Alicia I love this movie so much

Artivels Undescribable Perfection

FrogGlace In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

tedg I am an Alice obsessive. I recently saw the Depp/Burton project and was horrified at the opportunity missed. So I turned to this, surprised that I had not seen it before.This at least has a couple advantages. Though far less colorful and lacking imagination in the design, it conforms to the text mostly and draws images from the original drawings. That is to the good, because the original has some profound structure and some lines that zing. If you don't have the patience to read the little book, you won't get this anyway, so to recommend the film on this basis is sorta useless.Where Depp pranced and drew something from who knows where, this had Peter Sellers! Peter Sellers as the March Hare! Amazing. He is paired with Dudley Moore and some nobody. This was during a period of substance abuse for them both. While they only speak the lines from the book, it is rewarding just seeing them.There is a very clever extension of Carroll's framing device of Alice in the bank, dreaming. The extension has her on that famous boat trip with Carroll and others where the story was supposedly told. (It actually had been told in pieces developed over seven years, with pieces added in the writing.)Though we have the story more or less as written, the production is a disaster. This is because the filmmaker missed the tone of the thing. This is not silly nonsense that is amenable to a high-school play nonchalance; this is deep silly, funny stuff that makes you laugh and if you think about it demonstrates what von Neumann mathematically proved 80 years later: logic doesn't cut it.The book was written by the leading logician in England, ensconced at Oxford. They miss that this is disorder that matters. Some filmmakers get this. I'd like to see Richard Kellydo an Alice.Because Disney decided Alice's dress was blue, it is blue here. Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

MARIO GAUCI This is the fourth film version I’ve watched of Lewis Carroll’s classic – the 1903 Silent, the 1951 Walt Disney animated version, and the 1966 British TV adaptation; there are at least three more adaptations I’m interested in – Paramount’s 1933 all-star feature, the 1949 Franco-British version mixing live-action with puppet figures, and Jan Svankmajer’s 1988 film. This musicalized version was made in a time when setting literary classics (everything from Miguel Cervantes to George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens to James Hilton) to music was quite fashionable. Still, despite the engagement of a tremendous cast – Michael Jayston, Hywel Bennett, Michael Crawford, Ralph Richardson, Peter Bull, Roy Kinnear, Robert Helpmann, Peter Sellers, Dudley Moore, Dennis Price, Flora Robson, Spike Milligan, Michael Hordern – they are mostly ineffective and even unrecognizable under all the heavy make-up! Alice herself – Fiona Fullerton – isn’t very sympathetic either.The highlight is perhaps the tea party sequence with Helpmann (as The Mad Hatter), Sellers (as The March Hare) and Moore (as The Dormouse) – after which the slow-moving film starts slipping into boredom. The music by John Barry and lyrics by Don Black are decent at best, but distinctly unmemorable. Writer-director William Sterling’s adaptation – whose only film in that capacity this was – is disappointingly uninspired, then, turning Carroll’s surrealistic original into a dullish kiddie film! Apart from the opportunity of star-spotting, the film’s main virtues, therefore, are Geoffrey Unsworth’s cinematography and Anthony Mendelsohn’s colorful costume designs – qualities which were also recognized by the BAFTA. Admittedly, I rewatched this via a budget DVD release of a public domain, panned-and-scanned and extremely hazy print – which certainly didn’t aid my appreciation of it in any way!

Ephraim Gadsby A first look at this "Alice in Wonderland" on the small screen makes one think, "Oh, the humanity!" as many of Britain's finest thespians and comics get lost in animal suits. With this big film formatted for television, one loses two-thirds of the movie's gorgeous look; interrupted by commercials, it loses its narrative flow.Viewed in wide-screen (and it's very wide-screen), one sees striking art direction and set design. There is also a sensible flow from one scene to the next (all based on Carroll) that is lost on most television broadcasts because of commercial interruptions.The acting is often delicious. Peter Sellers' demented March hare provokes laughs, as does comic Spike Milligan -- utterly hidden in his Gryphon costume but using one of his best "Goon Show" voices to good effect and stealing scenes with just his eyebrows. Peter Bull is the image of the Duchess.Some of the costumes are tacky. Ralph Richardson, one of England's premier actors, is too obviously a poor man relegated to a caterpillar outfit. Michael Hordern makes his Mock Turtle even more bizarre than Carroll made him (contrast Hordern's M.T. to John Gielgud's wistfully melancholy mock turtle in the '66 Jonathan Miller "Alice"). Dudley Moore delivers his lines well, but his Dormouse suit seems to have come off the rack. Young singer/light comedian, later Phantom of the Opera, Michael Crawford, is unrecognizable as the White Rabbit.Other performances range from the excellent to the adequate. Robert Helpman, who terrified more than one generation of children as the child catcher in "Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang" doesn't come off so effectively as the Mad Hatter (it's too bad Milligan didn't get that part opposite Sellers' wonderfully insane March Hare, and maybe Harry Secombe as the Dormouse for an all-Goon tea party). Frank and Fred Cox are an amusing Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Flora Robson is a fine "Queen of Hearts". And Fiona Fullerton is a radiant and beautiful teen-aged Alice.Then there is the music. The songs are mostly taken from Carroll's text (with a few regrettable exceptions). They actually get better as the show goes along (as with the Lobster Quadrill and the White Rabbit's letter-song) and they're best when they stick to Carroll. Apart from the better songs, the music isn't inspiring. John Barry, who composed some of the best music for the movies ever, drops the ball with mostly sappy and unmemorable music that drags the movie down.What ultimately keeps the movie from being as good as the sum of its parts is that, like Carroll's story, there's just too much Wonderland to go around; and by the time we reach the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, good though they are in the book and as much life as Milligan and Hordern try to inject into their roles, we're saturated and ready for the story to wrap up.The letter-boxing makes the movie awfully narrow for many televisions, yet tapes and DVDs formatted for the TV screen simply can't do the feature justice.

James Hitchcock A book which details the strange adventures of a young girl in a surreal dreamworld is perhaps not a natural subject for a film, but Lewis Carroll's classic has been filmed many times. Few if any, however, of those filmed versions have themselves achieved classic status. The one exception is possibly Disney's cartoon version; this live-action British version from the early 1970s is less well known but is, I think, superior.Unlike the Disney version, this film stays faithful to Lewis Carroll's original text, except in one respect. Carroll probably envisaged Alice as a little girl (although her exact age is not given in the book, and Tenniel's famous illustrations show a strange child-woman with a twenty-year-old head on ten-year-old shoulders). In this film, however, Alice is not a child but a beautiful teenager on the verge of womanhood. Although purists may not approve of this change, in my view it actually strengthens the film, in two ways. The first is that Fiona Fullerton makes an enchanting Alice and brings a wonderful sense of freshness and innocence to the role. Paradoxically, she seems more child-like than would many child-actors, whose stock-in-trade is often a brash knowingness and the ability to seem old beyond their years. The second reason why the film works better with an older Alice is that it attempts to explore the psychological sub-texts of the original novel in a way that the Disney version, for example, did not. The story has a deeper significance than that of merely an entertaining children's story. Alice's bizarre adventures are symbolic of the process of discovery of oneself and of the wider world which constitutes growing up. No doubt amateur Freudians could have great fun interpreting the various incidents, but it is not my purpose here to comment on these interpretations. It is enough to say that Alice must, as must we all, try to make sense of a world which often seems strange and bewildering. Her world is simply a bit stranger than everyone else's is. Given that adolescence is for many of us a difficult, disorientating period, an Alice who is on the border between childhood and adulthood seems entirely appropriate. The title of the film's best-known song, `The Me I Never Knew', strengthens the idea that the book is about the attainment of self-knowledge.Miss Fullerton is ably assisted by a splendid supporting cast, including some of the best-known British comedians of the period (Peter Sellers, Dudley Moore, Michael Crawford, Spike Milligan, Roy Kinnear) and some actors better known for more serious roles (Ralph Richardson, Michael Hordern). Perhaps the cost of employing so many well-known names emptied the budget, as the sets look rather cheap and crudely made. That, however, is not a serious criticism; indeed, one could even say that the unreal-looking sets contribute to the strange, dreamlike feel of this film. In a surrealist film, realism is not a virtue. 8/10.