*beep*

Have you ever been to one of those school plays where you know all the kids, and there's not very good actors, and they're not very good singers, and the set direction isn't very good and it's way too long and nothing in the story really makes all that much sense, but you have fun because you know and love the people on the stage and you're happy that they're having fun? Well, imagine that exact situation, except that they CAN sing and the set direction in seemingly cocaine-induced. The acting is still horrible, it's WAY too long and most of the story, despite the fact that you know the tale in and out, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Also, Dorothy is a Harlem kindergarten teacher with a social anxiety disorder. Oh, and the entire cast is black.

And I mean the ENTIRE cast. The film is The Wizard of Oz entirely starring, from top to bottom, famous to chorus line, black folk. The fact that old whitey Sidney Lumet and Co. try to approximate both the best and worst associated with black culture, and succeed about half the time makes the entire production toe the line between celebratory and sort of racist; for example, the munchkins celebrate Dorothy crushing the Wicked Witch of the East because they were tagging up her walls, and one of the other witches is glad because now she can get back to running numbers. I'm tempted to read some sort of social critique in the scarecrow's introduction, but I honestly don't think it occurred to them. It seems like it vacillates between poking fun at stereotypes and enforcing them, but if you don't take it too seriously, it ends up being a non-issue.

Needless to say, especially for a film featuring Diana Ross, Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones working together, the music is among the highlights. If the numbers are not necessarily very memorable, they're solid enough that they kept the flow going and made the wait between songs where the cast makes painful attempts to deliver dialogue easier, because I knew something visually splendid and completely ridiculous was right around the corner. In the film, Kansas has been turned into Harlem, and Oz has been turned into a sort of bizarro-NYC. The yellow brick road is on the Brooklyn Bridge, the Wicked Witch has set up shop in Shea Stadium, and the Emerald City is none other than the World Trade Center.

Like I said, the acting is horrible. Diana Ross is a terrible actress, and is bizarrely sort of scary-looking, although Michael Jackson is surprisingly adept. Despite being caked in ludicrously ugly make-up (there's never been an easier plastic surgery joke), he has charm and presence, something she has none of. The rest of the cast were seemingly all cast for their dancing prowess or their access to drugs to keep the filmmakers with ideas (Mr. Pryor!). Nipsey Russell (easily the best), Ted Ross, Mabel King, Lena Horne are varying degrees of quality, but no one makes much of an impact thespian-wise.

One thing that my Sidney Lumet quest has proved to me is that Sidney Lumet has no idea how to expand plays in their travails from the stage to the screen. 12 Angry Men, his first and still greatest film, as well as his captivating take on Murder on the Orient Express, worked for him strictly because he didn't HAVE to expand the outlook, they took place in a small room and in a train car, respectively. The Offence was simply four extended sequences of people arguing in different rooms. Equus was people standing around discussing psychology in different rooms. Long Day's Journey Into Night was among the most interminable experiences I've ever had to sit through. When characters have more than one room to traverse in Sidney Lumet films, it always comes off like they're just going offstage and waiting for their cue, and The Wiz is no exception. In fact, I felt the atmosphere, I could hear the ambient chatter, I could see the actors go off, and the straightforward lightning fills, and really, all that was missing was the blackout for the transitions.

Overall, I think this charming raggedness along with several gloriously insane setpieces (for example, when they get attacked by inanimate object in the subway, garbage cans try to eat Michael Jackson's arms...with their teeth!; or when I found that apparently the "urban" equivalent of poppy flowers...is hookers) is what kept me with the film until its ending, a full two hours and fifteen minutes after it began. In fact, the film that The Wiz (retroactively) brought to mind was Uwe Boll's In the Name of the King, a film featuring a talented cast that could have become a gloriously over-the-top camp classic is only it wasn't so goddamn long. Well, The Wiz is both longer and better than In the Name of the King, but it doesn't make the bloated length any more tolerable.

Its closest actual contemporary is the equally ill-received Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but where that film alternated on an almost perfectly 50-50 basis between hugely enjoyable covers of Beatles songs, and apesh-t crazy setpieces, The Wiz has about 35% good music and 35% visual flair, leaving a disappointing 30% of downtime. It makes it all the more frustrating because you know that everyone involved is talented, and that with some judicious trimming, it could have functioned, if not as a classic, at least as a camp classic, and I could really like it as much as I had really hoped I would. It's not like this story can't be told in less time. That other version you may have seen contained everything this film did, just as many songs, and told it in a whopping 101 minutes. Regardless, that numerical breakdown in quality pretty much makes the final score a pretty easy figure to compute: {Grade: 7/10 (B-/C+) / #13 (of 20) of 1978}

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