A Study Guide for L. Frank Baum's "Wizard of Oz, The (film entry)"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for L. Frank Baum's "Wizard of Oz, The (film entry)," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535840576

Book preview

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The Wizard of Oz (Film entry)

L. Frank Baum

1939

Introduction

In the years since Victor Fleming's film The Wizard of Oz, based on the novel by L. Frank Baum, was released in 1939, it has become one of the foundations of American, indeed world, popular culture. Baum's novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, had been a children's classic ever since its publication in 1900 and had already been filmed several times—once with Baum himself as the director—as well as adapted into musical stage plays. But the 1939 film became an American classic, as beloved as any film ever made in Hollywood, familiar to practically everyone and the source of such universally remembered lines as There's no place like home, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore, and Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. The film turned a beloved children's book into an enduring secular myth that is a touchstone of the American imagination.

Plot Summary

The Wizard of Oz begins in Kansas. On screen it is a gray dustbowl world that might come from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, an America wracked by the Great Depression, an image that comes from Baum's sojourn on the plains of South Dakota during the depression of the 1890s. Baum makes a point of noting that Dorothy could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Even her Uncle Henry was gray also. But Baum says as little else as possible about Kansas, and the long segments of the film set in Kansas are largely new inventions. Dorothy, just back from school, plays around her aunt and uncle's farmyard, where she is rescued from the pigpen by their three farmhands, Hank, Zeke, and Hickory. Almira Gulch, an unpleasant but wealthy woman, soon arrives on her bicycle with an order from the sheriff that Dorothy's dog, Toto, be destroyed because he nipped at her once. She leaves with the dog, but Toto escapes from her clutches and runs home, and Dorothy decides that she has no choice but to escape also. When she runs away from home she gets as far as the wagon of Professor Marvel, a traveling stage magician. Pretending to use his magic powers to see the future and what is happening far off, he persuades her to go back home, but a tornado is coming, and her aunt and uncle and the farmhands have taken shelter in the storm cellar. Dorothy, however, looks for them in the house and is inside it when the cyclone arrives. She is immediately hit on the head by flying debris and knocked unconscious. In the film, everything that happens from this point on, until she wakes up back in Kansas, seems to be some sort of fevered dream of Dorothy's. This is perhaps the film's greatest departure from the book, where there is no