Larry Semon | The Wizard of Oz / 1925

the princess vamp from kansas usa

by Douglas Messerli

 

Larry Semon and L. Frank Baum, Jr. (screenplay, based on Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), Larry Semon (director) The Wizard of Oz / 1925

 

At least by this 1925 film, Baum and Semon has restored Dorothy (Dorothy Dwan) to her original Kansas location, living with Aunt Em (Mary Carr), Uncle Henry (Frank Alexander), and the farmhands we all know from the 1939 version. However, her Aunt and Uncle do not quite have the same open family relationship with her as they do in Fleming’s film, and the farmhands, particularly the two played by Oliver N. Hardy and Larry Semon are not simply friends—as are Hunk, Zeke, and Hickory—of a prepubescent girl, but are actually competitively engaged in trying to woo the young woman just about to turn 18 as the story opens. The third farmhand, Snowball, played by black actor Spencer Bell (who, to give Semon some credit, worked with him on several movies), obviously does not attempt to court Dorothy given US racist attitudes of the day, and his very existence alas occasions several other racist jokes and tropes. Instead of riding with the whites in the hunt in which they are caught up in the funnel of the cyclone, Snowball is jolted by electric lightning bolts directed to his rectum up to Oz.

      Moreover, Uncle Henry is not at all the dear ineffective farmer that Charley Grapewin portrayed, but an overweight surly hard-working hog-slopping bull of a man who actively shows his dislike of his “niece,” whom we soon discover is not truly family but a foundling left on their doorstep eighteen years earlier. Along with the baby, a letter was placed inside the basket to be opened up only on the girl’s 18th birthday, eventually revealing that she is actually Princess Dorothea, heir to the throne of Emerald City in Oz.  This was the same vampish version of Dorothy with whom director Richard Thorpe began his short tenure as a director for the 1939 version.

       Here too we witness the tornado which, in this case not only transports Dorothy to Oz, but her uncle, and three farmhands, one of whom (the Oliver Hardy character) has already betrayed her by the time they arrive, and for the rest film is represented as a villain. Instead of new characters discovered in a world that clearly is no longer Kansas, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion are simply costumed personas the three farmhands adopt in order to evade the evil dictator of Oz, Prime Minister Kruel (Josef Swickard) and his associates, Lady Vishuss (Virginia Pearson) and Ambassador Wikked (Otto Lederer). Caught by the soldiers devoted to this evil trio, the Scarecrow (Semon) and Snowball (dressed occasionally as the Lion) are sent to the dungeon, while Hardy’s character is made “The Knight of the Garter” and the Uncle is awarded the title of “the Prince of Whales.”

 

       However, even before the tornado brings Dorothy and her troupe to them, the citizens of Oz are “aroused,” as the intertitles describe them, by the fact that the Princess is missing, and Prince Kynd (Bryant Washburn) and the crowd demand that she take the throne. Interestingly, and completely unpredictably, the Wizard is called upon to distract the citizens, and does so by presenting what might almost be described as a vaudeville act. Placing an empty basket in front of

them, he waves a wand and out comes a marvelous female impersonator (played by the noted male impersonator of the day, almost as well known as Julian Etheridge, Frederick Kovert (credited here as Frederic Ko Vert) who, dressed in feathers and whose head is topped with a gigantic display of open peacock tails performs his famous Peacock Dance (which apparently was last seen in the now lost film directed by J. Gordon Edwards, The Queen of Sheba in 1921). So we now know at least that the Emerald City, in nothing else, can be said to attract some of the very best of gay performers. Ko Vert evidently also designed the movie’s costumes.

 

       With the sudden visitation of their Princess, Prince Kynd insists that she take on her formal role; but without removing Kruel, Vishuss, and Wikked the naive Kansas girl has difficulties ruling the kingdom, Kruel attempting to a find a way to marry her so that he might remain in power.

        This time ‘round there is no road trip for the central characters, and indeed little action as Semon turns almost all of the rest of the film to a series of vaudeville comic sketches, mostly involving the farmhands engaged in a long comic scene of hiding under wooden boxes in a kind

of exaggerated and jumboized shell game, and an equally long sequence that might have come right out of the later Abbott and Costello films where Semon and Snowball are locked up in a cage with real lions. Some of these skits involve what today we might describe as scenes out of reality TV show, particularly as Semon climbs a pair of towering parapets, swinging via rope to the other just as a cannon ball hits and destroys the one upon which he has just stood. He escapes the second parapet via a small rope ladder attached to a passing airplane piloted evidently by Snowball. The rope snaps at the very moment the Scarecrow is about to step into the plane, the film quickly slipping back into the frame of the story tale told by an old dollmaker to his granddaughter. We never actually need witness the sad ending, or even the happier one when Kruel is arrested and Prince Kynd and Princess Dorothea are about to be married.

 

       Obviously there will be no visits back to Kansas for this Dorothy, who has found the end of her utterly heterosexual rainbow. Maybe the Wizard, from time to time, can book some interesting LGBTQ entertainers like Ko Vert, but otherwise life ever after in this Oz looks to be utterly boring.

 

Los Angeles, June 18, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).