Good story, Not enough for a whole film

best movie i've ever seen.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This is a great movie. 1939 is a remake. It not a bad movie. It a good movie. But this is the original Wizard of Oz. And it is better. This movie has a great story line. It also has great acting. The first remake from 1914 is a little better. But still this is a great movie. A very good fantasy film. See it if you can. 5.7 is underrating this great film. It is no 5.7 it mush better. This is a true classic. Bebe Daniels who played Dorothy Gale was a great actress. Winifred Greenwood who played the Wicked Witch is also a great actress. This movie is a must see. Robert Z Leonard who played The Scarecrow is was a great actor. See this movie. It is a great.

What a treat it was to see this early film of the Wizard of Oz story. I did not know that there was a 1903 musical play and that this film was based in part on that and not entirely on the book. It does explain the cow – something that had me scratching my head, figuratively. I am most appreciative to those reviewers that provided this background information. While I wish the print I saw had been a little sharper (I could not read some of the documents), I nonetheless enjoyed it, particularly the cyclone scene and the dancing. While of course technically primitive, I still found it enchanting and how it must have even more enchanted the audiences of 1910. As some reviewers have pointed out, comparisons with the 1939 film are pointless but it is interesting what an endlessly fascinating subject the story of Oz is. Fortunately this bit of film history has not been lost.

In some ways, I found this 1910 silent version of 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' more entertaining than the big-budget MGM remake. And in some ways, this silent version (made while L Frank Baum was still alive and writing more Oz novels) is more faithful to Baum's source novel (and its sequels) than the MGM movie was. More significantly for historical purposes, this silent film preserves some aspects of the hugely popular 1903 stage musical based on 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz', which deviated significantly from both the novel and the later MGM movie.In the novel, Toto's single most important function is to be a sounding-board for Dorothy, so that she can express her thoughts aloud without talking to herself. In the stage musical (unlike MGM's version), it was impractical to have a trained dog performing various cues, so Toto was written out. Instead, for the stage musical, Dorothy's companion in the cyclone ride from her Kansas farm to Oz was Imogene the cow, played by two panto-style actors in a cow costume. In this movie, we see several 'animals' (including Imogene, and the Cowardly Lion) which are very obviously played by actors in costumes. Toto appears very briefly as a real dog, to be transformed almost immediately by Glinda into an actor in a dog cozzie, courtesy of a Melies-style jump cut. Refreshingly, Dorothy is actually played here by an age-appropriate little girl (more about her later), rather than a too-old teenage Judy Garland in a bust-suppressor.In the stage musical based on 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz', the star performers were the comedy team of Fred Stone and David C Montgomery as the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman; they sang comic songs such as "Hurrah for Baffin's Bay" and performed specialities, notably a 'black art' routine in which Stone assembled the various pieces of Montgomery's disconnected Tin Woodman. (After starring in this stage musical, Montgomery died young; Fred Stone went on to play Katharine Hepburn's father in 'Alice Adams'.) Here in this silent film of the stage musical, there's not much singing, but we do see the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman performing a comical dance. The Scarecrow does a very impressive back handspring, made even more impressive because he immediately segues from this into a weird crawling dance with the animal actors. I was astounded to learn that this acrobatic Scarecrow was Robert Z Leonard, a vaudeville performer who'd worked with Lon Chaney, and who later had a long successful career as a film director, well into the talkies era. (He directed Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli in 'In the Good Old Summertime', among other credits.) One tableau sequence in this silent movie puts Dorothy and the Scarecrow in a forest where the trees have sinister faces; I wonder if this sequence inspired the talking-tree sequence in the MGM film. Elsewhere in this 1910 film, we see that Oz has some black residents ... in loincloths, escorting camels.The charming and delightful Dorothy in this silent film, as I was pleased to discover, is Bebe Daniels, who later did much to inspire British radio audiences during the Blitz. Here, she performs a delightful dance. The nimble Tin Woodman is played by Alvin Wyckoff, who later became a movie cameraman. There are a couple of very impressive stage sets with ensembles of chorus girls in pageboy outfits, and the Melies-like entrance to the Emerald City looks like an enormous human face. I was hugely impressed with the flying effect used here for the villainous Momba the Witch (no, not Mombi from the Oz books: this is Momba with an 'a') and also used here for Glinda; the Glinda in this movie looks vastly more impressive than Billie Burke did as Glinda with that wastebasket on her head. In this silent version, when Dorothy uses a bucket of water to dissolve the wicked witch, I found the results more impressive than what happened in the MGM version. I'll rate this 1910 movie 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' a full 10 out of 10. I wish they had filmed the complete stage musical, even without sound.

Though primitive by today's film-making standards (the animals are portrayed by humans crawling around on all fours in animal costumes, the storm-filled sky is little more than a revolving painted sheet), this early version of the L. Frank Baum classic is an interesting bit of film and Oz history. Though only ten minutes in length, it manages to capture the main points of the story in encapsulated form. Certain well-choreographed (albeit naive) dance numbers indicate that it may have been conceived as a musical long before the 1939 version, and 9-year-old Bebe Daniels (later the hard-boiled Broadway star in "42nd Street") is a competent actress.