New Zealand professor Denis Dutton On Peter Jackson and Lord of the Rings, from which the following is excerpted.
Films promise so much. Yet what have they delivered? Between 1939 and 1942, barely a decade after the advent of sound, Hollywood could produce Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, His Girl Friday, Casablanca, Fantasia, and The Maltese Falcon. Ask yourself, how much better have movies gotten since then?
The Wizard of Oz, like the Rings, is a fantasy-adventure plotted around a quest. It has Munchkins for its Hobbits, flying monkeys for its Orcs, a malevolent witch who lives in a castle, and even humanoid trees. Although the tornado is still a tour de force, its 1939 special-effects are not there to astonish so much as to push the action along. The Wizard of Oz possesses an eternal freshness, its witty, beautifully-paced tale told with singing and dancing actors of phenomenal talent: Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr. Who can remember anything out of Howard Shore’s vapid, overblown score for Lord of the Rings? Who can forget Harold Arlen’s for The Wizard of Oz?
Add it all up — acting talent, script, pacing, humor — and you have in The Wizard of Oz an essential feature completely missing in Lord of the Rings: charm. Most importantly, the 1939 film presents the audience with the vulnerabilities and idiosyncratic interior lives of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. They are as much fantasy characters as any elf out of Tolkien, but they are at the same time deeply human personalities. Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West expresses a sense of authentic menace that Jackson’s flaming, computer-generated evil-eye cannot match. Among the Rings characters, only Gollum comes near to having an intriguing internal life.
I doubt the man has read much about Hobbits. The movie brings back to me, hours of wonderful reading. All in all, however his crtique is fairly accurate.
Quick, name a tune from “Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Gone With The Wind,” or “His Girl Friday!”
Of course you can’t. They weren’t musicals. Neither were the three “Lord of the Rings” movies.