| The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914) is one of the many silent films based on L. Frank Baum's series of Oz books made long before the MGM musical The Wizard of Oz (1939).
The setting: Oz. (Duh.) After their bread tree stops giving loaves, Ojo and Unc Nunkie (yep, those are their names) decide to travel to the Emerald City, where everybody is happy and rich. Kinda makes you wonder why they didn't move there years ago.
Anyway, en route they visit a magician named Dr. Pipt, who's been spending the last six years mixing up a batch of magical Powder of Life, which he's going to use to make a servant. The magician's wife stitches up a Patchwork Girl out of quilts and rags, while Ojo mischievously breaks into Pipt's unlocked Brain Cabinet. Mixing up a quick brain formula (heavy on the "Cleverness" and "Courage," but only a tiny pinch from the bottle labelled "Obedience"), Ojo slips the raggy homunculus a mental mickey. When the creature (played by a male acrobat) is brought to life, it behaves like a hyperactive buffoon.
Meanwhile, Unc Nunkie, the magician's wife and an innocent bystander named Danx all get turned into stone statues. How? Beats me – that footage appears to be missing. There's a lot of chemical damage to the print right around this part, so it's likely that some of the footage (a key scene, perhaps?) was destroyed.
Now Ojo, Dr. Pipt and Danx's girlfriend Jesseva must go in search of the magical ingredients needed to re-animate their petrified friends. During their mission, they encounter all kinds of bizarre and fanciful creatures. There are the Hoppers, who jump around on one leg and perform amputations on trespassers; Horners, who teach our heroes how to walk up walls; Tottenhots, who emerge from cardboard craters; and, strangest of all, a giant square cat called a Woozy. This angular beastie uses its heat-ray vision to break out of its corral, and then accompanies the heroes on their quest.
The party gets arrested for the crime of picking a six-leaf clover, and a love-struck girl named Jinjur steals Danx's miniaturized statue. Everybody is brought before Princess Ozma for judgment. Meanwhile, the Patchwork Girl falls in love with a familiar-looking Scarecrow, who's ducking out on jury duty.
The Patchwork Girl of Oz was produced by Baum's own company, which accounts for its utter weirdness. It's an agreeably imaginative silent film, with every frame filled with wild costumes and bizarre creatures. The film employs certain conventions of live theatre, such as cross-gender casting and having actors in suits play the animals. Of interest mainly to film historians and the curious, although children might enjoy it as well, the video version has colour tinting, a jaunty piano score and audible narration of the title cards. |
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