The Wizard of Oz

Young Dorothy, full of yearning for “some place where there isn’t any trouble,” is literally whisked from rural Kansas to the magical Land of Oz. When she opens the door of her house after the tornado, she finds herself “somewhere over the rainbow” … The Wizard of Oz was a milestone in the history of colour film. It was conceived as MGM’s answer to Disney’s Snow White (1937), and the colour scheme is as unreal as the story. This cinematic mixture of musical, fairy tale, and fantasy has been delighting moviegoers around the world for 75 years. Among them is British Indian writer Salman Rushdie, who said “once the door is open, colour floods the screen (…) the yellow of the brick road, the red of the poppy field, the green of the Emerald City and of the witch’s skin. So striking were these colour effects that, soon after seeing the film as a child, I began to dream of green-skinned witches”. With its transition from black-and-white to colour, The Wizard of Oz marked a new era in movies. Rushdie also called the film a blueprint of all emigrant dreams, “a film about the joys of going away, of leaving the greyness and entering the colour”.