Alice's Adventures in Wonderland [1972]

In a commentary track for his BBC-TV Alice, Jonathan Miller mentions that the usual way of filming Lewis Carroll is to hire big-name actors and comedians and make them unrecognisable under make-up. To whit: this 1972, semi-musical [with thin numbers by John Barry] which stays more faithful to the source than most, but is not as penetrating a use of the material as the Miller, Svankmajer's Alice or Dennis Potter's Dreamchild even as it manages [like a lot of non-Disney Alices] to be weirder than it is amusing or barbed.

Fiona Fullerton's well-spoken young woman is a reactive Alice, surrounded by comics [Dudley Moore, Michael Crawford, Peter Sellers, Roy Kinnear, Spike Milligan] or grand actors [Ralph Richardson, Michael Hordern, Flora Robson, Dennis Price] gussied up, with the odder castings [Peter Bull as the Duchess, Robert Helpmann as the Mad Hatter] more effective. The funny animals, all with funny teeth, overdo the bumbling and cavort through songs, but are far less vivid as characters than the unadorned Victorians of the Miller take [Sellers was in that too]. The effects use a lot of perspective tricks [which work well] and the camera keeps pulling back to a safe distance to convey the growings and shrinkings. Michael Jayston is Dodgson / Carroll in the frame story.

If you just want to be reminded of the book by a film, this is an acceptable adaptation – but the most interesting Alices are always the ones that offer commentary on the material rather than just reproducing it in another medium.

First published in this form here.

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