Glamour in The Wizard of Oz

Old Hollywood glamour is Jean Harlow lounging suggestively in a white satin gown or Fred Astaire sweeping Ginger Rogers across a ballroom floor; Rita Hayworth peeling off long black gloves or Greta Garbo staring mysteriously off to sea. It is decidedly not a gingham-clad, jolie laide farm girl and her scrappy little dog. Dorothy, Toto, and their companions may be beloved — familiar family friends introduced by each generation to the next. In our fond memories, however, they do not qualify as glamorous.

But now that The Wizard of Oz has survived its 70th anniversary and is about to get high-definition release in theaters and on DVD, it is time to reassess. The Wizard of Oz is actually one of the studio era's most emotionally sophisticated explorations of glamour. It does not offer us a luxuriously attired starlet or languid, sexy scenes. Instead, the movie shows us how glamour works. Glamour offers a lucid glimpse of desire fulfilled — if only life could be like that, if only we could be there, if only we could be like them, if I only had a ...

In The Wizard of Oz, the principal characters aren't the objects of glamour. They're its audience: the dreamers who imagine their lives transformed and who learn, over the course of the film, that even illusions can reveal inner truths.

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The Wizard of Oz will be shown in theaters on Wednesday evening. For information on locations and tickets, click here.

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Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 22, 2009