I don't know how many movies Lewis Carroll's classic has inspired. The recent television version seemed pretty muddled. Back on the big screen, Tim Burton made Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter seem like Johnny Depp's Willie Wonka. The Disney version scared my wife when she was a child. Alice has been haunting the screens long before the Disney animators put pencil to storyboard.
Here's how Alice looked on 1903:
http://www.archive.org/details/Alice_in_Wonderland_1903?start=29.5
The film was in pretty bad shape, but most of the elements were in this eight minute short: the White Rabbit, shrinking and growing Alices, the Cheshire Cat, the howling baby, the Mad Tea Party, the Red Queen and her minions...
Internet Archive also has a 1915 version of Alice, but I had problems linking to it. Perhaps you will have better luck.
A Dutch site has a cut of that 1915 one up, with a fifteen-seocnd commercial in front of it, too:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.123video.nl/playvideos.asp?MovieID=560517
Any of the versions particularly favored by you, Jerry?
And more of Tuesday's Overlooked can be linked to from my blogpost today...
ReplyDeleteI love Jonathan Miller's version from 1966 with Peter Cook, Peter Sellers, John Gielgud and many more, plus a soundtrack by Ravi Shankar. Very surreal but it suits the material well. The BFI DVD release includes the 1903 version. There's a recent documentary on Carroll that includes the 1915 version.
ReplyDeleteTodd, my favorite version is the book! (Actually, Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice.)
ReplyDeleteI do like the 1903 version because of the camera tricks it used. I doubt if any of the tricks were original, but this was an age when film makers had to make it up as they go, and i really appreciate their creativity and enthusiasm. Alice 1903 also has a Mickey/Judy vibe of "hey, let's put on a show!" And I'm sure some elementary school was emptied to provide the extras for the Red Queen's soldiers. The whole film tickles me.
Kate, thanks for the info. It's always good to a fellow Alice fan.
ReplyDeleteInteresting effects. Hard to be sure with the film in such bad shape, but it seems primitive compared to The Great Train Robbery of the same year.
ReplyDeleteIt is primitive in comparison, Evan, but that's the charm of it for me. There were no rule books and everybody had to figure things out for themselves as they went along.
ReplyDelete