The Talkies/The Wiz and Comes a Horseman
Yagoda, Ben
THE TALKIES by Ben Yagoda The Wiz and Comes a Horseman What a great idea-Manhattan as a black Oz. When I heard of plans for the movie version of the Broadway show The Wiz, I only wondered why...
...In this too simple (yet confusingly told) tale, Pakula and Clark have tried to combine the most diverse elements...
...What makes the film a painful embarrassment is the transformation of Dorothy into a clinical case-study: Her adventures in Oz become even more of a self-help workshop than they were in the Garland musical, emphasizing the I-thinkI-can, look-inside-yourself moral-the most tiresome aspect of the original...
...While these ingredients could conceivably be pulled together in a mediocre pop novel, they clash disastrously and almost comically here...
...here she is a 24-year-old schoolteacher with an almost pathological Ben Yagoda is a free-lance writer living in New York...
...Why is she acting that way...
...The most publicized aspect of the film, its $35 million budget and lavish sets, augured well, too: I looked forward to a transformation of Manhattan reflecting the same scrupulous attention to visuals that marked the 1939 Wizard...
...The director would be Sidney Lumet, who, in Dog Day Afternoon, The Anderson Tapes, and other films, has shown a fine sensitivity for the rhythms of New York...
...In a role that should be full of joy and magic she breaks out of the gloom only intermittently -and she seems to have dragged down her fellow performers with her...
...While a few moments meet one's expectations, and just manage to make the film worth seeing, by and large The Wiz is a bore...
...the Tin Man's costume, a compendium of found metal junk...
...What's more, having to play a wallflower puts a damper on Ross's spirits...
...that some of them are not answered until the picture is half over, and some of them not at all, indicates nothing more than a woeful narrative ineptness...
...Thus, in Comes a Horseman, James Caan's relaxed and witty performance is genuinely entertaining, and the aforementioned stampede and music skillfully evoke what is best about the Western-a sense of grandeur, violence, and the land...
...But Lumet, Schumacher, and Walton can bring no more than a few of them to life...
...Production designer Tony Walton obviously had no clear conception of what Manhattan-Oz should look like...
...Finally, the desultory production numbers at times resemble nothing more than large quantities of black people milling around...
...Robards is devilish because he's sexually thwarted...
...The inadequacies of The Wiz are especially disappointing in the light of its occasional charms-the times when one can glimpse a much better film that might have been...
...But after watching Comes a Horseman, I had a hard time figuring out why any of the principals consented to go through with it...
...Comes a Horseman comes a cropper in other ways as well...
...Alas (as they say in The Wiz), it didn't work...
...Further, Joel Schumacher's screenplay is distinctly lacking in humor...
...a matte skyline of Manhattan with five Chrysler Buildings...
...Robards, the local cattle baron who is determined to take Caan's land...
...The announced cast-Diana Ross as Dorothy, Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, Nipsey Russell as the Tin Man, Richard Pryor as the Wiz, Mabel King as the Wicked Witch-promised a film in which the humor and texture of black culture would abound...
...the Wicked Witch's lair-a sewing-machine sweatshop...
...The American Spectator January 1979 case of shyness...
...One of the redeeming qualities of American movies is that, no matter how bad they are, they usually contain something of value...
...Its language is not, as one might expect, the vernacular of black English, but is comprised of fairytale archaicisms ("Alas, all is not lost") and the platitudes of self-actualization...
...in The Wizard ofOz she was poignantly suspended between childhood and adolescence...
...and what sounded like a good, meaty plot, about cattlemen, oilmen, and passion...
...the yellow cabs that appear periodically, always with their "off-duty" lights on-all suggest the kind of funny, funky transformations that must have been in the filmmakers' minds from the outset...
...Comes a Horseman, though not so exciting a prospect as The Wiz, offered the intriguing acting collaboration of Jane Fonda, Jason Robards, and James Caan...
...This can most directly be attributed to the character of Dorothy...
...It is an eminently 1970s film, with little respect for pacing or intelligibility and a great deal of respect for long pauses...
...Who was that man...
...But the difficulties with The Wiz go beyond the performances...
...A brood of stylized crows in sunglasses playing the dozens with the Scarecrow...
...When I heard of plans for the movie version of the Broadway show The Wiz, I only wondered why it hadn't been thought of before...
...Otherwise, the film is an ill-conceived mishmash...
...the directorial services of Alan J. Pakula...
...The film is didactically psychological, in the worst 1940s tradition: Fonda is so feisty (to the point of unbelievability) because her daddy wanted a boy...
...and there's some messy symbolism with a doll's house...
...It is a socially conscious film-an oil company wants to "tear the earth apart...
...It has, first of all, a deucedly annoying way of raising question after question in our minds-Why did that happen...
...Considering the resources the filmmakers had to work with, the sets are a disgrace...
...The film is an old-time Western, with a barroom brawl, a cattle stampede reminiscent of Red River, and Aaron Coplandesque music (by Michael Small...
...These are not metaphysical queries, but simple matters of plot...
...Caan plays a GI returning from World War II to a ranch he has bought in Montana...
...How much time has passed...
...Besides King and Jackson (when he's allowed to stop whining and start dancing), no one has any bounce...
...What, in fact, is going on here...
...Manhattan is precisely what Oz-in the children's books and the Judy Garland movie-is supposed to represent: a psychic landscape full of wonder and terror, beauty and excitement, and most of all the continual possibility of surprise...
...and Fonda, a feisty small rancher who despises Robards and teams up with Caan...
...There is nothing magical about this Oz: It is a dank, dark place, and even the yellow brick road (made, the credits tell us, of Congoleum) looks chintzy...
...The most glaring deficiency is Dennis Lynton Clark's screenplay, which commits just about every mistake imaginable...
...In L. Frank Baum's original books she was a six-yearold...
Vol. 12 • January 1979 • No. 1
