The myriad pleasures of “The Wizard of Oz’’ — the beloved Judy Garland classic that was already just about as entertaining as anything to come out of Golden Era Hollywood — are enhanced by its new and controversial 3-D conversion.
Playing exclusively in IMAX theaters for one week ahead of its video release, this stereoscopic “Oz’’ looks great and sounds better than ever. The 3-D effects are subtle and have been respectfully applied by an army of 1,000 technicians who labored for 16 months.
By far the oldest movie to get a 3-D makeover to date — after “Top Gun’’ (1986) — “The Wizard of Oz,’’ which turns 75 next year, is, in my opinion, on a very short list of studio-era classics that would benefit from conversion, given its musical fantasy setting and vast sets. Some purists would disagree.
You all know the story, so I’m going to get a bit technical here.
Films in 3-D have been rightly criticized for often dim images resulting from the polarized glasses necessary to watch. But “Oz” is easily the brightest-looking stereoscopic movie I’ve ever seen (from the ’50s, ’80s or this century) — a faithful representation of gleaming classic Technicolor, even in the film’s night scenes.
It helps that there are many extended takes, and the camera moves relatively slowly by 2013 standards, so your eyes aren’t jolted by lightning-fast edits and quick-moving tracking shots, which can cause headaches in 3-D in contemporary movies.
Kudos to the technicians who have precisely calibrated the stereoscopic effects, most lightly used in the black-and-white Kansas scenes, except the tornado, which was never anywhere quite as effective in 2-D.
Most terrifying in the colorful Oz scenes is the attack of the flying monkeys, which blows away a similar sequence in this year’s “Oz the Great and Powerful,” shot in 3-D. The new effect is best used to accent things like the ruby slippers and the Wicked Witch’s nose. The vintage special effects hold up extremely well, and crowd shots — the Munchkins and the throngs in Emerald City — are handled nicely, as are the painted backgrounds.
I feel confident this presentation would get a big thumbs up in the sky from directors Victor Fleming and (the uncredited) King Vidor, cinematographers Hal Rosson and Allen Davey, composers Herbert Stothart and Harold Arlen, production designer Cedric Gibbons, special effects wizard Arnold Gillespie — and, of course, Judy Garland, Bert Lahr, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Frank Morgan and Toto!
You’re old school and the very idea of a 3-D “Oz’’ scares you more than the Wicked Witch of the West? Fine, that version isn’t going to disappear as long as Warner Bros. can continue minting money from it. The 2009 restoration in 2-D (the starting point for the 3-D conversion) is included in the Oct. 1 Blu-ray release.
Note: I saw the 3-D version at the Kips Bay multiplex, which has one of the newer (and relatively smaller) “Digital IMAX’’ screens. If you want to see it on a classic, six-story IMAX screen, you’ll have to schlep out to New Rochelle. Probably worth it.