M-G-M MEETS L. FRANK BAUM! (Part Eight)

 by John Fricke            

[Above:  Courtesy original Oz artist, William Wallace Denslow, this is the Wicked Witch of the West as she was known to millions of Ozzy fans from 1900–1938. Margaret Hamilton and the magic of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would change all that in 1939, but the image here shows L. Frank Baum’s classic menace with her conical hat put aside; instead, she’s wearing the magic Golden Cap that she uses to summon the Winged Monkeys. That bit of chapeau sorcery was actually included in the MGM film, but the scene was trimmed from the release print. One can still see the Witch’s winged monkey hand the cap to her in the movie, however, and she tosses it across her Tower Room during the Poppy Field segment: “Curse it! Curse it! Somebody always helps that girl! . . . .”]

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(Note: This is the eighth installment of our 2024-2025 blog series, celebrating the 85^th anniversary of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s classic 1939 film version of THE WIZARD OF OZ. Each month -- through this coming July, and sequence by sequence -- we compare the content of the motion picture with author L. Frank Baum’s original story of THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ, first published in 1900. The entry presented here describes further major differences between the two: in the book, Dorothy and her friends have but one encounter with the Wicked Witch of the West, whereas MGM sets up that character as a conspicuous threat that begins during our heroine’s first moments in Munchkinland. So, please keep reading and you’ll learn what MGM left in, crossed out, or added to Baum’s plot and characterizations! (Pictures from the motion picture herewith are recognizable; the remaining ten are among those drawn by W. W. Denslow for the first edition of Baum’s book.)

L. Frank Baum describes our friends’ departure from the Emerald City in no uncertain terms. The Guardian of the Gate admits to them that there is “no road” to the Wicked Witch’s domain, as “no one ever wishes to go that way.” In kindly fashion, he suggests that Dorothy and Company keep to the West, “where the sun sets . . . for when [the Witch] knows you are in the country of the Winkies, she will find you and make you all her slaves.” Despite his well-intentioned warning, the five set out across “fields of soft grass dotted here and there with daisies and buttercups”; at night, “Dorothy and Toto and the Lion . . . lay down upon the grass and fell asleep, with the Woodman and the Scarecrow keeping watch.”

It’s not until this juncture in his book -- as Baum sends our heroes to find her -- that the all-time harridan of intrinsic evil is first brought into the OZ saga. (The author even manages to cram her actual appearance into a single chapter.) Baum’s Wicked Witch, however, is not dressed exclusively in black, nor does she possess green skin and a hooked nose and chin; her basic garb and visage can be seen in Art # 1 above. That being said, this “first” WWW does boast one distinctive physical characteristic: she has “but one eye . . . as powerful as a telescope [that] could see everywhere.” By this means, she spies on our friends in their overnight rest, and for the next five pages of text, Baum paints a concise, believable, and surely vivid picture of someone who has no agenda but to violently rid her country of invaders. In an intentionally succinct manner, the writer describes several groups of her heinous hench-creatures, sent to destroy the Fab Five, and his off-handed and casual journalism may well have been constructed to withstand undue upset for young readers.

With great dispatch, Baum describes the Tin Woodman’s decapitation of the Witch’s forty violent wolves, the Scarecrow’s neck-twisting of her forty evil crows, and the straw man’s momentary sacrifice of his straw so that it might serve as a coverlet to hide Dot, Toto, and the Lion from her swarm of black bees. (The insects thus have only the Tin Woodman to attack; in the process, they break their stings and meet their own end in that fashion.) When the increasingly furious Witch notes all of this from afar, she sends an army of a dozen Winkie to make hash of the travelers, yet one roar from the Cowardly Lion sends them flying. (As has been shown in past editions of the 2014-2025 blog series, Denslow’s art – specifically that just below of the Scarecrow drawing the crows to their doom! -- is sometimes intentionally incorporated into a page of actual text.)

The Witch is now bereft of her personal armies but retains possession of a mystic Golden Cap by which she can make three requests of the extraordinary Winged Monkeys of Oz. (Their history – and bondage to the Cap – will be told in next month’s blog.) She uses her third and final wish in a last attempt to rid herself of the somehow invincible troupe from the Emerald City that continues to advance on her Castle; the leader of the Monkey pack can only salute and soar off with his fellows to obey her command. Per the Witch’s mandate: All of the travelers are to be destroyed except the Cowardly Lion, whom she intends to “harness . . . like a horse and make him work.” The simians quickly de-straw and scatter the Scarecrow, while the Woodman is lifted high in the sky and dropped onto sharp rocks that decimate his body. Finally, the Lion is bound by multiple Monkeys, flown to the Witch’s Castle, and imprisoned in “a small yard with a high iron fence around it.”

The leader of the Monkeys then flies up to Dorothy, “his ugly face grinning terribly.” He literally stops in flight, however, when he sees the mark of the kiss of the Good Witch of the North on her forehead (dating back to the little girl’s arrival in Oz). He instructs his companions that no one is to harm her or the dog she holds in her arms, and (in Baum’s sage and hopeful philosophy) the Monkey leader notes that “she is protected by the Power of Good and that is greater than the Power of Evil.” Dorothy and Toto are then gently lifted and carried to the Witch’s Castle, and the Monkeys disburse.

The Wicked Witch is equally alarmed by the shielding kiss on the child’s forehead but really begins “to tremble with fear” when noting the Silver Shoes on her feet. Yet it is quickly apparent to the Evil One that Dorothy is innocent of soul and has no knowledge of “the wonderful power” of her footwear. So, the girl becomes a slave in the Castle – a scullery maid-of-all-work -- and her only moments of comfort come when she sneaks out to the Lion’s cage overnight to feed, console, and confer with him about their seemingly impossible means of escape. (The Lion has refused to play horse to the Witch’s carriage, so she has refused him food; the Kansas girl secretly supplies him every night.)

Baum intersperses information about the captives with randomly scattered – and in some cases foreshadowing -- notes about the Witch herself: how much she wants the Silver Shoes, how much she is afraid of dark, and how she has an even greater fear of water: “She never touched [it] or let [it] touch her in any way. . .. Once, the Witch struck Toto a blow with her umbrella, and the brave little dog flew at her and bit her leg in return. [But] the Witch did not bleed where she was bitten, for she was so wicked that the blood in her had dried up many years before.”

Finally, the Witch is no longer able to control her desire for the shoes. She places “a bar of iron across the kitchen floor” and then makes “the bar invisible to human eyes.” Dorothy thus unwittingly stumbles over it, losing a shoe in the process; chortling with hateful glee, the Witch pounces on it. The Kansas child turns on her, demanding its return, but the Witch only taunts her and vows to eventually claim the other as well.

With the spunk that made her famous, Dorothy Gale of Kansas angrily turns on the creature and “picks up the bucket of water” that stands nearby. She dashes it over the Witch, “wetting her from head to foot.” The wicked woman gave an instantaneous and “loud cry of fear . . .and began to shrink and fall away . . . like brown sugar before [Dorothy’s] very eyes.” At the very end, the sorceress proclaims, “I never thought a little girl like you would ever be able to melt me and end my wicked deeds. Look out – here I go!”

The last that one sees of the WWW in Baum’s story comes after she’s fallen “down in a brown, melted, shapeless mass [that] spread over the clean boards of the kitchen floor.” In turn, “Dorothy drew another bucket of water . . . threw it over the mess [and] then swept it all out the door.” The girl then cleans out her Silver Shoe, puts it on again, and runs to tell the Lion in the courtyard “that they were no longer prisoners in a strange land.”

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When they came to this part of the OZ shooting script, MGM managed to coalesce several elements of Baum, while – as in earlier scenes of the film – going their own way as well. They even semi-softened the basic idea for the characters’ trek to the West: the motion picture Wizard demands “the broomstick of the Witch” – not her demise. Of course, Jack Haley’s Tin Man is quick to point out that “We’d have to kill her to get it,” and Lahr the Lion conjectures, “What if she kills us first?” So, the concept of alleviating worry for the kids in the audience (these past 86 years) perhaps ends as more an uneasy possibility than an assuagement. 

As has been discussed, Baum’s WWW pretty much came and went in one chapter, but Metro’s villain was scarcely limited to a single segment of the film. She swoops into the 1939 motion picture early on and remains a recurring “in person” threat – and a psychological sword of Damocles. First scripted into Munchkinland, she then materializes in an orchard, perches on a rooftop and on her sky-writing broom, and swirls about in her horrorific castle. There she has in her control a magic crystal ball, a font of poison, and a clipped-wing monkey “familiar.” (For completists, I’m happy to note that she had also been spied as Miss Gulch – at the Gale farm, on the country road, and “up inside the cyclone” -- where she becomes . . . the Wicked Witch of the East?)

Regardless, the movie has become so familiar to (and so cherished by) so many that the rest of this blog will be offered in a pictorial treatment of MGM’s trip to the Winkie Country. Some of the art is familiar, some of it is rare – and some of it is drawn from moments never seen in the finished film. Here below, the intrepid crew has just made it as far as – per the notice at left -- the Haunted Forest. The signpost also notes that the Witches Castle is one mile hence while cautioning, “I’d turn back if I were you.” (The Oz crew comes comically armed for the occasion with a giant spray gun of Witch Remover, an oversize net and wrench, and a tiny pistol.) When the Lion manifests terror, the Tin Man pooh-poohs the idea of attendant spooks; for his disregard, Jack Haley is smoothly hoisted into the air by the powers of the unseen Witch (although it’s his stunt double who then abruptly and clankingly drops to the Forest floor). In confessional admission, the Lion quickly goes into a fervent, spiritual chant, “I do believe in spooks! I do believe in spooks!”

All of this is monitored – via crystal ball -- by the Witch in her Tower Room. She confers with Nikko, her Winged Monkey companion, and then directs another primate to take “his army to the Haunted Forest and bring me that girl and her dog. Do what you like with the others, but I want her alive and unharmed. They’ll give you no trouble, I promise you that; I’ve sent a little insect on ahead to take the fight out of them.” (The first of these two photos below show Margaret Hamilton’s first days of filming under director Richard Thorpe, who would be fired two weeks into production. Here at the onset, however, the Witch’s hair is down – in a sort of Tracy Turnblad/HAIRSPRAY flip – and her nose and chin have yet to be elongated. The next two images offer contrasting views of the A. Arnold “Buddy” Gillespie long shots of his miniature rubberized monkey “marionettes.” One is seemingly a test frame of the rear projection of the footage on its own; the other shows the Witch acting in front of that film and exhorting her legions to “Fly! Fly!”

The “little insect” she references is, of course, “The Jitterbug” – an animated, pink and blue spotted mosquito who would arrive in the Forest, bite our friends, and send them into a wild and exhausting swing-time song-and-dance, leaving them too weary to fight off the coming Monkeys. Below is a set reference still for the “Jitter Forest,” plus a posed still of what seems to be the onset of the number, and a film frame from composer Harold Arlen’s home movies of part of the routine during a dress rehearsal. (“The Jitterbug” was cut from THE WIZARD OF OZ after its first preview/test screening in June 1939 for several reasons; perhaps the most sensible one indicates that the film didn’t need an upbeat song and silly choreography to interrupt a sequence of extremely harrowing storytelling.)

At the conclusion of the number – or ultimately (in the final version) on the immediate heels of the Witch’s directive to “Fly!” – the Monkeys soar from the MGM soundstage rafters to combat our friends. There were about a dozen diminutive men in costumes augmenting the scores of background rubber miniatures; a complex arrangement of piano wire served to “travel” them all. The three visuals below offer: 1) a glimpse of OZ director of record, Victor Fleming, on the set floor, overseeing the Monkeys’ approach; 2) costumed simians preparing to pick up Judy Garland and fly her into the rafters (it’s Judy here; her double, Bobbie Koshay, would be photographed from behind and do the actual feet-off-the-ground stunt for that moment of the scene); and 3) what’s left of the Scarecrow after the Monkeys get through with him. (That dispersal of straw was Metro’s only acknowledgement of Baum’s book moment when the Scarecrow and Tin Man were actively destroyed.)

“How kind of you to visit me in my loneliness . . . .” Dorothy is now a prisoner of the Wicked Witch, who threatens to have Nikko toss the basket shown below into the river beneath the Castle. Toto is captive in the wicker container, and the second of these pictures again harks back to Richard Thorpe’s brief stint on the film – when Maggie’s hair was down, and Judy wore a different dress, different shoes, an overextended blonde wig, and a whole lot of baby-doll make-up. To prevent Toto’s death, Dorothy agrees to relinquish the coveted ruby slippers. The close-up here – the fourth picture just below -- is a film frame of the moment the WWW reaches for her prize. In the actual movie, her greed wins her what seems to be a fierce shock. (Buddy Gillespie achieved that with a vivid, superimposed film of a burst of electricity – NOT, as modern-day and internet legend would have it, with a spurt of apple juice.) Finally, the third photo of this illustrated quartet again shows director Fleming, “in conference” with heroine, villain, and monkey; please note Judy’s temporary, more comfortable footwear.

As the Witch recovers from her shock, she remembers and glares at Dorothy: “Those slippers will never come off -- as long . . . as you’re . . . alive.” Her threat is disrupted when Toto suddenly jumps out of the basket, soars down the Witch’s Castle steps, crosses the drawbridge (here amidst a crowd of Winkie Guards), and departs to organize a rescue party of the friends left behind in the Haunted Forest. Dorothy’s shouted encouragement (“Run, Toto, run!”) and the Witch’s disbelieving consternation are shown in the second photo, and she turns on the girl in photo three to curse, “Drat you and your dog! You’ve been more trouble to me than your worth in one way or another . . . but it’ll soon be over now.” (These stills were taken during director Thorpe’s days; in the film, Toto does escape from the pursuing Winkie Guards and their spears – and leaps the gap in the drawbridge – but is never surrounded as shown below. And both Miss Garland and Miss Hamilton are again presented here in their early make-up, hair, and costume facades.)

Holding one of the all-time unforgettable implements of psychological torture (“THAT’S how much longer you’ve got to be alive!”), the WWW serves notice on Dorothy and locks her in the Tower Room. Judy’s emotional breakdown here originally included a few sung-through-tears lines of “Over the Rainbow”; these were trimmed from the scene before OZ premiered, but the girl’s fleeting hope at seeing and hearing her aunt in the Witch’s Crystal remains – and is shockingly truncated when Hamilton’s visage suddenly appears instead (“I’ll give you ‘Aunty Em,’ my pretty!”). In a 1962 interview, actress Hamilton may have had this sequence in mind when she admitted the fact that “There were some scenes even I was appalled at!” when she first viewed OZ some 23 years earlier.

Meanwhile, Toto has roused the trio of wonderful friends of Dorothy and is leading them up a craggy Winkie mountain as a rescue party. The square block inside the derriere of Bert Lahr’s costume provided an anchor for his guide-rope tail, but when pulled by Jack Haley, the foundation is (if briefly) all-too-obvious and remains one of the few odd and glaring visual indiscretions in the OZ motion picture. Another is so fleeting, however, that most viewers haven’t even noticed it: In a couple of long-shots of the threesome as they climb, it’s their doubles who are doing the work (not Bolger, Lahr, and Haley) – and the Lion sports an almost unbelievably ratty costume.

Near the mountain’s peak, our friends’ first glimpse “that awful place . . . the Castle of the Wicked Witch.” Even though merely a crayon matte painting, it’s a real and evocative enough image to momentarily halt their advance – as is the formatted drill-marching and chanting of the Winkie Guards beneath them (“O-Ee-Yah! Eoh-Ah!”). The Lion, Tin Man, and Scarecrow manage to majestically triumph over a trifecta of those sentinel soldiers and appropriate their gear so as to sneak into the Castle itself. Toto intrepidly leads them up the staircase to the locked doors of the Tower Room, and the last two photos just below capture the moment before the Tin Man chops Dorothy free. The first of these shows the Thorpe era actors: Lahr and Bolger flank the Tin Man, here played by Buddy Ebsen. (This was one of the few scenes the latter managed to film for OZ before an allergic reaction to the aluminum dust in his facial make-up sent him to hospitalization in an iron lung). The second still, of course, offers Ebsen’s successor in the role, Jack Haley.

A succeeding moment is shown next and indicates both the contrasting cast members and directorial approaches. As Thorpe guided the troupe’s attempt to escape from the Witch’s Castle – only to find themselves trapped by her magically-controlled cathedral doors – he kept our heroes in their almost unimaginably hot Winkie garb. (It’s Ebsen again, on the left, with the blonde Judy to his left.) Victor Fleming, of course, had to reshoot the scene some six weeks later -- with Haley, and with Judy more-or-less herself in appearance -- but he mercifully had the actors shuck their warrior array prior to making their running dash for the exit.

MGM’s demise of the Wicked Witch of the West is portrayed in a more elaborate (all stars on deck!) and much more Dorothy-sympathetic manner than in Baum’s historical summation. Instead of angrily tossing a bucketful at the old crone for stealing one of her shoes, the little girl only launches the water to save one of her friends, whom the WWW has set to blaze: “How about a little fire, Scarecrow?” In the process, the strawman is blessedly spared, the gruesome villain is dispatched, and Dorothy’s basic innocence is assured. Below, the principals observe director Fleming as he prepares to wet down the dry ice under Margaret Hamilton’s hem, so as to steam up her floor-through departure. Next, both a posed still and a film frame convey that self-same moment of truth -- and the last image offers the grateful Winkies (out from under the evil control of their all-wet mistress), as they present Dorothy with the broomstick our five friends need to offer to the Wizard of Oz himself in order to claim their personal gifts.

In the movie, of course, we’re next and instantaneously back in the Emerald City Throne Room – and the hope for presentations abounds. In the book, however, there’s much more work to be done in the Winkie Country before our champions can head “back East,” plus a bit of Ozian back-story about the Golden Cap, the Winged Monkeys (they turn out to be good guys, too!) – and even a triumphal return by the Queen of the Field Mice.

Next time! 😊 And meanwhile, thank you for reading!

Article by John Fricke