Alice in Wonderland

This is pretty bad all the way around. Even with the limited resources and technology available, it could have been decent. To start with, Alice looks like she's about 35. I guess the actress was 18 but she looked much older. The costumes are like the ones you could buy in the Halloween rack at Walmart. Everything is stilted and posed. I was really hoping to enjoy it for its historical significance, but the script is dull and the characters don't seem to be doing much. Sometimes it might be a good idea to get away from those illustrations from the original books. That was the curse of the 1933 version. Here, the characters are even more costume than substance. Of course, there's no star power here either.

Apparently, this is the first talkie transmutation of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" to screen. Most others seem to rate this version relatively low, but it does surprisingly well in one important aspect of adaptation: retaining and cinematically translating the nonsense. Of only two years later, Paramount's 1933 iteration is good example of how stilted Alice movies can be. Sure, this low-budget 1931 film is a creaky early synchronized-sound film, has poor production values (the Mock Turtle part looks especially lousy), isn't particularly faithful to the source (e.g. a love affair between the White Rabbit and the Duchess), and the acting is atrocious, but it moves at a brisk pace and without the hindrance of ever appearing to take itself seriously. Indeed, for the first time in film history, the spectator heard some of Carroll's nonsensical wordplay to go along with the picture's visual imagination.

Setting the pace and tone from the start is a jazzy tune by Irving Berlin during the credits and opening shots, which is recycled from "Puttin' on the Ritz" (1930). Relatively rare for an early talkie, another early scene features a score as Alice's image is stretched and shrunk while staggering beside giant mushrooms--the film's only reference to the character's growing taller and smaller from the book. The picture jumps right into Wonderland, too, without the preamble of it being framed as a dream--although, of course, it still ends that way--or of her following the White Rabbit. Alice even seems to be breaking the fourth wall without a direct address to the audience with the first words spoken in the picture. The primitive special effects have a charm to them, as well; these include spinning images, use of distorting lenses, blurred images, superimpositions, iris masking, stop-substitutions and dissolves. Also somewhat unusual for a film from 1931, the camera movement has zing to it, including beginning shots with quick adjustments to focus on a character. There are many of these during the Mad Hatter's tea party, with some seemingly employed to disguise the editing, as though the camera is flowing between characters in a continuous tracking shot of their conversation. The only thing I think needlessly slows down the proceedings are the fade outs between episodes. Regardless, thanks to its pace of shot succession and scene dissection, the average shot length here of 9.75 seconds (my count) is good for a 1931 talkie.

Moreover, while the acting is generally poor, including actors looking off in strange directions (the Duchess and Alice not looking at each other while talking in one scene stands out), the Cheshire Cat stumbling through his lines, and some awful singing, everyone appropriately plays it light. Alice adaptations after the Disney cartoon tend to focus on the frightening aspects of the story, and some are decidedly more for adults than children, so it's refreshing to see this brisk early talkie have fun with the nonsense. Ruth Gilbert does a good Alice, too, in the respect that she plays the wide-eyed, slack-jawed and excitable dumb blonde part well. That Alice seems to be having fun makes all the difference.

I had no idea this curio even existed--I found it while looking for the 1933 version. It's not bad for an independent production of its era. The performances and costumes are fair enough, on the level of a decent stage production for children, even if most of the actors don't address their dialogue to each other--they stare straight forward while speaking, as if reading their lines off cue cards. The sets reveal the limited budgetary means, which of course counts in a fantasy like this--Wonderland feels no more surreal or magical than any random assortment of recycled theatrical backdrops and props.

Things start shockingly with an original Irving Berlin song (the film was shot in New York, and must have exploited some Broadway ties), but that opening-credits tune is the first and last we hear. Tonally, it does have more of Carroll's tart absurdism than many subsequent screen interpretations. However, the pedestrian execution makes it less than persuasive as entertainment either for kids or for adults.

As others have said, this Alice looks too old, but otherwise she's perfectly all right. She went onto a long career mostly on stage (including several premiere Eugene O'Neill productions) and in early television. This movie doesn't really work, but as a whimsical misfire it's not really any worse than Paramount's big-budget, starry "Alice" a couple years later. And it's short enough to satisfy your curiosity without turning into a real slog. Yes, it's "stagy," but no more so than most movies that came out in 1931.

This quickie version of the children's classic shot in New York doesn't actually compare that badly with the mess Paramount made of it a couple of years later, and achieves a fair degree of the book's wit and certainly its strangeness; which the cheap stylised sets if anything enhance. Director Bud Pollard does his best to embellish things with occasional optical and editing effects; although for most of the rest of the time his blocking of the action leaves something to be desired.

Against this ramshackle backdrop nineteen year-old Ruth Gilbert's good-humoured, gurgling-voiced Alice carries the film rather well; although looking nearly as bizarre to modern eyes as the rest of the cast in her obvious platinum-blonde wig and vampish Lily Munster makeup.

The first sound version of ALICE IN WONDERLAND exists in a shoddy copy, with fuzzy details, an echoing sound track, and performers who seem to be reciting their lines instead of performing them, even when they are not doing Lewis Carroll's butchering of popular children's songs of his era. The characters are made up for pantomime, as they typically were on stage and in the movies, but Bud Pollard's cast of unknown and forgotten performers aren't much fun. You can skip this one.