OVP: The Wiz (1978)

Film: The Wiz (1978)
Stars: Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell, Ted Ross, Richard Pryor, Lena Horne
Director: Sidney Lumet
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Art Direction, Costume Design, Cinematography, Song Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Lena Horne-click here to learn more about Ms. Horne (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Lena Horne had a career, a truly steady, vibrant reliable career, for a longer stretch than virtually any other actor of Classical Hollywood.  Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Ava Gardner, Judy Garland-they had all long since passed away while Horne was still doing her act.  But her film career pretty much died when she lost both Pinky and Show Boat, and thus refused to consider another contract with MGM.  She spent the next few decades doing television, theater, and nightclub acts near constantly.  During that time, Horne was blacklisted (for her association with Paul Robeson), and became a pioneering voice in the Civil Rights movement, working with voices as diverse as John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Medger Evers.  But in terms of her time in the cinema, Horne appeared in just two narrative features after the 1950's-first, the Don Siegel-directed Death of a Gunfighter, and then today's entry in our series, The Wiz, directed by her (then) son-in-law Sidney Lumet.

(Spoilers Ahead) I know this is odd, but I'd never actually seen The Wiz and was not at all prepared for what was about to happen in this movie.  For those unfamiliar, the movie is a re-imagining of the Wizard of Oz story with Dorothy (Ross) now a New York teacher in her mid-twenties who lives with her aunt and uncle and never has gone below 125th Street (which is basically the southern border of Harlem, if you aren't familiar), and seems scared to start her own life.  A snowstorm transports her to the land of Oz, where she meets a Scarecrow (Jackson), Tin Man (Russell), and Cowardly Lion (Ross) who are in wont of a brain, heart, and courage, respectively.  Together with Dorothy, trying to find a way home, they go to find "the Wiz" (Pryor) a wizard who is supposedly so powerful that he'll be able to give them all that they desire.

This all sounds pretty close to the idea of the Wizard of Oz, right?  It's in the execution that the film becomes something resembling an acid trip (in a way not even the 1939 classic could do on its strangest day).  The Wiz, originally a Broadway production, combines blaxploitation-era touches with just some bizarre production design to create a truly distinct visual.  You'll see the people of the Emerald City disco dancing as the Wiz changes the color of all of their clothes, and a frightening Mabel King bellowing out as the Wicked Witch of the West.

The film is impossible to watch without a clear understanding of the original film or book, because it strays so vehemently from logic in hopes of getting to the next outlandish motif (seriously-the Oscar-nominated set design here approaches something like 2000's How the Grinch Stole Christmas in its abundance & garishness) or musical number.  It'd have the makings of a proper camp classic (which in a lot of ways it is), except it's pretty dull.  With the exception of "Get on Down the Road" and "Home" there are no truly memorable musical numbers, and no one is doing heavy-lifting in terms of acting.  Ross is dreadfully dull (and miscast) even if she's on-fire vocally, and Pryor, whom one would assume would be able to steal the film in a late third act appearance, is dull (something he's never been accused of before).  Jackson brings a naivete that would work for Scarecrow, but considering the troubling knowledge we'd learn about his private life in the coming decades, it's hard to watch this without it feeling unnerving.  About the only Oscar nomination I'll get behind is the costume design, which is unique & occasionally fascinating (the whole disco scene requires a very specific color scheme to work so well), but the rest feel like a way for AMPAS to get behind a flop that had cost a fortune.

Horne is only in one scene of the movie, delivering a musical interlude of "Believe in Yourself" and proving that she, unlike the Wiz, is powerful enough to get Dorothy home.  Sixty-years-old (but still impossibly beautiful) at the time, it's both a reminder of the sort of roles she had played before (just being trotted out to do a musical number that is inconsequential to the plot), and what might have been in a different era.  Diana Ross, her costar, was able to have a more balanced stardom, getting to star in a mainstream hit like Mahogany and even getting an Oscar nomination for Lady Sings the Blues.  Horne would never act in another movie, though she'd reach arguably the peak of her professional career three years later with her one-woman show Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, winning a Tony & two Grammys for her work.  Though her time in the cinematic spotlight was brief, it was well-remembered.  Sixty years after she signed with MGM, one of the first people that Halle Berry thanked when she became the first black woman to win Best Actress at the Oscars was Lena.