THE WIZARD OF OZ IS 70

From a one-room shack on the Kansas prairie with her defeated and joyless Uncle Henry and Aunt Em, Dorothy is in many ways a symbol of hope in hard times.

Dorothy's "little black dog" Toto kept her out in the storm, and together they were whisked to Oz, a place she had longed to discover but on discovering was instantly feverish to leave.

Oz was a strange and unsettling place and all that she dreams for is not what she really wants. It is a place full of inadequacy and longing to be human again.The Tin Man rusts and is cursed by the witch. And the Lion seeks a heart. And Dorothy just wants to get back to Kansas. She never really knows that all she has to do is click the heels of her red shoes and say the words "There's no place like home"

Dorothy, was a "well grown child for her age" – although not, perhaps, as well grown as her MGM incarnation who, generations on, still reigns as a symbol of hope in hard times.

Dreams Come True, if by dreams we mean standing on a stage, holding a microphone like the Wizard, while little people across the land look up at us in rapture. In the context of the film, Over The Rainbow means nothing of the sort, of course. The best and oddest thing about The Wizard Of Oz is its power as a critique of what it's supposed to be striving for.

The producer, Mervyn LeRoy, nearly invented postmodernism 20 years before Derrida by suggesting an opening shot of Dorothy reading a copy of The Wizard Of Oz in bed. Director George Cukor lasted just three days before huffing off in protest at the trashy material. ("I was brought up on grander things," he sniffed. "I was brought up on Tennyson.")

Oz has been turned into books on philosophy ("Was Oz the dream or was Kansas?"), Jungian therapy ("Psychological healing through the archetypes of Oz")

Inadequacy is ok. Dorothy learns of suffering of the world and that brings compassion and an appreciation that, disaffected youth lose until they make their own journey.

"If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I'll never go further than my own back yard."

This line is open to interpretation. It can be genuine home, the home of inner peace and the heart, a reconciliation of the fractured psyche of a paradigm for hard economic times. There are many more.

Because as we know "There's no place like home".