“Oh, but anyway, Toto, we’re home…home! And this is my room and you’re all here and I’m not going to leave here ever, ever again. Because I love you all! And…oh, Auntie Em, there’s no place like home!”
You can snort and sneer but Judy Garland‘s delivery of this final passage of dialogue in The Wizard of Oz (’39) is one of the most emotionally affecting moments in the history of cinema. You can just dive in and watch this scene cold without sitting through the 100-minute film that precedes it, and it still gets you every time. Because it doesn’t seem as if Garland is reciting dialogue (written by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, Edgar Allan Woolf and possibly Herman J. Mankiewicz), She seems to be really feeling it rather than selling it.
Go ahead and guffaw…I don’t care.