While the impeccable and nearly perfect 1939 Wizard of Oz beats the 1925 movie on almost every count, there is a single important innovation in the 1925 version that clearly inspired the 1939 version. Now that the bad news about the 1925 Wizard of Oz being a turkey is out of the way, here’s the good news: the film provides a fascinating opportunity to contrast what one film version may do badly and another may do well. He would die three years later at the age of 39). (As it happened, this Wizard of Oz destroyed Larry Semon last hope for a breakthrough Hollywood hit. Frank Baum’s original plot elements to work their natural magic. It also has a gleaming Land of Oz, and one wonders if Larry Semon’s movie might have succeeded if he’d left L. It does have a tornado (as seen in that wild image at the top of this page). The 1925 Wizard of Oz has no Wicked Witch, no Toto, no yellow brick road. Many of his routines go on too long, but he finds the right note in his initial Scarecrow number, a set piece that clearly informed Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow in 1939. Larry Semon’s vintage comic routines bear traces of various stage traditions from vaudeville to music hall to mime to slapstick, and he’s an energetic marvel to watch, even as he shamelessly hogs the screen. Larry Semon cast himself as the Scarecrow, and surprisingly it’s not Dorothy Dwan but Semon himself who prances proudly on camera through much of this movie. Here she is - a rather worldly child - with kindly Aunt Em in an early scene on the Kansas farm. Larry Semon financed and directed this movie, and he cast his vivacious starlet wife Dorothy Dwan as Dorothy. The 1925 Wizard of Oz was the masterwork of a then-popular moviemaker and clown named Larry Semon whose spindly motions and sad-sack expressions recall Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Frank Baum’s story at all as the movie begins if we didn’t see an old man reading the book to a little girl. These dreary machinations barely connect to the familiar story of The Wizard of Oz, and the melodrama makes the movie immediately wearying to watch. Frank Baum’s story from the very start, the movie introduces a meandering political subplot: a prime minister, a threatened land, a secret lost princess whose identity is sealed inside a mysterious envelope. It doesn’t take long before the problems with this ambitious production begin to reveal themselves. Here it was, the early version I’d always been curious to see! This silent-era Wizard came out fourteen years before the great Judy Garland classic, and even though I’d heard the 1925 version was a box-office dud and an artistic failure, I’d long been curious what this interpretation of L. Then I spotted the year on the movie listing: 1925. “ Wizard of Oz is on again”, I noticed recently while flipping through my favorite classic movie channels.
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