Despising the Disney take, Jonathan Miller set out to de-anthropomorphise the story of Alice In Wonderland by returning to Dodgson’s mathematical logic and Victorian values for this BBC drama.
Stripping away the masks and costumes, he allowed the audience to see Wilfrid Brambell’s White Rabbit, Peter Cook’s hammy Mad Hatter, Michael Redgrave’s irritable Caterpillar, Peter Sellers’s goonish King of Hearts and John Gielgud’s sweetly melancholic Mock Turtle.
He also invested the action with a somnambulant melancholy that made adulthood seem forbidding.
Yet 14-year-old Anne-Marie Mallik’s Alice is anything but a waif, as she gives as good as she gets during a progress whose trance-like oddity is reinforced by Dick Bush’s deep-focus monochrome photography and Ravi Shankar’s sitar score.
Squarely aimed at grown-ups, the film was commissioned for television by the BBC as a centenary celebration and screened after 9 pm, well after most children’s bedtime.
Alice
Anne-Marie Mallik Alice’s sister
Jo Maxwell-Muller White Rabbit
Wilfrid Brambell Mouse
Alan Bennett Dodo
Finlay Currie Caterpillar
Michael Redgrave Duchess
Leo McKern Mad Hatter
Peter Cook March Hare
Michael Gough Dormouse
Wilfred Lawson Queen of Hearts
Alison Leggatt King of Hearts
Peter Sellers Mock Turtle
John Gielgud Lory
Geoffrey Dunn Duck
Mark Allington Eaglet
Nicholas Evans Peppercook
Avril Elgar Knave of Hearts
Peter Eyre Gryphon
Malcolm Muggeridge
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