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(These films, including a movie interpretation of Paul Dukas’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” that clearly influenced Disney’s version in “Fantasia,” were recently released in a public domain collection from Alpha Video, “The Fantastic World of William Cameron Menzies,” $7.98, not rated).
WATCH ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS 1966 SERIES
And many of the innovative special effects in “Alice” particularly, the “drink me”/“eat me” scene in which Alice (Charlotte Henry) grows and shrinks seem to have been based on Menzies’s work in a series of short experimental films he produced in the early 1930s. “Alice” bears a thematic as well as stylistic resemblance to “Invaders”: both use spatially distorting techniques inherited from German Expressionism to view a cold, grotesque and foreboding adult world through the eyes of a child. His sparse but consistently inventive body of work includes “Things to Come,” the 1936 British production that was among the first post-apocalyptic science-fiction epics, and the nightmarish “Invaders From Mars” (1953), in which a young boy discovers that his parents are actually zombies controlled by a Martian spaceship buried in a sandpit near his suburban home. His work on “Gone With the Wind” earned him an honorary award at the 1940 Oscars that cited his “use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood.”īut he was also a gifted director in his own right, with a particular interest in the fantastic. (The end credits bring no comforting reassurances from the ASPCA.)īy 1933 Menzies had become known as Hollywood’s leading production designer (a title he is sometimes said to have invented for himself) for his work on elegantly stylized films like Raoul Walsh’s “Thief of Bagdad” (1924), starring Douglas Fairbanks, and “The Bat” (1926), an early dark-old-house mystery directed by Roland West. The transformation of the howling baby (played by the dwarf actor Billy Barty) into a squealing, squirming flesh-and-blood pig could be an outtake from Tod Browning’s 1932 “Freaks.” And the croquet party hosted by the Red Queen (Edna May Oliver) turns into an Ubuesque scramble of authority run amok, in which the terrorized participants (“Off with their heads!”) flail around in violent desperation using actual flamingoes as mallets. The Mad Hatter (Edward Everett Horton) and March Hare (Charles Ruggles) seem less like lovable eccentrics than recent escapees from Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island,” fully capable of exotic, unspeakable acts. This Wonderland is not the proto-psychedelic playground of the 1951 Disney animated version, but a distorted, claustrophobic environment populated by menacing, bizarre figures. Seen today, it’s still a profoundly creepy experience. Fields) hidden behind heavy, outlandish makeup based on the famous John Tenniel illustrations represented something closer to a horror movie than a benign children’s fantasy. Hargreaves might have been overstating the case, but the Paramount version, directed by Norman McLeod from a screenplay that uses episodes from both “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and its sequel, “Through the Looking-Glass,” remains among the most faithful and insinuating of the dozens of films and television shows derived from the source material.įor baby boomers who first encountered it on television in the 1950s, the Paramount “Alice,” with its ominous atmosphere, distorted sets and cast of contract players (including Cary Grant, Gary Cooper and W.
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Reginald Hargreaves, expressed admiration for the film that Hollywood had wrought from the story Carroll had invented for her some seven decades before.
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7, 1934, article in The New York Times, Alice Liddell, quoted under her married name, Mrs. The reissues range from a 1966 adaptation directed for British television by Jonathan Miller and starring Peter Sellers, Michael Redgrave and John Gielgud (BBC Warner, $14.98, not rated) to a radically reconstituted miniseries, “Alice,” shown last year on the SyFy channel (Lionsgate, $19.98, not rated).īut only one can boast the endorsement of the original Alice: the 1933 Paramount “Alice in Wonderland,” being released to DVD by Universal Studios Home Entertainment ($19.98, not rated), the current rights holder. THE home video market is awash in versions of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” this week, all evidently intended to capitalize on the publicity surrounding Tim Burton’s new 3-D interpretation of the classic Lewis Carroll book, set to be released on Friday by Walt Disney Studios.