Alex in Wonderland (1970)

All the reference books lay into this as an example of the sort of self-indulgence only possible in the wake of Easy Rider, and there's a kind of fractured surrealism – even evoked in the movie itself – to the idea of MGM bankrolling a hippie art movie which is also a self-conscious reworking of 8½. As the hero strolls across the lot, we see a 'Mr Chips is Here!' banner in the background, announcing the Peter O'Toole musical which was a far bigger flop than this, and even the script thinks it bizarre that Peter Fonda's framed picture is up there beside Burt Lancaster in the studio corridor.

Paul Mazursky, whose previous hit (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) had hardly earned him the right to make what was dubbed 1½, takes the role of the not-quite-crass long-haired studio exec (with a caged monkey in his huge, den-like office) who throws a bunch of ideas at long-haired filmmaker Alex Morrison (Donald Sutherland) in a kind of genial desperation, suggesting he go to Paris to read the galleys of a book or take a Chagal lithograph from the office while mulling over his next project (then clinches with his secretary chick as they try to put the picture back up).

Sutherland is physically different enough from Mazursky to take a bit off the edge off the autobiographical elements, though one wonders how the oot-and-aboot Canadian wound up with a Jewish New York mother (Viola Spolin). The scenes of Sutherland's home life (with wife Ellen Burstyn and two daughters, one played by Amy Mazursky with braces) and general noodling-around with his affluent counterculture friends may be rambling and self-indulgent but also have a ring of truth. The unwisest decision was to echo 8½, which Alex tries to explain to his daughter at one point, with 'Fellini-esque' dream sequences involving clowns and clerics and hordes of extras dressed as the maestro (Angelo Rossito is credited as Fellini #1, which puts him ahead of the cameoing Federico, who politely directs Alex out of his editing room). Though the fantasy moments may be spurious, they sometimes have a blunt force – a stretch of tarmac littered with choked corpses, naked African dancers surrounding Sutherland on a beach, the Vietnam war exploding in downtown Los Angeles to the tune of 'Hooray for Hollywood' and a musical ride with Jeanne Moreau (as herself). A lot of it is obvious to the point that you wonder if it was meant seriously (a Jewish mother complaining that her son never calls), but there's a specificity to some elements (a very 1970 bit has Alex rush home enthusiastic about his acid trip, wanting to play the tape of his stoned banter to his wife and resentful that she hasn't wanted to share the experience) that was worth getting on film for posterity.

It winds up with a pageant of pretty (but real) Californian schoolkids doing a pageant about racial equality on a sundrenched schoolyard as parents applaud and Fellinis, giraffes and other fantasy refugees blur in the background, then has Alex ramble about the big house he's buying and wonder what he'll be like at the end of the thirty years it'll take to pay off the $89,000 purchase price. Interestingly, most of the pictures Alex mulls over but doesn't commit to sound like things that did later get made – biopics of Lenny Bruce ('the only person who could play Lenny Bruce is Lenny Bruce and he's not available') and Malcolm X, a modern Western with Anthony Quinn as Navajo Man (Flap), a love story about a girl with a heart transplant (Return to Me). We're still waiting for the one about the black radical who takes over Beverly Hills though. A sweet scene that could not been shot these days finds the hairy hero sharing a bath with his little daughter. Mazursky didn't get 8½ out of his system, and took another bash at it in 1993 in The Pickle.

First published in this form here.

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