‘WIZARD OF OZ’
Sundown, Riverfest Amphitheater. Free.

“Movies in the Park” goes classic with its penultimate film, one of the greatest family films of all time: “The Wizard of Oz.” We forget, of course, that the movie was adapted from L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” a children’s novel, but also one that a host of scholars think it’s a grand allegory for the gold standard debate, a hot topic in the late 19th century, when Baum published. It’s safe to say that William Jennings Bryan is nowhere to be found in Victor Fleming’s film adaptation. Instead, we’ve got “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead,” one of the greatest nah-nah songs in cinematic or any kind of history, those glistening ruby red slippers in glorious Technicolor (the film, which came out in 1939, helped usher in the use of color in cinema), Margaret Hamilton’s gleefully wicked witch of the west and flying monkeys, which, no matter your age, are pretty friggin’ scary.

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