ROAD TO PERDITION (Sam Mendes, 2002)

Sam Mendes’s Road to Perdition, based on a graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner, is a lame film, I suppose, in many ways, but I don’t think it merits the critical derision that it has received point-blank. To be sure, the story is farfetched—unbelievable, really, and the style is both selfconscious and inflated (as was the case with Mendes’s first film, American Beauty, 1999). Moreover, the narrative framing must elude anyone’s literal comprehension, for a 12-year-old voice speaks for the man that the narrating boy (presumably) becomes, referring to his boyhood experiences, and experiences that came after, in the past tense. The boy, Michael Sullivan, Jr., even says something that likely isn’t so: he claims his confrontation with his father’s killer was the last time that he held a gun. A boy who was twelve in 1931 America would have likely carried a gun fighting in World War II. But “literal comprehension” becomes irrelevant here, as the film is frozen in myth. It stills time to the aching point of an experience shared by a father and son during six adventurous weeks in the winter of 1931.

First things first. The protagonist of this film is not who at first glance it appears to be. The central character of Road to Perdition is not Michael Sullivan, Jr., whose mother and younger brother are killed in their home by the self-serving son of regional Irish mob boss John Rooney, Connor Rooney, who in fact was gunning for Michael Jr., after the latter witnessed an internal mob killing he and Michael Sr. executed. Rather, the central figure is Michael Sullivan, Sr., who experiences a delayed education of the affections; now that they have been thrown together in a life-and-death situation, through the agency of his son he learns how to be a father for the first time. On the road, both in flight from the mob to which the father belonged and on a mission to avenge the murders of his wife and younger son, Michael Sr. opens up, for the first time, to the son whose life he is now desperate to protect—a son he has heretofore pushed away for fear that the boy, so eerily like him, would go down the same road to perdition he chose in order to raise his family from poverty and provide for them nicely: the possibility that working for John Rooney offered.

Michael Sr., an executioner so skilled he is known as the Angel of Death, is an evil man—a man steeped in spilt blood from countless cold-blooded murders. As Tom Hanks (à la Olivier, with a false nose) brilliantly plays him, he is a man beyond all redemption, whose Roman Catholicism and patient, dutiful wife, Annie (Jennifer Jason Leigh, eloquent in a small role), provide the grounding that enables him to rationalize his totally evil existence. Beyond redemption, and yet redeemed by his son in their six weeks on the road: this is the paradox at the soft heart of this sentimental film. There is irony, too, for the spirited and highly adaptable intelligence Michael Sr. demonstrates as he twists and turns both to keep his son and himself alive and to track down Connor Rooney, now being hidden away by Rooney’s father, suggests that he might easily have gone as far, even farther, down some legal road in the American economy. But the central paradox trumps this irony, providing a view of Michael Sr. as morally elastic: a father, after all. To penetrate his surviving son’s thick and guilt-ridden head, he asserts paternal authority perhaps for the first time in their lives, yelling at the boy with a fierceness like a laser to the soul. Now that there’s nothing to hide (i.e., Michael Jr. now knows what Michael Sr. does for a living), he opens up to the boy, sharing intimate conversation. And, in the one hilarious passage of an otherwise glum and grim film, Michael Sr. teaches Michael Jr. how to drive their vehicle so that the boy can assist him in their joint venture to survive and prevail. We watch the familiar humanization of evil right before our eyes. This doesn’t eradicate the evil—Michael Sr. remains to the finish a vicious man,—but it suggests two possibilities: that familial feelings can co-exist with evil promptings (thus it’s conceivable, say, that George W. Bush really loves his daughters); and, beyond that, but for a different turn or sign any one of us, under certain circumstances, might have gone down Michael Sr.’s road to perdition. Evil, then, isn’t someone’s original calling or state of being; it’s the accumulation of experience as it weighs on and warps the soul.

The film is overloaded with extraneous melodrama. The subplot wherein John Rooney is Michael Sr.’s surrogate father and must choose between Michael and Connor insults our intelligence. Paul Newman’s good acting is insufficient to counter the absurdity of this sentimental goo. Rather, the film is fine when it keeps on track, showing how not only Michael’s son but also a decent, older farming couple, who take in and nurse Michael Sr. back to health after he has been shot, contribute to Michael’s moral education. They also during that brief time give Michael Jr. a home—a home to which he will be able to return once he is completely orphaned. The implication touches the heart: this random couple do what any countless number of decent people would have done. This is antidote to the film’s relentless canvas of monstrous, murderous acts, and, within the action of the film, it is for Michael Sr. partial antidote for the evil impulses that hold his nature in its grip.

Some, including Roger Ebert, have criticized the film for denying the characters free will. On the contrary, the film implies that Michael Sr.’s narrowed “free will” to choose good over evil is the consequence of a choice he made long ago to go down a particular road, and each murderous stop along the way has further sapped this freedom of choice, keeping him on this hellish road. This is a far more complex situation than the film’s detractors suggest, and it’s underscored by the most heated debate between John Rooney and Michael Sr., with stunning irony set in a church basement, when the latter tries to persuade the former to give up his son, Connor. Michael calls Connor a murderer, and Rooney counters that there are only murderers in the room and that the course of their lives was set by their decision to follow this course. Rooney remarks that it’s certainly the case that none of them will ever get to Heaven—a poignant admission from a devout Roman Catholic. Indeed, the film implies also the corruption of the Catholic clergy itself, who aid and abet the mobsters for financial gain, and who would betray in an instant their sacred obligations to further the mob’s cause. Thus, early on, when Michael Sr., pursuing his vengeful mission, gives his son a pistol and tells Michael Jr. to seek help if he doesn’t return within thirty minutes, he warns the boy to go to the local Methodist minister, not Father Callaway. The implication is that, to protect the financial support that the mob tenders the church, the Catholic priest would turn Michael Jr. over to the Rooneys in a heartbeat. Terrifying.

Other, more serious charges have been leveled against the film. The most pressing of these comes from a reviewer I totally respect: J. Hoberman, of the Village Voice, who describes the film as “pulp that aspires to Greek tragedy. The rain machine works overtime in this gloomy tale of Depression-era gangsters as they (and their sons) stalk each other through a sepulchral Chicago and across the bleak Midwest.” I know the feeling, but I would frame it differently, perhaps grasping the perspective of Mendes on this occasion, a British Tocqueville. Isn’t it the point that America is “pulp that aspires to Greek tragedy”? Consider two things. One is America’s romance with black-and-white reductiveness while all the while insisting on the grandness of her endeavors: democracy, manifest destiny, you-name-it. Here, the black-and-white reductiveness is wittily rendered by the black-and-white Lone Ranger book with which Michael Jr. intently occupies himself, searching in it for parallels between its characters and himself and his father. It is also rendered by the black-and-white insertions in this color film and, in frame after frame, the film’s tendency towards black and white and other sober monochromatic presentations. (As in American Beauty, Mendes’s cinematographer is Conrad L. Hall, who won his third Oscar for this, his final film.) At the same time, Michael Sr.’s mission of revenge, which endangers the son he is ostensibly trying to protect, is very grand—this, as antidote to the smallness of his existence. Michael’s life is “pulp that aspires to Greek tragedy,” for this is one way that anonymous Americans can stake a claim to the grand myths of a nation that does a very poor job of invigorating the lives of its people. The other sense in which “pulp that aspires to Greek tragedy” describes the America that in fact Mendes is attempting to describe involves America’s romance with violence—violence so historically deeply rooted that, for the sake of its contrary self-image, America is always trying to rationalize it where it cannot deny it. (Denial has always been America’s first line of defense.) These rationalizations again lead America, and Americans, to those myths that insist on America’s being a special case, a nation with which Providence peculiarly concerns itself. Thus its horrible aspects—slavery, for instance—aren’t interpreted in a nuts-and-bolts way as revelatory of the greed and unconscionable cruelty of networks of individuals founded in indecent impulses and prejudices; they are seen as “tragic,” as though America isn’t responsible for America, as though whatever is awful about America is out of America’s hands. Mind you, actual tragedy (as a literary form) is all about responsibility and about taking responsibility, but America has a tendency to sentimentalize everything, including tragedy. Yes, everything we see in Road to Perdition is “pulp that aspires to . . . tragedy,” but that’s not a fault of the film but, rather, part of the film’s vision of America.

Mendes, unfortunately, can’t resist sentimentalizing Michael Sr.’s death at the hands of Harlen Maguire (Jude Law, bringing scarcely anything to the role), a freelancing photographer of murder victims who enhances his workload by doubling as a hired killer. The Angel of Death has met another Angel of Death, and both in fact kill one another in a poorly devised scene of Woo-goo. (John Woo, that is.) The scene is preposterous to begin with, because the vacated setting, Michael’s sister-in-law’s place in Perdition, doesn’t instantly alert him that a killer is afoot on the premises. (We instantly realize this.) Moreover, we are reminded here of the one other inconceivable thing Michael has done, that is to say, not warning his wife’s sister, Sarah, that Maguire knows he is on his way to her place. This oversight has likely resulted in her pointless execution and, if she had a family, in theirs. Only the family dog, whom Michael Jr. adopts, remains on the grounds. Now Michael Sr. also has fallen victim to Maguire, through the same carelessness, unless one opts for the impossible notion that he is embracing his own end even at the expense of orphaning and endangering his son. The whole scene is a mess, then: a mess built on another mess. And while it rounds out a thematic point, that Michael Jr. can’t shoot dead Maguire, showing that he isn’t as much like his father as his father once feared, the messiness tends to lose the ironic parallel that Mendes has drawn between the mob and the tabloid press. Indeed, David Self’s script falters on a number of occasions, and Thomas Newman’s lugubrious music accounts for another of the film’s defects.

I have not yet mentioned a wonderful performance—the very best one in the film, perhaps. (Tyler Hoechlin is no more than adequate as Michael Jr.) Stanley Tucci is extraordinary as Frank Nitti, a calm, practiced, management-type Chicago mobster. The supporting-actor Oscar nomination that went to Paul Newman should have gone to Tucci instead.

The credits list Anthony LaPaglia as Al Capone. Just try finding him.

THE GAMBLER (Károly Makk, 1997)

Sixty years after winning two consecutive best actress Oscars (as Anna Held in The Great Ziegfeld and O-Lan in The Good Earth), and more than fifty years after retiring following a subsequent string of flops, Luise Rainer takes center-screen in The Gambler (A Játékos), giving a fabulous performance. Rainer, looking ancient except for those signature (and still rolling!) eyes of hers, plays an elegant, infirm nineteenth-century Russian woman who, visiting relations, belatedly discovers the feverish excitement of roulette. Her ten or so minutes on-screen are so thrilling and moving one might overlook just how good a film The Gambler altogether is. Rainer’s brilliance, full of full-bodied bravura and quicksilver responses, invigorates the piece clear to the heavens, but what remains steadfastly on earth is of interest, too.

This joint production from the United Kingdom and Hungary (which is in English) was written by people whose names are unfamiliar to me—Katherine Ogden, Charles Ogden and Nick Dear—and directed by Hungary’s Károly Makk, whose Love (Szerelem, 1971) stars Lili Darvas in a phenomenal bedridden performance, and whose Cat’s Play (Macskajáték, 1972), his finest piece, is an intricate mosaic of present tense and memories. The Gambler also shifts back and forth between two modes of existence, but in this case they are not past and present. Rather, they are a fictional realm and an historical realm—although one should be forewarned that poetic license is generously applied to the “real life” aspects of the film’s action.

The protagonist is Fiodor Mikhailovich Dostoievski (Michael Gambon, too old, but excellent), the Russian author (not yet) of The Idiot and Crime and Punishment. It is the mid-1860s. His wife having died a year or two earlier, his poverty like flypaper, and constantly under the threat of a fresh epileptic seizure, Fiodor is a middle-aged man in a deep funk. Now, because of a contract he signed a year ago with an exploitive publisher who dangled the enticement of clearing his debts, Fiodor must complete a novel and turn it over in 27 days; otherwise, the publisher will own whatever Fiodor writes for the rest of his life. Fiodor therefore hires a stenographer, 20-year-old Anna Grigorievna Snitkina (Jodhi May, the former child actress who won at Cannes for her performance in the 1988 A World Apart—here, accomplished and fine), a devout Christian like her employer, and a bit of a pest with her addiction to happy endings. (“I don’t know what sort of books you are in the habit of reading,” Dostoievski counters, “but I write about life!”) Anna helps Fiodor meet his contractual obligation—Roulettenberg becomes the novella we know as The Gambler—and becomes his second wife, although a quarter-century his junior. The film’s gorgeous prologue, in deep slow motion, is set years hence, as the widowed Anna visits alone Roulettenberg, the past of her husband’s imagination. This opening doesn’t quite haunt everything that follows, as it was meant to do.

Makk’s method shifts back and forth between Dostoievski’s writing the book (and sparring with Anna, and seducing Anna) and a visual rendering of the scenes he is writing. The boy in the story, Alexei (Dominic West, dashing and impetuous), is as addicted to gambling as was his creator, and he is “deeply” in love. But has he a prayer of winning his Polina?

At each point of shift, we lose our bearings for a fraction of a second, and we are delighted each time by the readjustment our mind must make. But there comes an explosive moment that blows us away, when one of the shifts turns back on itself and the character in one of the film’s two modes of action walks deliciously into the film’s other mode of action. Even thus apprised, you won’t see the moment coming and you will be just as surprised as I was.

At one point, Fiodor shouts back at Anna that he is merely inventing his story; at another point, he counters some other remark she has made by insisting he is drawing from reality—and, quick as a whip, Anna points up the contradiction. The film, then, discerns, in the course of someone creating a work of fiction, where reality, recollection and experience penetrate the imagination, and vice versa. This is not a lofty aim; it is superficial, to be sure, but fun.

And Rainer’s contribution to The Gambler is more than that.

CARMELITA TROPICANA: YOUR KUNST IS YOUR WAFFEN (Ela Troyano, 1994)

With an agile mix of situational farce, political cabaret, and various cinematic forms (including the animated cartoon and the black-and-white silent), Ela Troyano’s Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen amiably tests just how many disparate styles a half-hour film can accommodate—and without breaking into a formal sweat. This daffy, at times deliriously funny film—second only to Cheryl Dunye’s far more ambitious and complex The Watermelon Woman (1997) at the apex of American lesbian comedy—is, for all its brevity, a whole piece, not an orphaned fragment, in part because of its sustained tone of jocundity, and also in part because of Jean-Luc Godard’s pioneering work in making sheer passion and personal commitment a unifying force in works that, despite their brilliances, would otherwise fall apart. But this is not to say that Carmelita Tropicana lacks a consistent theme. Indeed, its theme is urgent: in a multicultural society, the need for mutual tolerance—and a sense of humor!

Carmelita, the main character, is a triple ‘minority’: a Latina (1 ethnic + 1 gender minority = 2 minorities, although the latter constitutes a political rather than a mathematical minority) and a lesbian (minority #3). She is (both in the film and in reality) a performance artist—a means of defense against political disappointment and social intolerance, and for the heck of it. By day, Carmelita Tropicana ‘sunlights’ not as a prostitute, like Belle de Jour, but as the put-upon superintendent of the Lower East Side New York apartment building where she lives in tiny, poster-filled quarters. (One encounter of hers with a basement rat—I am referring to the animal, not to a tenant—is uproarious.) Carmelita is active also in a radical-feminist organization that today is countering right-wing protests at an abortion clinic. As a result, she ends up in a city jail cell along with two of her ‘sisters.’ One of these is, in fact, her biological sister, who, looking for work, has discovered that her thoroughly professional appearance violates every ‘rule’ of ‘acceptability’ applied to Latina applicants! Carmelita’s other cell-mate is her ‘sister’ in the organization. But occupying the same cell is a fourth young woman who turns out also to be a ‘sister,’ although (wouldn’t you know?) she is the very person who mugged Carmelita in the street the night before. The political system works overtime to keep us from recognizing one another as brothers and sisters; but this little film of Troyano’s gets to the heart of the matter.

From pointed insert to flashback, to fantasy musical number, Troyano’s film exhilarates with a wealth of comic versatility and invention reminiscent of Buster Keaton’s sublime silent work. Its whole air is like manna. Brought patiently to fruition, one typically beautiful gag involves Carmelita’s father’s telephoned news that Carmelita has an eight-year-old brother whom she knew nothing about. Carmelita, in her cell, shares the rattling revelation with her sister. Finally, in a one-year-later coda, we see the adorable child, now a part of his sisters’ protective domain. Under a baseball cap is a face that completes the gag; I won’t spill the beans except to say that this final revelation is as explosively funny as it’s good-natured—and, like nearly all the film’s gags, rather than being extraneous or gratuitous, it encapsulates the film’s heartfelt theme.

Carmelita Tropicana lends Troyano her clear, bright stage persona. Their collaboration is perfect. I love most about their film its pure love of film—and of people. This political film, rare for being without rancor and so rich in humor, won the Best Short Film prize at the Berlin Film Festival.

EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE (Glenn Andreiev, 2002)

The digital feature Every Move You Make turns hackneyed material into something fresh and irresistibly charming. Written and directed by Glenn Andreiev from a story by Paul Kanter, the film, about a young woman who claims she is being stalked, masks a series of subtle inflections beneath an engagingly blunt, rough-hewn style. The film is effortlessly analytical insofar as nearly everything we see in it encourages scrutiny and debate.

It’s a film about, among other things, blurred boundaries and compromised attitudes. The protagonist, Casey (Erin Cummiskey, who contributed dialogue, in a fetching bravura performance), operates a Greek eatery in a Long Island community. Shawna is her employee; yet when Casey becomes fretfully obsessed with the idea that she is being stalked, Shawna (a school friend, too, I believe) becomes her confidante and even takes her in—into her father’s house—for a short spell. A private criminologist (played by New York’s Subway Vigilante, Bernard Goetz) is shown demonstrating how to pack a concealed weapon, thus blurring the distinction between protection and aggression. The investigating police detective feels more compelled by anticipated community pressure to shield the accused stalker, a local high school “hero” being courted by colleges to play football, than to respond fully to Casey’s fears for her safety. This blurs the boundary between his sense of professional responsibility and his sense of communal responsibility. Anson Shine, the so-called stalker, moreover, is caught between the pathology attributed to him and his anxious pursuit of a date. We may say (especially since the film subjectively discloses his erotic fantasies and dreams, which, if you ask me, are extraordinarily chaste) that the line between normal and abnormal is, in him, blurred. But so is the line that defines how he is perceived, for this same boy who proceeds from being a figure of annoyance to a terrorizing one of danger to Casey ends up being rewarded with a date by another girl he pursues in the same way he pursued Casey. Indeed, the boy may be absolutely harmless, for all the rummaging through garbage bags that he does in order to cull intimate details about them with which to close the distance between himself and the girls who have caught his eye. For all her fears, it isn’t Casey who is attacked; it’s Anson, by some street vigilantes outside Casey’s home. The poor boy is beaten to a pulp by these would-be Bernie Goetzes.

By these blurred lines and twists of circumstance, the very notion of “stalking” is thrown into question, along with the responsiveness of the police and even Casey’s mental stability. In Casey’s mind, it seems, this boy who had been too shy to approach her in high school is warped and enlarged to seem like some sort of monster. Anson may deserve some sort of response for his boorish behavior, but it’s unclear that he deserves all that the “stalkee” puts him through here. This includes the videotape that she makes for him that cannot help but agitate and excite him, moving him for the first time across the boundary dividing his space and hers. It’s this tape that brings Anson to Casey’s house in the middle of the night.

For me, this isn’t a perfect film; the description of Casey’s rattled sensibility doesn’t require all the boo-tactics to which Andreiev resorts, and one shock to the heart, regrettably, is purely for us: interrupting and derailing Casey’s pursuit of someone she (wrongly) suspects to be the stalker, someone literally bursts into the frame. Rather, it is Andreiev’s reflective wit and sumptuous taste for irony and ambiguity that make the film, through repeated viewings, so pleasurable. Something else is very decent about this film: the extent to which it allows us to feel for Casey in her panicked circumstance isn’t achieved at Anson’s expense. Andreiev equally pursues, largely through expressionistic means (including delightfully primitive special effects), the boy’s subjectivity and the girl’s. Casey’s ambivalence about the boy’s pursuit of her, refreshed each time she picks up her phone (its ringing is the film’s signature sound), is best underscored when she doesn’t answer but postpones answering it, “giving in” later, by which time her curiosity has become too strong to repress. Casey doesn’t seem to have any social life apart from what the boy (at first) anonymously and invisibly provides, and her imagining that he is inside her house when in fact only the phone line connects them skirts wish fulfillment. This is a film about two very lonely young persons.

A deeply dimpled John Roberts plays Anson Shine very broadly. Roberts seems slight to be playing a football player, but rather than grating as being unrealistic, given the whole nature of the film, this strange detail only adds to the poignant quality of the character. Andreiev hasn’t gone down the stereotypical TV-movie road where the arrogant, ever-popular high school athlete gets away with murder. Actually, Anson doesn’t get away with anything at all. (Except, as I stated earlier, his life.)

The director himself appears in a cameo as a Florida relative of Casey’s. It’s the sweetest performance in the film—so much so, in fact, that one might miss what the character casually implies when he is talking to Casey: that as a child Casey had a propensity for lying. We may thus summarize the trajectory of her personality as follows: the child who lied to others has since become someone who lies a lot to herself. Although the film certainly doesn’t insist that this is the case, it will occur to many viewers, at least in passing, that Anson Shine, who still haunts her now that she is in the Sunshine State, may have been Casey’s last chance for happiness. Or maybe not. The point is, she didn’t give him (or herself) a chance, and one suspects that she won’t give anyone else a chance either.

Every Move You Make stands a lot on its ear (or eye), such as the positioning and movement of the camera to imply the stalking that Casey fears/desires—a virtual parody of DePalmanoia. It’s a little film that doesn’t deserve to be lost in the oddity bin to which its principally talked-about feature, the resurrection of Goetz, threatens to consign it. One should do what one can to search it out.

HIS MAJESTY, THE SCARECROW OF OZ (L. Frank Baum, 1914)

There are so many faults to be found with The Wizard of Oz (1939) that one scarcely knows where to begin. It’s a klutzy movie. The technicolor is tacky. The Land of Oz is tackily realized, and so literal. Indeed, there’s a lack of imagination throughout. The film is heavy, as though based on something by the Grimm brothers. (It isn’t a film; it’s a production.) The Borscht-belt humor, especially pertaining to the Cowardly Lion: What on earth were these people thinking? They weren’t thinking. They just didn’t care. (The film raked in big bucks at the box-office, but the production was so pointlessly expensive that the net result was a financial flop.)

Still, included in the Vatican arts council’s list of 100 outstanding films, The Wizard of Oz has its partisans, and the movie does have its virtues. If the Oz material appals, the Kansas material—directed by King Vidor, not Victor Fleming, who mangled the rest—moves and delights. (This includes the scene in which Judy Garland, who plays Dorothy, sings “Over the Rainbow.”) The sepia-and-white cinematography in Kansas, by the same Harold Rosson who’s color blind in Oz, is gorgeous, and the naturalistic production design there, unlike the fairy-tale production design in Oz, is beautifully rendered. There’s no place like that farm.

Nevertheless, no one on earth, including in Vatican City, could possibly like this film based on its merits. It’s one of those films, like The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957), To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962), Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) or Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), that one pretends to like and, pretending, convinces oneself one does like it—or genuinely likes it for reasons that have nothing at all to do with the film. For instance, The Wizard of Oz sends a certain kind of soul into fits of nostalgia. It rekindles childhood memories, or makes one wax sentimental for the good old days of the Great Depression when everyone was starving to death.

By contrast, one doesn’t have to condescend in such a manner to like His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz, one of a number of silent films that the author of the Oz books, L. Frank Baum, wrote and produced. Indeed, Baum himself directed this pre-World War I film, and it’s light, airy, and as fresh as the out-of-doors where it was shot, not dank and studio-bound like the lumbering, bellowing mastodon that Mervyn LeRoy produced for M-G-M a quarter-century hence. His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz doesn’t make us nostalgic for our own childhoods; instead, it allows us to enter a child’s world of unfettered fancy. There’s no place like Baum, there’s no place like Baum.

The story is fabulous. Poor Dorothy (Violet MacMillan, with blonde curls), from Kansas, is lost in the Land of Oz, where Old Mombi, a scolding witch (Mai Wells, a hoot), has enslaved her as cook and housekeeper. With a hairdo that seems to give her a pirate’s eyepatch, Old Mombi is ever seeking cold cash for her witchly mischief. Today, royals have called on her at her shack. King Krewl is not at all happy that his niece, Princess Gloria (Vivian Reed, beauteous), has fallen in love with Pon, a mere gardener’s son (Todd Wright—Everyboy who ever did love a princess). What’s to be done? Not to worry, Old Mombi assures King Krewl; she will freeze his niece’s heart, and that will be that. Left alone with the princess, who for the occasion has been tied to a post, Old Mombi works her black magic, summoning her sister witches to ensure that her potion-stirring and incantations get the job done. Outside meanwhile, through a window, Dorothy and Pon watch in horror. Fleeing the witches, the two reunite with Gloria at a well; but all is not well, because Gloria’s heart is now frozen to her once-beloved! The threesome becomes a foursome when Dorothy frees a field scarecrow (Frank Moore, terrific) from his pole, whereupon he promptly falls in love with the ice-hearted princess. Other characters become part of the group, including Button Bright, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion, with Old Mombi periodically popping up, a ubiquitous nemesis with a prodding umbrella, at one point (on camera) losing her head—literally—to the Tin Woodman’s ax. (Not to worry; once her groping locates it, she puts her head back on as if it were a hat.) The Tin Woodman decides to kill King Krewl and make Gloria queen, giving the heretofore wanderers (minus Gloria, who lacks all interest, and Pon, whom Mombi has turned into a kangaroo) a mission. Along the way, the group meets the traveling Wizard of Oz, who, a wizardly match for her, turns Mombi into a can of “preserved witch.” (Yum.) Meanwhile, the king’s army is attempting to snatch the Princess to take her back to the castle when our group chances across the army’s path. Will this all end happily? Don’t doubt it for a moment.

His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz is one of the most liltingly magical films I have seen. To be sure, Baum has as a cinematic guide Georges Méliès, who in France had already taken his Trip to the Moon (1902) and made his Impossible Voyage (1904) and Conquest of the Pole (1912). It is surely these and other films by Méliès that helped fill Baum’s wondrous bag of camera tricks. But Baum’s sprightly humor is all his own, and Scarecrow’s hilarious squaring off and his dance with a giant crow in a field may have caught the eye of Charles Chaplin, in whose The Gold Rush (1925), the greatest American film comedy, Charlie, starving, imagines a confrontation with a giant chicken he wants to eat—in reality, his shackmate, transformed by Charlie’s hunger. Among the most remarkable passages in Baum’s film is one in which Old Mombi assaults Scarecrow and tears the straw of life out of his chest as he lies on the ground. Seamless editing replaces the actor playing Scarecrow with a real scarecrow, permitting a scene of truly gripping witchly frenzy and scarecrowly vulnerability. Even more marvelous are the scenes on the barge as Dorothy and her companions pursue their plan to dispose of King Krewl. At one point Scarecrow is left behind, stuck on his pole in the water, and, looking for a way out, he goes into the depths of the sea, encountering a whole other realm. At another point, the group on their barge goes up and comes back down the Wall of Water—one of the most deliriously beautiful passages in all of fantastic cinema. There isn’t a moment of this film that doesn’t delight.

Also, even after the wanderers adopt something of a cause, they remain wanderers, taking to the water only to end up at the point on land from which they started, having things just happen to them, and chancing across unusual characters, both human and animal. (Fred Woodward, the “King of All Animal Personators,” plays the Kangaroo, the Crow, the Cowardly Lion, a cow and a mule.) Unlike The Wizard of Oz, this film isn’t straightjacketed into a moralistically tagged linear narrative; Baum’s film is open to magical and fanciful experience. The plot isn’t the point; the wonder is.

His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz is as light as light on water. A dream of a movie, it’s like a wonderful dream.