Alice in Wonderland
Paramount’s 1933 Alice in Wonderland is a curiosity in the worst sense. It combines Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books into one picture and manages to capture the spirit of neither.
Charlotte Henry plays Alice, a girl in Victorian England. One winter’s day she steps through her mirror into a world of talking chess pieces, then floats down a rabbit hole into Wonderland. Things happen. None of them matter.
The studio conscripted all the big names on its roster—Cary Grant, W. C. Fields, Gary Cooper, Jack Oakie, Edna May Oliver—then buried them under full-face masks and padded costumes meant to evoke John Tenniel’s original illustrations. The resemblance is there, but Tenniel’s magnificent creatures have become clunky costumes. Seams show. Joints don’t match. Movement looks obstructed and painful. According to Scott Eyman, Grant wasn’t even in the suit.1 He just dubbed the Mock Turtle’s lines.
The optical effects fare better. Objects vanish and reappear. Alice grows and shrinks. None of it rivals what Willis O’Brien achieved in King Kong that same year, but it doesn’t humiliate itself. The film’s one genuine bright spot is entirely practical: for the scene where Alice drinks a potion that makes her a giant, the crew rebuilt the set at a smaller scale around her. No trick photography. Just carpentry and common sense. It works better than anything else in the picture.
But camera tricks cannot substitute for a story, and this film has none. Alice drifts from one encounter to the next with no purpose, no urgency, no stakes. The result is a series of disconnected skits. Fields mugs agreeably as Humpty Dumpty. Cooper’s White Knight is painful. Most fall somewhere in between, in that dead zone where you’re not entertained but not offended enough to leave.
Henry, nineteen at the time and unknown, never convinces as a child. She recites her lines with a flat American accent and hits her marks. I don’t blame her. Grant and Cooper, stars with actual talent, do no better.2 Director Norman McLeod seems deaf to everything that makes Carroll’s writing sing: the wordplay, the menace, the dream-logic. He treats Wonderland as a backdrop for vaudeville acts.
The picture died at the box office. Some studio executives concluded that fantasy simply couldn’t work on screen. But six years later, MGM made The Wizard of Oz, which did everything this movie didn’t. The script offered genuine narrative and emotional stakes. Judy Garland delivered a real performance. The costumes let their stars act. The songs gave the story a heartbeat.
One suspects Paramount believed the spectacle alone would suffice. If that sounds familiar, it should. To anyone who thinks the triumph of effects over storytelling is a modern disease, this film is the cure for that illusion. Hollywood has always been willing to mistake technology for entertainment.