The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910)

Otis Turner: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910) with Bebe Daniels as Dorothy.

THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ (Selig Polyscope Co., US, 1910).
    Director/Writer: Otis Turner, from the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum and the stage musical The Wizard of Oz (1902) by L. Frank Baum and Julian Mitchell, with music by Paul Tietjens. Cast: Bebe Daniels (Dorothy), Hobart Bosworth (Wizard of Oz?), Robert Z. Leonard (Tin Woodman?), Eugénie Besserer (Aunt Em?), Winnifred Greenwood, Lillian Leighton, Olive Cox, Alvin Wyckoff, Marcia Moore. 35 mm. 13 min (18 fps). Preserved by George Eastman House.
    English intertitles.
    Grand piano: Donald Sosin .
    Viewed at Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM): Treasures from the American Archives, 10 Oct 2004.

Scott Simmon (GCM): "This first surviving film of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is filled with characters and incidents that have a primal familiarity – thanks to the 1939 MGM musical. Squeezed into one reel are young Dorothy and her dog Toto in rural Kansas; the cyclone that carries them to the land of Oz ruled by its “humbug” Wizard; her faithful companions the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and the Tin Woodman; the good witch Glinda and a Wicked Witch of the West. Missing are the book’s munchkins and magic slippers, but added are such comic touches as the unionized women workers of Emerald City. As it survives, the film begins abruptly with a glimpse of Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and the Kansas farm.

Due mainly to a popular musical adaptation that had toured for eight years, the Wizard of Oz story was so familiar by 1910 that the film could be structured as somewhat disconnected scenes. The film retains a charming theatricality as well as the stage version’s dance-and-comedy team of the Scarecrow and the piccolo-playing Tin Woodman. Dorothy is played by nine-year-old Bebe Daniels, and many others in the cast would have long Hollywood careers.

This film was the first of several Selig one-reelers about Oz – all but this one now lost. The sequel, Dorothy and the Scarecrow in Oz, released three weeks later, showed our friends lulled to sleep in the field of poppies and the good witch Glinda helping Dorothy find her way back home." – Scott Simmon

AA: The earliest surviving Wizard of Oz movie is a busy adaptation, a lot of fun, with a Méliès impact, vivid, moving. Black is missing from the viewing print. This was Bebe Daniels's second film: she would make for Hal Roach a long series films with Harold Lloyd, play in Douglas Fairbanks's first film, be "Satan Synne" for Cecil B. DeMille in The Affairs of Anatol, and participate in 42nd Street before marrying Ben Lyon and sharing her career with him.  ***