Cinema: The New Pictures: Aug. 21, 1939

The Wizard of Oz (M. G. M.) should settle an old Hollywood controversy: whether fantasy can be presented on the screen as successfully with human actors as with cartoons. It can. As long as The Wizard of Oz sticks to whimsey and magic, it floats in the same rare atmosphere of enchantment that distinguished Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. When it descends to earth it collapses like a scarecrow in a cloudburst.

Producer Mervyn Le Roy's 1939 version of this childhood classic follows with reasonable accuracy L. Frank Baum's original story...