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gatekeeper, the palace guard—are quickly won over. (In this respect, once again, they are untypical city folk.) Our four friends gain entry to the Wizard’s palace because Dorothy’s tears of frustration un-dam a quite alarming reservoir of liquid in the guard, whose face is soon sodden with tears, and as you watch this Niagara you are struck by the number of occasions on which people cry in this film. Apart from Dorothy and the guard, there is the Cowardly Lion, who cries when Dorothy bops him on the nose; the Tin Man, who almost rusts up again from weeping; and Dorothy again, captured by the Witch. (If the Witch had been closer at hand on one of these occasions and gotten herself wet, the movie might have been much shorter.)
    So: into the palace we go, down an arched corridor that looks like an elongated version of the Looney Tunes logo, and at last we confront a Wizard whose illusions—giant heads, flashes of fire—conceal, but only for a while, his essential kinship with Dorothy. He, too, is an immigrant in Oz; indeed, as he will later reveal, he is a Kansas man himself. (In the novel, he came from Omaha.) These two immigrants, Dorothy and the Wizard, have adopted opposite strategies of survival in the new, strange land. Dorothy has been unfailingly polite, careful, courteously “small and meek,” whereas the Wizard has been fire and smoke, bravado and bombast, and has hustled his way to the top—floated there, so to speak, on a current of his own hot air. But Dorothy learns that meekness isn’t enough, and the Wizard—as his balloon gets the better of him for a second time—that his command of hot air isn’t all it should be. It’s hard for a migrant like myself not to see in these shifting destinies a parable of the migrant condition.
    The Wizard’s stipulation, that he will grant no wishes until the four friends have brought him the Witch’s broomstick, ushers in the penultimate and least challenging (though most action-packed and “exciting”) movement of the film, which is, in this phase, at once a buddy movie, a straightforward adventure yarn, and, after Dorothy’s capture, a more or less conventional princess rescue story. After the great dramatic climax of the confrontation with the Wizard of Oz, the film sags for a while and doesn’t really regain momentum until the equally climactic final struggle with the Wicked Witch of the West, ending with her melting, her “growing down” into nothingness. The relative dullness of this sequence has something to do with the script’s inability to make much of the Winged Monkeys, who remain ciphers throughout, whereas they could have been used (for example) to show us what the oppressed Munchkins might have been like under the power of the Witch of the East, before their liberation by Dorothy’s falling house.
    (One interesting detail. When the Witch dispatches the Winged Monkeys to capture Dorothy, she speaks a line that makes no sense at all. Assuring the chief Monkey that his prey will give him no trouble, the Witch explains,
I’ve sent a little insect on ahead to take the fight out of them.
But, as we cut down to the forest, we learn nothing further about this insect. It’s simply not in the film. It was, though. The line of dialogue is left over from an earlier version of the film, and it refers to a ghost of the discarded musical sequence I mentioned earlier. The “little insect” was once a fully fledged song that took over a month to film. He is the Jitter Bug.)
    Fast-forward. The Witch is gone. The Wizard has been unmasked and, in the moment after his unveiling, has succeeded in a spot of true magic, giving Dorothy’s companions the gifts they did not believe they possessed until that instant. The Wizard has gone, too, and without Dorothy, their plans having been fouled up by (who else but) Toto. And here’s Glinda, telling Dorothy she has to learn the meaning of the ruby slippers for herself . . .
    GLINDA: What have you