Seldom seen since its 1933 limited release, ALICE IN WONDERLAND, Paramount's champagne surrealism centerpiece, can stand on its head proud surrounded by to the barrage of lunatic brilliance of the studio's peak pre-code '32-34 lunatic comedy output: MILLION DOLLAR LEGS, SNOW WHITE, DUCK SOUP and INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (1933 Paramount was the best gonzo-weird year/studio ever). For a long weird time we had to take it all on faith that this movie was as bad as they said. Well time is officially caught up with itself, and thanks to TCM's celebration of its set designer William Cameron Menzies, ALICE can be easily appreciated in all its basement childhood nightmare rarebit and psilocybin overdose glory, free of rumor and innuendo. Man how I would have flipped to find this floating around on a 5 AM Saturday morning UHF station as a kid in the 70s. I wouldn't have known if I was seeing an Sid and Marty Kroft-style life size puppet kid's show or a late night horror movie... and that was just the way we liked it, back then. Kids' TV was a big tent back then, and 5 AM PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE on the late night horror movie segued into weird Z-grade European 'kiddie matinee' nightmares like RED RIDING HOOD AND THE MONSTERS before finally morphing into SCOOBY DOO and LAND OF THE LOST then SPACE GIANTS as easy as falling down a K-hole.
A K-hole, that's this 1933 Paramount ALICE. Remember when you were a kid on some haunted or pirate ride at Disney World or Dorney Park and imagining what it would be like to sneak out of your little car, off the track, and into the elaborate tableaux on either side of you, hiding amidst the animatronic figures? If there was a Paramountland, or a Fleischerland, and a ride through Betty Boop's early great classics rendered in black and white automated papier mache figures, or a miniature golf course, all the weird undulating surreal characters but it was kind of a low budget ride, and you were kind of stuck there, and had drank the water like Lisa Simpson at Duffworld, and you were hanging out with a 10 year-old blonde girl with no fear of the unknown, who dragged you around to all the moving parts, then there you go. So if you love haunted house rides, and creative miniature golf courses, and mushrooms, then my friend, honk once.
I never like to preface but if you know this site at all you know I'm in that rarity of critical voices, the drug-addled classic monster lover, and those early mornings are still with me, so when a movie stumbles way off course and lands in nightmare territory, reminding me of the cheap look of childhood nightmares after eating too much candy or going through the haunted house ride one too many times at the carnival. And I learned way back in my 90s Deadhead/Floyd period that there was no better time of the night than when the show was over, and every last parent and wally long tucked away, coming down hard but still tripping our faces off, but all the anguished paranoid driving home finally done, safe and snug and able to finally take our shoes off, but still wired and whacked out with miles (and bourbon) to go before the colors would be muted enough to get any sleep. So we needed to watch something that wouldn't bum us out, no TV commercials or guns, or violence, man, but no squares either. And at those times, when they were needed most, my tapes of Betty Boop, W.C. Fields, Marx Bros, and Cary Grant could always see us through. One look into their eyes and we'd know they knew the score. If MGM was the studio of amphetamines, Warners of cigarettes, and Universal of cocaine, Paramount was the studio of psychedelics (and believe me, alcoholism is very psychedelic, especially the DTs. I wouldn't miss 'em for the world).Hence ALICE IN WONDERLAND is 1933 Paramount's ideal choice for a 'literary' adaptation. Remember what the door mouse said, man?
Granted it's not perfect--the idea to totally obscure our favorite actors with masks seems wrong, then again neither Gary Cooper nor Cary Grant were huge stars at the time (just handsome arm candy for Mae and Marlene) and which Alice is--to the kids' and critics' alike--perfect? Disney's 1951 cartoon version is clever and engaging but pedantic, Burton's is beautiful and thrilling but lacks surrealist fervor, Jan Svankmajer's version is basement hallucinatory and uncanny childhood nightmare disturbing but lacks class, and all the BBC versions are too much the same other way around. Paramount's pre-code Alice is sooo wrong on the other hand, it's better than right.
Anyway, I had trouble getting past the first few minutes before, but this time I came in during the middle, half paying attention and soon there was this crazy mock turtle with a strange yet familiar voice, and I wasn't at all sure it even was Cary Grant inside the shell, until he sings "Turtle Soup" with that 20s trill in his voice and you realize all the other layers and talents of Cary Grant that fell by the wayside in favor of others, until he was, simply put, perfect in every way, sanded down from finest oak, a greatest hits and tics package, but this craziness is so welcome, a bit like when he breaks down in front of the child services judge in Penny Serenade and you're like whoa, Cary, we never see this side of you, and it makes us weak in the knees. We realize the vast wealth of brilliance and jubilance that went into making Grant as grand as he is, all of it folded and edited and streamlined until he was, as Stanley Cavell put it, "fit to stand the gaze of millions." Here, though, that gaze is rendered moot. He's in a turtle shell (or just doing the voiceover) One wonders what kind of miracles Grant could put into, say, a Pixar film. Here it's pretty damn close to that, because some stars just do their persona when doing a voiceover. You won't find, say, Tom Hanks or Will Smith going out on a far limb into madness in their roles, not like Grant does. Grant is committed to the madness and the result is like reading/acting out a story book for agog infant children while hopped up on mescaline backstage at a 1920's Vaudeville theater. |
Amongst the stand-out sights are a king and queen of hearts perfectly gussied to resemble the English pattern playing deck (left), the king especially is so uncanny in that Freudian sense. We've all seen that face since we first learned 'Go Fish' as a child, and suddenly wham here he is, in black and white and surrounded in a curiously 2-D dream space, as if childhood memory and fever dream had crashed ceremoniously together. |
And just when you're wondering why they didn't just make this a cartoon, there's a segue into a Fleischer animation of the walrus and carpenter story. It's a a nice break, and there's all sorts of character actor familiar faces and voices to help you navigate the off-putting (and rather flatly lit) weirdness that the whole alienated kids ride acid flashback thing is tempered with the thrill of recognizing an old friend in a throng of strangers: Ned Sparks snarling through his usually croaky clenched jaw as the caterpillar; Louise Fazenda as a hybrid Ginger Rogers and the girl in the Eraserhead radiator as the White Queen; Edna May Oliver, strangely sexy with her upturned nose extension as the Red Queen; Roscoe Karns and Jackie Oakie as the Tweedles; Edward Everett Horton singing about the tea-trays in the sky (and waving around saucers to make sure we get the UFO connection), and Charlie Ruggles as the March Hare. Richard Arlen is the Cheshire Cat; Charlotte Henry is fine as Alice, as ever quite the fearless wanderer, moving from freak tableaux to freak tableaux, size to size, like they're so many miniature golf course holes. Amateur trippers could learn a lot from Alice -- no matter how weird things get, she never freaks out or judges them as horrid or ugly, bad or good. Where others cower or freak out she just notes shit got "curious." Is it any wonder a nervous sensitive artists like me would worship her? (1)
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| any similarities to a human ass surely coincidental |
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| This is your dinner on drugs - but play it cool, bro |
But the real selling point for this as the bad acid rarebit fiend K-hole nightmare miniature golf course-cum-carnival-ride childhood fever dream are the grotesque images that linger in the mind, etched on the soul like dark scars in the thick unconscious muck where nothing ever dries or heals, just festers until it erupts into sudden hallucinations and terrifying vertigo (with the right 'trigger'). When I saw the mouse, this big lumbering dude in a mouse costume I should say, flopping around in a shallow concrete pool (of Big Alice's tears) as if some plushy Overlook refugee paddling forward in the Freaks climax rain, never speaking, just starting and stopping his soaked mouse suit splashing when Alice orders him, I had that uncanny spine tingle of recognition, as if my nightmare childhood well, long singe paved over, was flooding up all over the couch around me. Or the scene with the crazy fat mom throwing the baby around while the cook hurls insults and pots, narrowly missing the child/little person (in real time) and the frog sits outside in a Sterling Holloway sigh, super uncanny creepy. Alice holding the baby and having it oscillate from what looks like Billy Barty to an actual baby to a plastic doll and then a real piglet; or the half-dead (or are they puppets?) flamingos waved around during the croquet game (did they drug a bunch of flamingos into submission or do they just play dead when scared or were they dead or what? They're as eerie in their oscillation between corpse, inanimate puppet, and barely conscious organism as, say, gramps was in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE); the way the white queen saying "better" over and over gradually turns into a sheep selling giant egg which Alice stares at until it turns into W.C. Fields' as Humpty Dumpty demanding she stop staring at him like he was an egg, and state her name and her business; the talking roast (it's bad manners, we learn, to slice off a piece of someone we've been introduced to) defining to a T what it's like trying to keep cool while eating dinner with your parents while on mescaline, at the final dinner party, where Alice is crowned queen, and everyone dances around, and chokes her and generally carries on like the "one of us! One of us" FREAKS dinner combined with the Her Professor dinner in THE BLUE ANGEL and the entirety of Allendro Jodorowsky's canon all boiled and distilled into one black and white fever dream bad trip childhood cold sweat k-hole delirium tremens nightmare. And in general the way small details become huge and vice versa as Alice alternates her pills for growth and shrinking depending on the parameters of each scene.
But hey, it's a kids' film, or something, and I didn't even get to mention W.C. Fields' as Humpty, which is one of the better vignettes. Joseph Mankiewicz wrote the script with the same sense of deadpan fluid riffing absurdity that made his MILLION DOLLAR LEGS and DIPLOMANIACS so pitch Paramount perfect. I'm not sure if Mankiewicz ever tried mescaline or reefer or anything, but I wouldn't be surprised if had. he captures the bizarro tripping hipster wordplay very well, the freestyle way staring at something long enough turns it into something else, or saying any word more than once or twice renders the words themselves alive and fluid, strange and absurd. It could be the bad trip 1933 YELLOW SUBMARINE or HEAD, and maybe in the way it's too out there and dark for young kids, but juuuust right for tripping adults with shady memories of K. Gordon Murray European kids movie imports finally breaking through their acid-burnt bonds of language, persona and time, as well as providing them the guide on how to not wind up in the looney bin, just don't try to recapture the sense of where you were or what's going on or what those words someone spoke at you mean, the way all the world used to line up along a time-space-language axis for you before the drugs took hold. And don't worry some dark corner of Wonderland is going to ensnare you, or that the queen really will chop your head off. Nothing can last or be returned to now that you're finally loose. You may wind up were you started but it won't be the same you that ends there. So you better hold on yet if you can let go of needing even a single line of sanity, can throw that last breadcrumb thread into the wind and fall fall fall, then Hole in One, baby. You're awake for the first time all over again, and ready for a whole looking glass country, Auntie Em! There's no place like... home.... home... home.....ohm... ohm.....ohm...omm... t]
1) NOTES
Longtime readers note one of my graven image idols of worship is the giant Alice statue in Central Park - see Erich Kuersten: A Poet's Journey