Alice In Wonderland [1966]

Average customer rating:

Back to the novel.

40 years on, still modern

You had to be there, I suppose.

All in the golden afternoon...

Mind boggling & enchanting film

Alice In Wonderland [1966]
Starring: Anne-Marie Mallik , Freda Dowie , Jo Maxwell Muller , Wilfrid Brambell , and Alan Bennett
Director: Jonathan Miller
Manufacturer: Bfi Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B00008WQ58
Release Date: 2003-04-28

Customer Reviews:

Back to the novel........2007-07-26

This is the best attempt at adapting what is actually in the book, so, if your view of Alice in Wonderland is shaped by Disney, you're probably not going to like this.

If only Jonathan Miller had directed more drama.

40 years on, still modern.......2005-07-12

The comment I want to make is on just how modern this version of Alice in Wonderland appears some 40 years later. Perhaps it's the timeless effect of the black and white, but it's quite easy to imagine this being made today, using guest stars like Vic Reeves and David Walliams in place of stars Peter Cooke and Leo McKern.
The drug fuelled aspect is alluded to often - Alice looks 'out of it' more than once, clearly by design, and the sense of being inside an LSD trip is conveyed subtly but clearly. Again, this allows the play to retain a modernity - if Miller (or Carroll) had shown any actual use of drugs, this work would have been censored and probably banned - but by using Carroll's device of bottles and cakes marked 'eat me' and 'drink me' he pretty much gets away with making you feel like you just spent an endless summer day tripped out at woodstock without risking any censorship.
Quite an experience.

Very connected to the psychedelic movement that was as it's height then too - I half expected John Lennon to appear, but sadly he didn't. Beatles fans will recognise the warped victoriana throughout the play.

You had to be there, I suppose........2005-03-25

This is a weird take on a weird story, and reflects the time it was made in. I think it loses a lot by being such a throw back, and it's so determined to be crazier than necessary that it falls down because of that. Instead of being a story set in a mad dream, it becomes an indulgent, over-blown "hey, it's the 60s we can do like anything, groovy!" and falls apart into being a collection of very silly moments. That's the word for this, 'silly'.

All in the golden afternoon..........2004-03-16

This remarkable film almost defies description; it's so completely unlike any other film or any other adaptation of Carroll's book. Watching it is like gazing through a crystal ball at someone's confused, faded, half-dreamed memories of childhood in another life and another age, when summers were long and lazy and hot and the world was severe and confusing. Little of Carroll's text is preserved intact; his ingenious wordplay is mainly given second place to atmosphere, so for all its wonderful qualities this can't really be considered the definitive adaptation - perhaps such a thing is impossible - but it does capture aspects of the original that no other version comes close to. Director Jonathan Miller gives a fascinating, entertaining commentary and you can't help but wonder what we would have had if the BBC hadn't insisted on trimming thirty minutes out of it before transmission... though we shouldn't complain too much about that; today, such a fascinating and individual piece of work would probably never get commissioned in the first place, by the BBC or anyone else.

Mind boggling & enchanting film.......2004-03-10

I borrowed this one from the local library, and, being quite a fantasy story fan, not to mention seeing previous reviews of this film, I was quite looking forward to it.

I thought the actor (I just call both actresses and actors, actors!) playing the lead role as Alice was really good, as well as the actors who appear as humans instead of animals (as is the case in the original story of 'Alice In Wonderland, and most of it's many screen adaptations). At first I was unsure about this & thought maybe it would be more accurate to have actors dressed as doormice, cheshire cats, etc but the fact that these characters appear as humans in this film does actually add to the surreal nature of the story.

I like the intellectualism of the film which somehow could've only surfaced on something made for BBC television, and something which is probably absent on the more family musical type based Warner Bros/Disney based versions of the story. The film also does well to re-capture the complex, hard-to-get-your-head around plot of the book, and it'll probably take me several views to totally 'get' the story.

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