Under the Rainbow 2013

1938, a year teetering on the brink of global upheaval, opens with a quiet, almost intimate dreamer’s arc. In Kansas, a little person named Rollo Sweet lives in a homeless shelter and nurtures a hopeful gaze toward Hollywood, where fame and possibility await. As a radio carries a speech from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the shelter buzzes with the ordinary urgency of life on the edge, and Rollo, ever practical in his daydreams, climbs to the roof to fix the antenna. The attempt goes wrong, the ladder wobbles, and a sudden slip sends him plummeting toward an uncertain fate. The moment crystallizes a larger tension: somewhere beyond the plain, glittering promises of the silver screen lie risks and revelations that the dreamer cannot fully know.

Across the ocean of miles, Culver City, California sits in the glow of near-mythic cinema magic, just steps away from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. A disparate troupe checks into a hotel that becomes a microcosm of a world at play. Annie Clark, a long-suffering MGM employee, holds a wary, patient line as she moves through the day with her assistant Homer. An Austrian duke and duchess arrive under careful guard, accompanied by their Secret Service escort Bruce Thorpe. A Nazi secret agent, Otto Kriegling, and his Japanese contact Nakomuri move through shadows and rooms, while a swarm of Japanese photographers adds to the flurry of activity. The hotel’s peculiar atmosphere is further colored by the presence of 150 little people who have been cast as Munchkins in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz. The hotel is run by the somewhat ineffectual Henry, the boss away on business, which leaves the place in the hands of a caretaker’s nephew and a steady trickle of comic misfortune.

From the outset, the threads of mistaken identity begin to weave a tangled web that pulls every guest into a shared orbit. Kriegling, certain his Tokyo contact will be among the studio guests, misreads a photographer as the one he seeks. Nakomuri, who knows only that his Nazi contact is a little person, assumes the opposite—that the hidden man must be one of the Munchkins. In the shadows, Nazi military maps slip into Annie’s copy of the screenplay for The Wizard of Oz, a small symbol of the larger game being played around and behind the film’s production. The plot intensifies when an assassin trailing the Duke and Duchess murders Akido, one of the Japanese tourists, in a moment of sudden, chilling violence. Homer, misreading the situation, grabs Kriegling and drags him to a studio costume and makeup shop, while the Munchkins’ inebriated antics threaten to derail the entire enterprise.

As the night unfolds, the fearsome tension tightens into a near-claustrophobic confrontation. Kriegling and Nakomuri close in on Annie, Thorpe, the Duke, and the Duchess in a hotel room, and the danger grows more acute with every passing moment. The assassin makes one last, desperate bid to strike at the Duke’s life, but Nakomuri, in a startling turn of improvisation, uses his camera to threaten the killer. A shot rings out, a strange bullet from the camera’s lens, and the would-be assassin and Nakomuri meet their end in a dramatic, fatal crossfire. The room’s alarms fade into a tense silence that only heightens the sense of a story spiraling beyond control.

In a further escalation, Kriegling levels his sword at Annie, demanding the map he believes to be hidden in a locket on the Duchess’s dog’s collar. Thorpe reveals the crucial detail: the map is indeed concealed within that locket, but the route to it hinges on a chase that spills out from the hotel and onto the studio lot. The Duchess’s dog dashes toward safety, dragging Kriegling into a high-stakes pursuit that interrupts the filming of Gone with the Wind. The chase roars across the space between hotel corridor and studio, with Kriegling grabbing the locket and attempting a getaway in a vintage bus, while Sweet pursues in a horse-drawn carriage. The pursuit culminates in a dramatic crash, a collision that binds the fates of dreamers and schemers alike.

When the dust settles, the truth returns with a soft, almost homely inevitability: Sweet awakens back in Kansas, and the entire cascade of events has been revealed as a dream, a nocturnal tapestry woven from the lives and fantasies of the shelter’s residents. In a closing echo of The Wizard of Oz, the dream’s characters are reimagined as people from the shelter who never truly left their ground-level lives. A bus full of little people arrives, signaling a new chapter in Sweet’s own story, and he recognizes, with a mixture of wonder and resolve, that he is on his way to Hollywood. The line between illusion and reality remains tantalizingly thin, and the film leaves us with the sense that the dream will continue to haunt, shape, and propel those who dare to seek a brighter horizon on the screen.