Alice in Wonderland, film versions. Alice in Wonderland, a classic Victorian fantasy, has proved more difficult than most to bring to the screen. The rambling, dream‐like structure coupled with the book's literary stature and the renown of the original John Tenniel drawings have created problems for a range of film‐makers.
Alice in Wonderland (film: USA, 1933) combined the first Alice book with its sequel, Through the Looking Glass. The result is a series of assorted incidents which come and go without much relation to each other. Further, the Tenniel factor influenced the director to decide that each of the actors must wear a Tenniel‐style mask of the character being portrayed; thus an array of stars including Gary Cooper (the White Knight), Cary Grant (the Mock Turtle), W. C. Fields (Humpty Dumpty), and Jack Oakie (Tweedledum) are heard but not seen.
In the early 1950s, with Lewis Carroll's book just out of copyright, two fresh attempts at making cinematic sense of the stories appeared. A British‐French‐American co‐production of 1951 began by locating their origins in Victorian Oxford. Alice, her father the Dean, the Vice‐Chancellor, and Queen Victoria all feature in a live‐action prologue; then Carroll, as maths lecturer Dodgson, makes up for Alice the story which the film, with some fidelity, goes on to show. The creatures Alice meets in Wonderland, played by 128 articulated Tenniel‐based puppets brought to life by stop‐motion photography, are derived from the people and events of Oxford. Thus the Cheshire Cat is Alice's father, the White Rabbit is the Vice‐Chancellor, and the head‐chopping Queen of Hearts is Queen Victoria. This last identification, and the caricature presentation of Victoria in the prologue, led to problems which resulted in the film having to wait till the 1980s before getting a release in the UK.
Elsewhere it competed with Disney's animated version (USA, 1951), which tried to make the story accessible by rearranging Carroll's sequence of events, omitting some characters, bringing in others from the second book, inventing a new one, and giving the narrative a logical chase structure—Alice constantly in pursuit of the White Rabbit. The surrealism of Carroll's scene in which a baby turns into a pig while Alice is holding it is one of the elements left out by Disney as being too repulsive. Also missing are the White Knight, the Duchess, Humpty Dumpty, and the Mock Turtle. They are replaced by the Jabberwock and its backing group, and by the only totally Disney invention, Doorknob, who guards the entrance to Wonderland. In the late 1960s, despite its omission of the pig‐baby scene, the film acquired a reputation as a ‘head‐trip’, and for a while had cult status.
Another 1960s fashion—sitar music played by Ravi Shankar—accompanies an adaptation directed by Jonathan Miller for the BBC in 1966. Apart from that, the film contains no contemporary references. It aims, rather, to lay bare what was in Carroll's mind. Miller would have liked to re‐title the story ‘Growing Pains’, perceiving it to be not in any sense a fairy tale, but a Victorian child's‐eye‐view of a gallery of upper middle‐class characters and their servants, thinly disguised by animal names and by the Tenniel drawings. This version therefore uses authentic Victorian locations but no masks, no special effects, and no animal costumes. John Gielgud (the Mock Turtle), Peter Cook (the Mad Hatter), Peter Sellers (the King of Hearts), and other actors create their characters solely through the use of voice, face, and gesture. Their caperings, ramblings, gravity, and outbursts of bad temper are all mediated by Alice's disdainful gaze and cool questioning, as she realizes with dismay that she is doomed to grow up and become like them.
Far away from Carroll's narrative line, but aiming to be close to him in spirit, is Jan Swankmajer's Alice (Neco z Alenky, Switzerland, 1988). Swankmajer, a Czech surrrealist working within the medium of three‐dimensional animation, was inspired by Carroll's stories to make a film which illustrates his belief that there is no simple distinction between dreams and reality: for him, dreams are reality. With no dialogue, using a mixture of human Alice and doll Alice, real animals and puppet animals, he begins the story in the traditional way—Alice falling asleep by a stream. As soon as she dreams, however, the White Rabbit is different: stuffed with sawdust, he escapes from a glass case by smashing it from the inside with scissors; and he leads Alice into her adventures not down a rabbit hole but through the drawer of a kitchen table in the middle of a field. The subsequent incidents sometimes derive from Carroll—the ‘pool of tears’ scene is seized with relish—but mainly consist of variations on Carroll's themes. Alice is constantly hungry, but cannot satisfy her hunger: a scoop of jam contains tacks, a baguette sprouts nails, lumps of raw bleeding meat pass by, a sardine tin yields a key but no sardines, tarts just make her grow bigger or smaller. The Caterpillar—played by a sock, a pair of glass eyes, and a set of false teeth—darns his eyes shut with a needle and thread when he wants to retire. When Alice wakes up she is no longer by the stream; she is now where she was at the beginning of the dream—on her nursery floor. Everything she has dreamed about is around her, except that the glass case is still smashed—and the rabbit has not returned to it.
A kind of postscript to all these adaptations is offered by Dreamchild (UK, 1985), written by Dennis Potter, which centres on the real‐life Alice Liddell, at the age of 80, visiting New York in 1932. A young American reporter charms her into talking and wins the love of her young companion, Lucy. Alice opens up, goes back in her mind to 1862, and becomes haunted by her memories of Dodgson and the characters he made up for her. Some of them—the Mad Hatter, the Caterpillar, the Gryphon, the Mock Turtle—come alive on the screen in the form of animatronic creatures designed and performed by the Jim Henson company. At the degree ceremony which is her reason for being in New York, Alice finally comes to understand and accept Dodgson's gift, and the love for her which it expressed.
— Terry Staples
