"ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND"........OFF WITH THEIR HEADS.....

Alice's Adventures In Wonderland (1972)    One-of-a-kind curiosities like this movie are part of the reason we started this blog to begin with.........

                   Despite the fairly catastrophic end results, this movie doesn't fall under the category of.....what the hell were they thinking???

                   This one comes more in the category of ……we know what they tried to do, but how did things go so horribly awry??

                    Even in its painful, awkward state, the film's best intentions remain clear........to reproduce the classic, beloved Lewis Carroll book  in gorgeous color by master cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth and in stereo and Todd-AO widescreen no less.

                    As they say in infomercials....but wait, there's more!   Not only did the film recruit the cream of British acting superstars and icons (Peter Sellers, Ralph Richardson, Flora Robson, Peter Bull, Spike Milligan Michael Hordern, etc, etc), it then costumed this legendary bunch to exactly resemble the original John Tenniel illustrations from the first published edition of Carroll's book.

                    But wait.....there's more!  On top of everything else......it was a musical......with songs and a lush, dreamy background score by John Barry.  Barry and lyricist Don Black contributed a few poignant solo songs for Alice ("Curiouser and Curiouser", "The Me I Never Knew") in addition to Barry putting music to all of Lewis Carroll's  scraps of rhymes.........(thereby making the film burst into song almost every other minute, if only for a few lines or so)_

                      Wow. Sounds like the making of an immortal children's film classic, right?

                       That's the sound of us making a deep, deep sigh.........while slowly, sadly shaking our heads...."uh...no..."

                       Under the non-existent writing and direction of William Sterling, the film arrived stillborn, virtually inert. The actors, most of them unrecognizable in the elaborate make-up and costumes, duly capered through the scenes like elementary school children putting on a pageant.

                    Already burdened with 1-mile-an-hour pacing, John Barry's sweet but impossibly languid score poured over the movie like heavy molasses.  (Barry was rapidly moving into a period where all his scores sounded like "Out Of Africa"....)

                      If this was meant to be a children's and family film, only children sedated with an entire bottle of Benadryl could ever sit through it.........the film showed up dead on arrival, looking like a slightly animated, colored-in version of the Tenniel characters moving about.

                      But as a film buff, we took this poor, misbegotten unloved orphan of movie to our heart.We thought 15 year old Fiona Fullerton, fresh from playing Princess Anastasia in "Nicolas and Alexandra", interacted as best she could with the overly costumed luminaries........(we liked that the girl dubbing Fullerton's songs sounded as wobbly and uncertain as any real kid at a recital.... speaking of  'Nicolas And Alexandra', that's Michael Jayston, who played Czar Nicolas,  as Lewis Carroll in the film's pre-Wonderland prologue....)

                    For the buffs among us (and you know who you are), 2 stars (**)…...worth at least one viewing, cause you'll never see anything quite like it...……(as for the cast, though, you could easily see them all assembled again in films like "A Bridge Too Fair", "Battle Of Britain" and so on....)