**Contains spoilers ** Where do I begin with this one? Okay, you'll have gathered that the film is based only very loosely on the book. And by very loosely I mean its taken a few basic ideas - a girl called Dorothy, three workers from her farm in Kansas who (sort of) become a scarecrow, a tin woodman and a lion, and a far off land called Oz where resides a 'wizard'.
Larry Semon's complete re-working of the story just fails. It is an awkward mish-mash of ideas. Some of the elements of Baum's original story are shoe-horned into the plot without much logic behind them, and there are a number of sub-plots that are not satisfactorily resolved.
Dorothy loves her Auntie Em - but once the action switches to Oz, Auntie Em and Kansas are just forgotten about.
Then there's Oliver Hardy's character which is inconsistent throughout the film. When we first see him he's kind and protective towards Dorothy. At the end of the film he's one of the prime villains! Likewise Dorothy's Uncle Henry is initially hostile towards her, then is a protective guardian before becoming a bit of a villain again by the end.
Most disgracefully the film's eponymous character, the Wizard, is hardly in the plot at all. He's not a wizard but a charlatan and has little relevance to the story other than to provide a (very tenuous) reason why the farmhands disguise themselves as a scarecrow, tin man and lion.
Dorothy totally lacks any motive throughout this film. The plot is more centred around Semon's character who loves Dorothy but spends most of the time clowning around totally independently of her. His gags are mostly physical and some of the stunt-work is impressive but there are also sequences which go on well past the point where the idea has been milked, notably an impossible scene where Semon is hiding in wooden crates and somehow manages to teleport himself from one to another! Given the otherwise complete absence of magic in the film, the sequence defies explanation.
Also confused is the idea that the ruling Prime Minister of Oz is going to whatever lengths necessary to retrieve papers that prove that Dorothy is the true ruler of Oz. Now even overlooking the extraordinary coincidence that his men turn up to get them on the very day she is about to be given them, it begs the question why he left the papers there in the first place when they could easily have been destroyed. And to add to the lunacy, even when the papers are found and their contents made public, in the end it makes little difference to his position! As a framing sequence we see a grandfather figure relating the story to a little girl. This starts off well enough as the viewer gets the impression that what we are seeing is what the girl is hearing/imagining, but later on when we cut to these characters the grandfather doesn't even have the book out and the girl is in a separate room! The ending is also muddled. Dorothy falls for the prince she hardly knows (just like that) and the supposed hero of the film, Semon, is seen falling (to his death?) from an aeroplane. And the wizard himself just disappears from the proceedings about halfway through! Hardly a fairytale ending!
Larry Semon's complete re-working of the story just fails. It is an awkward mish-mash of ideas. Some of the elements of Baum's original story are shoe-horned into the plot without much logic behind them, and there are a number of sub-plots that are not satisfactorily resolved.
Dorothy loves her Auntie Em - but once the action switches to Oz, Auntie Em and Kansas are just forgotten about.
Then there's Oliver Hardy's character which is inconsistent throughout the film. When we first see him he's kind and protective towards Dorothy. At the end of the film he's one of the prime villains! Likewise Dorothy's Uncle Henry is initially hostile towards her, then is a protective guardian before becoming a bit of a villain again by the end.
Most disgracefully the film's eponymous character, the Wizard, is hardly in the plot at all. He's not a wizard but a charlatan and has little relevance to the story other than to provide a (very tenuous) reason why the farmhands disguise themselves as a scarecrow, tin man and lion.
Dorothy totally lacks any motive throughout this film. The plot is more centred around Semon's character who loves Dorothy but spends most of the time clowning around totally independently of her. His gags are mostly physical and some of the stunt-work is impressive but there are also sequences which go on well past the point where the idea has been milked, notably an impossible scene where Semon is hiding in wooden crates and somehow manages to teleport himself from one to another! Given the otherwise complete absence of magic in the film, the sequence defies explanation.
Also confused is the idea that the ruling Prime Minister of Oz is going to whatever lengths necessary to retrieve papers that prove that Dorothy is the true ruler of Oz. Now even overlooking the extraordinary coincidence that his men turn up to get them on the very day she is about to be given them, it begs the question why he left the papers there in the first place when they could easily have been destroyed. And to add to the lunacy, even when the papers are found and their contents made public, in the end it makes little difference to his position! As a framing sequence we see a grandfather figure relating the story to a little girl. This starts off well enough as the viewer gets the impression that what we are seeing is what the girl is hearing/imagining, but later on when we cut to these characters the grandfather doesn't even have the book out and the girl is in a separate room! The ending is also muddled. Dorothy falls for the prince she hardly knows (just like that) and the supposed hero of the film, Semon, is seen falling (to his death?) from an aeroplane. And the wizard himself just disappears from the proceedings about halfway through! Hardly a fairytale ending!