Down the Rabbit Hole

First broadcast on BBC1 in 1966 (and released on DVD in 2003 by the British Film Institute) Jonathan Miller’s Alice in Wonderland is quite simply the best adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece ever committed to film. Rather than offering an assortment of slightly embarrassed actors in unconvincing animal masks, Miller instead opts to depict the bestiary of creatures Alice meets in human form. Here the viewer has the fun of spotting familiar sixties faces from the panoply of superb actors involved including Peter Cook, Peter Sellers, Wilfrid ‘Steptoe’ Brambell, Michael Gough, and Leo McKern and Angelo Muscat from The Prisoner. By having the animals depicted as human Miller plays upon the interpretation of the book as a satire of the absurdities of Victorian society, with various characters decked out in military regalia and aristocratic finery.

The stand-out achievement of the film is its treatment of Alice herself. Alice is an incredibly difficult character to bring to the screen as so much of her personality depends on how the reader interprets her actions. Here Alice is an vacant oddly detached figure, rarely even looking at the bizarre characters she is engaging with. Anne-Marie Mallik excels at delivering Alice’s deadpan reactions to the insanity surrounding her, standing out as a voice of reason in a world of madness, yet also as one who is drifting, and never quite there, emphasising the dreamlike nature of Wonderland.

Miller obviously had a great understanding of the source material and weaves many aspects of Alice-mythology into the design of the film. Alice herself looks remarkably like the little girls who feature so prominently in Dodgson’s own (slightly unsettling) photography, as does the world of country gardens and bearded men she inhabits. Miller also adds the lovely touch of having Dodgson’s own, rarely seen, illustrations accompany the film’s end credits. So although the visuals are far removed from the familiar Tenniel illustrations they are deeply indebted to other less known, but just as important visual Alice motifs.

The programme benefits greatly from being shot entirely on film, rather than the disconcerting mish-mash of location film and studio-bound videotape familiar from many BBC productions of the period. Despite being made for television Miller’s Film is incredibly cinematic and the DVD benefits from a crystal clear print. The BFI have also dug out another interesting oddity from the archives to bolster their DVD release, an eight minute silent version of Alice in Wonderland from 1908. Although not in the greatest condition (which is entirely forgivable for footage nearly 100 years old) the film gives a fascinating insight into early cinema’s camera-trickery much of which, for example Alice’s shrinking and growing, still stands up today.

Also languishing in an archive somewhere is Dennis Potter’s 1965 Play for Today Alice which tells the life of Rev. Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), and stars Doctor Who’s Deborah Watling as Alice Liddell. Given the enduring appeal of both Carroll and Potter it’s high time this film saw the light of day, either as a BFI DVD release or on BBC FOUR, c’mon…pretty please?