Alice In Wonderland 1933
Lewis Carroll (the pen name of the Rev. Charles Dodgson) was a known pedophile whom even as a member of the clergy, was said to have spent an inordinate amount of time around young children and even went so far as to have taken nude photographs of them even as no allegations of legitimate sexual abuse were ever made against him. The particular child for which it is said that he harbored an undying infatuation for was one Alice Liddell, as so obsessed was he with this little girl that in order to impress her and ensure that her name would be known for all time, he would write his everlasting fantasy stories Alice In Wonderland and its sequel, Alice Through The Looking Glass, a stunningly surreal and somewhat disturbing piece of insight into Carroll’s own mind that revealed his admitted predilection for imagining pieces of business that had absolutely nothing to do with accepted reality but when tied into a completely nonsense narrative and filtered through a surreal lens of comprehension amounts to being a fairly amusing story albeit nothing that could be considered at all relevant nor insightful in terms of either spirituality or philosophical reinterpretation. Regardless, actually getting the story published managed to net Carroll his share of fame and fortune at that time, and its enduring popularity as a silly children’s story and little more continued well into the 20th century. Of course, most people are quite familiar with the 1951 Disney animated version, considered one of the most effective “acid trip” movies ever made along with a number of lower profile adaptations in the intervening years leading all the way up to the Johnny Depp / Tim Burton version in recent times. What many people are not aware of is that Disney attempted a live action version as early as 1932, only to see Paramount snatch up the rights and produce their own version in 1933. The studio was laying quite a gamble on the project, loading up the cast with literally every big name star AND character actor on their contracted roster (with the exception of Bing Crosby who was offered the role of The Mock Turtle but turned it down on the grounds that it was degrading), most of whom were big league stars back then but are mostly forgotten today with three big exceptions: W.C. Fields (as Humpty Dumpty), Cary Grant (as the aforementioned Mock Turtle) and Gary Cooper (as The White Knight). How is the overall movie? Well, the special effects (or at least the attempts at them given that it’s 1933) come off as being rather cheesy today but the costume and makeup work surprisingly still remain the stuff of nightmares even now, mostly because many of the big name stars (including Fields and Grant) are given full costumes complete with a giant creepy mask (which include moving mouths) that totally covers their heads and faces with only their distinctive voices being the only indicator of their presence in delivering the performances (whether or not any of these big names actually wore the full body costumes in order to give a fully realized physical performance or rather just dubbed their voices in while a double would carry on in front of the camera remains a mystery) while others (such as Cooper) would wear extensive facial makeup and prosthetics but would otherwise still be good to go in front of the camera playing their roles. The overall effect is akin to watching a feature length presentation where many of the characters resemble the Disney theme park performers AND audio animatronics running around and actually playing a role in the featured story. As for Alice herself, she is played here by a young actress named Charlotte Henry who would have an abbreviated run in Hollywood (including playing Bo Peep in the Laurel and Hardy Babes In Toyland) before fading out completely by the end of the decade and more or less living a normal life after that. In order to make sure that the Lewis Carroll universe is almost completely addressed, the film opens with Alice magically passing through the looking glass (mirror) and THEN chasing down The White Rabbit and falling into the rabbit hole, where the pacing of her journey and all the cameos that go with it moves along with a near machine gun cadence. Many times when the story requires Alice to move on to the next environment with little to no time for a transitional explanation, she just moves on to that location in the blink of an eye and there she is, meeting up with many of the well known characters such as the decapitation obsessed Queen Of Hearts (May Robson), The Mad Hatter (Edward Everett Horton), The March Hare (Charles Ruggles), The Caterpillar (Ned Sparks), Tweedledee (Roscoe Karns) and Tweedledum (Jack Oakie), The Cheshire Cat (Richard Arlen), and The Frog (Sterling Holloway who would later voice The Cheshire Cat in the Disney version) along with one of the most sadistic cases of onscreen child abuse ever in the form of the Duchess (Alison Skipworth) and of course, Grant’s Mock Turtle with his crying routine followed by a song, Fields’ Humpty Dumpty falling off of his wall and Cooper’s White Knight literally living up to his name and serving as a sort of bumbling hero towards the end. Unfortunately, the fast pace when combined with the obvious and antiquated studio settings only serves to wear the viewer down rather than entertain, and while much of the nightmarish imagery can still be appreciated today, the film comes off as being an entertaining failure, one which was held off the home video market for decades but at least is available now for fair reappraisal by any aficionados of the Golden Age Of Cinema…
7/10