Curiouser and curiouser (Alice In Wonderland [1966] (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Alice In Wonderland [1966] (DVD)
Date:	06/08/09 (93 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great cast, looks lovely

Disadvantages: Not a very good adaptation of the book

A review of the BFI DVD, which costs about £20 (BFI DVDs are always a bit pricey).

This adaptation of Lewis Carroll's classic children's book was made in 1966 for the BBC by director Jonathan Miller. It's a distinctly odd take on the book, and is more Miller's interpretation of the story than a faithful adaptation. I think it's extraordinary, but not entirely successful.

The story is as per the book. A girl called Alice follows a white rabbit down a hole and has lots of surreal, faintly menacing encounters with the people and creatures she meets. The book always has an edge of unpleasantness about it, which I think is why it tends to stick in people's minds well beyond childhood. The famous illustrations by Tenniel helped, but I think there's a sense that there must be more to the book than meets the eye, which has led to some lurid and occasionally unpleasant speculation about Carroll himself.

This adaptation might be one of the first to try to bring that faint unease about the story to the surface. Controversially, Miller does away with anything that matches the illustrations, and presents us with actors in Victorian dress and no animal masks. It's all set in realistic locations, too, so instead of, say, meeting a caterpillar on a mushroom, Alice meets Sir Michael Redgrave sitting at a table polishing a dolls house. Imagine any scene from the book, strip it of its sense of wonder, and reinvent it as an encounter between a girl and a Victorian grandee, and you've got the essence of this film.

Which makes it sound terrible, but it isn't. It's beautifully filmed in lovely, deep-focused black and white, and the locations and costumes look amazing. Individual shots are breathtakingly good, although the editing sometimes leaves it feeling a bit disjointed. There are moments where you can't avoid a bit of magic, as in the bits where Alice changes size, but they're done well (without special effects). As a visual experience, this film is incredibly rewarding (if that kind of thing isn't your bag of chips, you'll probably want to skip this). It seems almost redundant to call it 'dreamlike', but it is, and in a far more convincing way than, say, the backwards talking dwarf in Twin Peaks. The haunting use of sitar music by Ravi Shankar, along with snippets of hymns, adds to the dreamy feel, while playing nicely with the late-Victorian decor.

It's got an astonishing cast. The characters are played by a combination of acting titans (John Gielgud, Redgrave), comedians (Peter Cook, Peter Sellers, Alan Bennett, John Bird) and well-known TV faces (Wilfrid Brambell, Leo McKern). For the most part, they're excellent, with Redgrave and Gielgud both on particularly good form. Peter Cook is the weak link, offering a silly voice in lieu of a performance. My favourites were Michael Gough as a sinister, stammering March Hare and Wilfrid Lawson as a drunk dormouse. Alice herself is played by a 13-year-old girl, Anne-Marie Malik, who looks peculiar - Miller cast her for her odd, old-fashioned face - and is more an observer than a participant. She's very good as an unusually dour and oddly distant Alice, which is just as well; this wouldn't work at all otherwise.

But is it really Alice in Wonderland? While the twee Disney version misses the darker side of the book, it at least remembers that the story is meant to be funny. The Jonathan Miller version is amusing, in a slightly abstract way, but only Peter Sellers and Leo McKern give performances that might make a child laugh. Miller has decided that the story should serve various purposes that I'm not sure Carroll had in mind. The absurdity of the bizarre, ritualistic behaviour of the Wonderland characters is presented as a child's-eye view of the adult world, which is sort of fair enough.

There's a little sub-genre of films about adolescent girls drifting towards adulthood, experiencing the world of the grown-ups as full of surreal danger. This is all about rites of passage, as the girl has to work out how she'll fit into this strange world when she's not a child anymore. Usually these things are overtly sexual, which this film isn't, but it has that growing-up-enigma vibe. It would make an interesting triple bill with Valerie And Her Week of Wonders and Company Of Wolves. (Odd that mysterious films about girls growing up are always directed by men. Well, perhaps not that odd, come to think of it.)

Alice's conversations with the Cheshire Cat, for instance, are presented as internal dialogue in which she seems to be trying to work out the world she's found herself in. Which is an interesting way of reading the book, but I'm not sure it's what Carroll had in mind. I suspect he intended the Cheshire Cat to be simply a cat that could vanish, not a facet of the main character's awakening awareness of adulthood. I think the main reason the book has lasted is because of the funny nonsense poems and odd pictures, not because anyone sees it as a peculiar coming-of-age tale (Alice in this film is significantly older than Alice in the book). Miller did something similar a few years later with an MR James ghost story, Whistle and I'll Come To You, but at least he remembered to make it scary while he twisted its meaning. This Alice is very clever and very interesting, but it's more like a filmed piece of literary criticism than an adaptation.

The DVD has wonderful picture quality. There's a very good commentary by Miller, which combines an explanation of what he hoped to achieve with an account of the making of the film. The other extra is a ten-minute version of Alice made in 1903 by British film pioneer Cecil Hepworth (it briefly features the dog which later starred in Rescued By Rover). If you're interested in early cinema, you'll probably enjoy it.

I wonder if this will be available for much longer. The BFI released an impressive collection of classic BBC work from the 60s and 70s, most of which is now out of print and ludicrously expensive to pick up second hand. (Why the BBC can't release it themselves is beyond me. Why they can't make interesting, experimental-but-popular drama anymore is also unclear.) It's quite expensive, especially as it's only 70 minutes long, but it casts a spell over the viewer, and is not quite like anything else I've seen.

Summary: A peculiar but lovely take on Alice in Wonderland