When this Wizard of Oz sequel starts by sending Dorothy to a psychiatric hospital for electroshock treatment, you do wonder if Disney may have slightly misjudged its audience.
It is six months since a tornado blew away the family home, and Dorothy (Fairuza Balk) is still too weakened by insomnia to help out on the farm, while clinging to her story about having had an adventure with some sort of cowardly lion. The therapy should rid her of “all those bad waking dreams”.
If you’re hoping that Dorothy will instead return to Oz, then I have good news, followed immediately by bad news. Fleeing the hospital, she reaches a dystopian Oz of washed-out colours and relentless menace, treading the smashed-up Yellow Brick Road to the ruins of Emerald City, where she finds that her old friends have been turned to stone. “BEWARE THE WHEELERS,” yells the graffiti amid the wreckage, hinting that the horrors have only just begun.
My cousin was taken to the cinema for his seventh birthday to see Return to Oz, and then taken out after half an hour because he couldn’t stop screaming. That was fairly typical of the reviews. Gene Siskel’s capsule verdict read simply:“Don’t,” while Variety called the film “an astonishingly sombre, melancholy and, sadly, unengaging trip back to a favourite land of almost every American’s youth”.
Considering the movie “ill-advised”, the Santa Cruz Sentinel added: “It’s hard to imagine whom the film-makers are trying to reach.” Well: me, apparently. Because to these eyes, Return to Oz still looks like that most elusive of cinematic beasts: the superior sequel. It has flaws, certainly, but also a dizzying sense of ambition and a dazzling central turn, its cruel and vividly realised worlds viewed through the eyes of a little girl.
Judy Garland had been 16 when she first stepped into Oz; Fairuza Balk was nine. Garland had made six features; Balk had made none. And while Garland had a host of stage and screen veterans for company, Balk was acting mostly opposite two puppets, a chicken and a sofa. Yet the tiny, pale, turquoise-eyed Balk proceeded to give one of the greatest child performances in cinema.
Even when the movie is uneven, her Dorothy remains desperately believable and utterly affecting – a terrified, damaged and resourceful hero with vast wellsprings of empathy, who treats strangeness as a friend. The unquestioning and unequivocal bond she forges with the steampunk robot Tik-Tok – who is “not alive and never will be, thank goodness” – has to rely almost entirely on Balk, and it remains one of the film’s enduring pleasures.
The movie was devised by Walter Murch, the brilliant cutter of Coppola’s The Conversation and Apocalypse Now. He had never directed a film before Return to Oz and hasn’t been allowed to make one since, which is apparently what happens when your debut loses almost $17m domestically.
His non-musical film, based mostly on the author L Frank Baum’s own Oz sequels, is undeniably imperfect. While I bow to no one in my love of a wisecracking chicken, Dorothy’s new sidekick, Billina, simply has bad banter. The movie’s task-driven narrative occasionally makes it seem like a big-budget episode of The Crystal Maze. And given that it’s directed by one of Hollywood’s finest editors, it can feel curiously disjointed. But those shortcomings look positively prosaic against the film’s virtues. Return to Oz is a true original: a devastatingly dark movie blessed with a genuine sense of daring. Its opening deals with mental illness and hardscrabble poverty, while its climax attempts to indict colonialism. In between, Murch busily shreds Dorothy’s safety net before systematically subverting the entire iconography of Oz.
He also offers more visceral delights. Murch had first made his name as a sound editor, and an early sequence in the sanatorium showcases those gifts. As Dorothy waits for her treatment, he conjures an eerie, escalating symphony that mixes thunder, flicked switches and turning locks with the swishing of a nurse’s dress and the creaking wheels of an approaching gurney. The effect is heightened by a haunting musical theme from the Conversation alumnus David Shire, whose other credits include All the President’s Men and Zodiac, Murch naturally requiring a specialist in paranoid thrillers to score his family film.
Perhaps the movie’s most notorious scene is an indelible set piece in which our hero tries to escape from the palace of a wicked sorceress and unwittingly awakens a hallful of severed heads, who have just two words to say: “Dorothy Gaaaale!” That it wasn’t even the worst thing to happen to Dorothy that week is a testament to the wild hellishness of Murch’s vision.
Thirty years earlier, another great artist had directed his first and final film, a similarly creepy fantasy that also alienated audiences and repelled critics. But while Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter is now rightly regarded as a classic, Return to Oz remains entirely estranged from the canon. Today it exists largely in the nightmares of fortysomethings – though not enough of them for it to have made any money.
Return to Oz is available on Disney+
