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
Related Posts
About Face (1952) Biff Roberts (Eddie Bracken), Tony Williams (Gordon MacRae) and Dave Crouse (Dick Wesson) are just three months away from graduating…
And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973) Set in 1795, Catherine (Stephanie Beacham) has married the wealthy baron Charles Fengriffen (Ian Ogilvy) and moved into his grand…
After Hours (1985) Do you have days when nothing goes right? when you feel disoriented, when everything around you is strange and you…
Armed and Dangerous (1986) Ex-cop Frank Dooley (John Candy) and inept lawyer Norman Kane (Eugene Levy) cause chaos as guards at the Guard Dog…
Alice (1988) Having previously visited Lewis Carroll in Jabberwocky (1977), Czech surrealist animator and director Jan Svankmajer made his feature bow with…
Man For All Seasons, A (1966) King Henry VIII was used to getting his own way and, on those rare occasions that he didn't, he merely…
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1975) Ellen Burstyn won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance as strong-willed 35-year-old widow Alice Hyatt, trying to forge a…
Press For Time (1966) British comic Norman Wisdom pulls a Peter Sellers and plays several different parts in this hilarious escapade. The story centres…
