Sidney Lumet (1978)

I’d never seen The Wiz before.  A notorious flop, it’s rather stunningly bad for a while – until you realise the die is cast, and it becomes a slog.  The film begins in present-day Harlem, where an extended family gathers to celebrate either Thanksgiving or Christmas.  I guessed Christmas because it starts snowing and nearly everyone rushes to the window to gaze out in wonder:  it seemed a Christmassy thing to do in a family musical.  I guessed wrong (according to Wikipedia and IMDb) but it hardly matters.  The snowfall is thoroughly upstaged by the one person inside the apartment not watching it.

As soon as she appears, you can’t take your eyes off Diana Ross’s Dorothy but not for the right reasons.  L Frank Baum’s Dorothy was ten or eleven, Judy Garland sixteen when she immortalised the character on screen.  Diana Ross was just over twice Garland’s age at the time The Wiz went into production; her Dorothy is meant to be twenty-four and girlishly shy but the youthening tactics are counterproductive.  Wearing a high-necked pale-lavender blouse, a white skirt and a neat, de-glamorising hairdo, Ross looks more than her age – the old-maid-in-waiting that her Aunt Em (Theresa Merritt) is worried Dorothy is turning into.  ‘Please, no more match-making,’ says her niece, as they talk in the kitchen, but Aunt Em is not to be deterred.  She tells Dorothy it’s time she started teaching high school instead of kindergarten – ‘It’s a chance for you to be with older students – almost adults’.  It’s hardly unusual to find old films expressing attitudes that now seem startlingly unreconstructed.  If (as it seems) Aunt Em is suggesting this is how Dorothy can get herself a boyfriend it must have raised eyebrows even in 1978.

When her little dog Toto scampers out into what’s soon a blizzard, Dorothy rushes after him.  She retrieves Toto but a whirlwind whips them both off to Oz.  The stage version of The Wiz, a major hit when first staged on Broadway in 1975, retained the Kansas setting of the Baum books and the 1939 film; the Oz where Diana Ross and her dog fetch up is a stylised New York City.  As designed by Tony Walton, the place has an awful lot of yellow brick – on subway walls as well as providing the way ahead – and plenty of piles of garbage, tidily arranged.  This film obviously couldn’t emulate the impact of its predecessor’s sepia-to-Technicolor transformation, when Judy Garland relocates from Kansas, but the Oz of The Wiz on screen has no appeal at all – the snowscape from which Dorothy and Toto are removed has a more magical look.  As you watch the opening Harlem scenes, you wonder for a few seconds who is the conspicuously introverted thirty-something woman shuddering in the background as Aunt Em and Uncle Henry (Stanley Greene) welcome their guests.  Once you realise it’s Ross, you wonder how Dorothy’s appearance will change once she’s transported to Oz – surely it must?  On this point, though, The Wiz is faithful to The Wizard of Oz.  Like Garland, Diana Ross gets only a change of footwear.  Her slippers are silver rather than ruby ones, in keeping with her pallid garments.

The benumbed look of Big Apple Oz is consonant with Diana-Dorothy’s personality but that doesn’t help – they’re aspects of a limbo that’s neither involving for adults nor appealing to children (as box-office receipts seemed to prove).  John Badham, who had just made the NYC-set Saturday Night Fever, was the first-choice director but left the project once Diana Ross, rather than Stephanie Mills (who, as a teenager, had been an acclaimed Dorothy in The Wiz on Broadway), was confirmed as the lead.  Perhaps Motown Productions thought Sidney Lumet, a famed director of New York movies, could animate proceedings but Lumet is even more miscast behind the camera than Ross in front of it.  He was used to working with the gritty, noisy reality of the city rather than an artificial version of it.  He wasn’t used to directing musicals.  (In a half-century of film-making that comprised forty-two other features, this was his first and last venture into the genre.)  Lumet often shoots the numbers from a distance, as if reluctant to admit they’re going on at all.

The scriptwriter, Joel Schumacher, had an impossible task in trying to make the story, with its changed setting and protagonist, coherent.  Oz being as unappealing as it is, Dorothy can’t be blamed for repeatedly wailing that she wants to go home; each time she does, though, it’s a reminder she’s not a high-spirited child who decided to run away from her rural Kansas home but a grown woman with a pathological fear of venturing beyond the limited world she’s always known.  On their eventual return to Harlem, Dorothy and Toto re-enter the house that they left and the film ends.  A pity (as well as a relief):  it would have been interesting to hear Dorothy explain to Aunt Em what manner of transforming self-discovery her visit to Oz has brought about.  ‘There’s no place like home’ isn’t a lesson this Dorothy learns.  It’s the hang-up that shapes – misshapes – her from the start.

The Oz personnel duly include munchkins, a scarecrow, a tin man, a lion, good and bad witches, and a wizard.  The script occasionally justifies their presence in a New York setting – it’s a stretch for the Scarecrow (Michael Jackson) but the Tin Man (Nipsey Russell) is a relic of a disused amusement park and the Cowardly Lion (Ted Ross) has been hiding inside one of the stone lions guarding the New York Public Library.  Locations such as Munchkinland and the Emerald City aren’t similarly connected, however, and are meaningless in this specific geography.  It’s no coincidence that the only sequence in which Louis Johnson’s choreography has charge and purpose, takes place in a distinctly urban setting.  Evillene (Mabel King), the Wicked Witch of the West (though not of the West Side), presides over a sweatshop in the bowels of Oz.  The all-Black cast turns the workers there into slave labour and gives their ecstatic celebration, once Dorothy has vanquished Evillene, a larger sense of emancipation.  In a film as cack-handed as this, it’s hard to know if that was the intention but it’s certainly the effect.  For the most part, though, the action pulls off the difficult trick of being frantic while lacking in positive energy.

As with the dancing, only one song – ‘Ease on Down the Road’ (a big hit single) – makes a strong impression.  Several numbers correspond to ones in the 1939 picture; a smaller number are additions from the stage show, for which Charlie Smalls, Luther Vandross and others wrote the music and lyrics.  As their titles suggest, the songs tend towards maudlin questioning and/or yearning self-assertion – ‘Can I Go On?’, ‘Is This What Feeling Gets?’, ‘Believe in Yourself’, and so on.  (It’s hard to decide which is the ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ equivalent:  there’s more than one candidate.)  No one could say that Diana Ross’s singing is poor but her physical presence eclipses her voice.  The character she’s playing makes no sense and you know she has only herself to blame (even Berry Gordy didn’t think she should be in the film).  The only convincingly youthful thing about Ross’s Dorothy is that she’s a fast runner.

It’s the supporting performers you feel sorry for:  Nipsey Russell and Ted Ross would be fine in a traditional Oz.  Michael Jackson, at this distance in time, is more problematic.  His Scarecrow wears prosthetic make-up that darkens his skin tone – you feel he must have found that disagreeable – though he can’t fail to be vocally expressive.  As the fraudulent title character, Richard Pryor has next to nothing to do.  I was glad to see Toto get back home.  Throughout their time in Oz, Dorothy is remarkably inattentive as to where her dog is and what he’s up to even though her anguish, whenever she can’t find him, is characteristically OTT.  Mesmerised by Diana Ross’s appearance, I didn’t notice if other people at the Thanksgiving gathering were among the faces she would later encounter in Oz, as with the Kansas locals in the Garland film.  But I’m pretty sure Lena Horne wasn’t among the Harlem company – I think I’d have noticed her.  As Glinda the Good Witch, Horne is utterly wasted until late on, when she’s half of the film’s only memorable duet – of sorts.  Lumet cross-cuts between her and Ross singing their respective versions of ‘Believe in Yourself’.  Each diva seems determined to outdo the other.

The Wiz is ridiculous but also sad to watch.  Lady Sings the Blues is hardly a great film but Diana Ross is marvellous in it.  Her next movie, Mahogany (which I’ve not seen), was critically panned but did well enough commercially.   The debacle of The Wiz, only her third cinema film, brought an end to her short career as a dramatic performer.  As for Michael Jackson, despite his prodigious talents as a singer and dancer, his big-screen appearances were so rare that you’re grateful for this one, in spite of everything.  The film musical as a major popular genre had been failing for some years before The Wiz was made – it’s a great shame that opportunities to accommodate African-American talents of the magnitude of Jackson and Ross were therefore few and far between.  There’s no doubt either that the making and consequences of this film are a damning illustration of the racist aspect of contemporary Hollywood’s commercial calculations.  It was only Diana Ross’s pulling power that persuaded a major studio (Universal) to come on board with financing for The Wiz and get it made.  Its failure at the box office seems to have been enough for the money men to decide audiences just didn’t want to see big-budget movies with all-Black casts.

6 June 2021