Battle of Wonderland III

"Dear, dear! How, queer everything is today! . . . Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!"

Last week Alice's admirers had a chance to share her puzzlement. Two different film versions of Alice, both billed as Alice in Wonderland, appeared almost simultaneously on U.S. movie screens:

Alice in Wonderland (Walt Disney; RKO Radio) presents Lewis Carroll's beloved classic in the characteristic vein of another children's favorite, to wit, Producer Walt Disney, but it adds no glory to either.

Disney's $3,900,000 Technicolored version draws on both Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, skips many of Alice's adventures, reshuffles others and caricatures most of its cast of 31 Carroll characters until they look more like Disney creations than the original Sir John Tenniel drawings that inspired them. Only the most unyielding Alice cultists would begrudge Disney an adapter's liberties, even when he feels forced to omit some favorite passages and characters, e.g., the White Knight, Humpty Dumpty. But Disney's liberties betray the tone and spirit of the original. The mock-solemn humor of Carroll's perversely logical nonsense is all but lost in a jazzed-up jangle of gags, violence, slapstick and sticky jukebox ballads. Only rarely, e.g., the scene where Alice (spoken by Kathy Beaumont) meets the hookah-smoking caterpillar (Richard Haydn), does the Disney idiom enrich the fun instead of slanting it down to the comic-strip level.

Judged simply as the latest in the long, popular line of Disney cartoons, Alice lacks a developed story line, which the studio's continuity experts, for all their freedom with scissors and paste, have been unable to put together out of the episodic books. Much of it is familiar stuff; Carroll's garden of live flowers prompts Disney to revive the style of his Silly Symphonies. Yet there is plenty to delight youngsters, and there are flashes of cartooning ingenuity that should appeal to grownups. Funniest sequence: the famed mad tea party, which proves rollicking, not out of fidelity to Carroll, but because the Mad Hatter and the March Hare are faithful to Ed Wynn and Jerry Colonna, who speak the roles.

Alice in Wonderland (Lou Bunin; Souvaine), produced mainly in France with British actors and U.S. technicians, is the version whose release Walt Disney sued to block on the ground that it would cash in on his publicity (TIME, July 16). It turns its Alice (Carol Marsh) loose in a colorful wonderland of puppets and stylized sets after a live-action prologue purports to show how Mathematician Charles Dodgson cooked up his fantasy.

Though Alice is celebrated both for its satire and as Dodgson's escape, in the guise of Lewis Carroll, from the repressions of his era and personality, Producer Bunin plays hob with the facts to picture the children's tale as a virtual allegory of the author's difficulties. To point up a tenuous parallel, he not only rigs the prologue but also changes such characters as the King of Hearts and the White Rabbit, who becomes a comic villain.

Fortunately, however, most of the puppets prove more authentic than the human beings. In appearance and style, as well as in the amount of dialogue they salvage intact from the original, they are notably more faithful than the Disney creatures. Bunin's skillful technique makes the figures seem almost as flexible as an animated cartoon and his trick photography is fully up to Alice's magical feats.

The picture's most disconcerting drawback is Alice herself, whose age the book gives as seven. The blonde, grownup good looks of Actress Marsh, 16 when the film was made, suggest that a casting director got Lewis Carroll mixed up with Earl.

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