting from his own tears, than we would the Scarecrow, who only had a brain.

Oz help us all.