Jon Mirsalis on Piano Recommended for age 7 and older. The first Oz films were produced by author L. Frank Baum himself back in a pre-Birth of a Nation era just as movies were growing to feature length. The products of his Oz Film Company compensate for technical crudities with an astonishing imaginative freedom. In this one, from 1914, the familiar Oz figures, the Tin Woodsman and Scarecrow, are background to a wonderful collection of creatures, magicians and children. After their friends are turned to stone (then miniaturized, for easy carrying), they go in search of the hard-to-locate ingredients of the "powder of life"-a six-leaf clover, a hair-tail from a "woozy" (a creature formed of blocks). The Patchwork Girl of Oz is truly a film for big and little folks: for adults, it should reveal skills of a little-seen era in filmmaking; for children, it's a great romp.