Alice in Wonderland

I had no idea this curio even existed--I found it while looking for the 1933 version. It's not bad for an independent production of its era. The performances and costumes are fair enough, on the level of a decent stage production for children, even if most of the actors don't address their dialogue to each other--they stare straight forward while speaking, as if reading their lines off cue cards. The sets reveal the limited budgetary means, which of course counts in a fantasy like this--Wonderland feels no more surreal or magical than any random assortment of recycled theatrical backdrops and props.

Things start shockingly with an original Irving Berlin song (the film was shot in New York, and must have exploited some Broadway ties), but that opening-credits tune is the first and last we hear. Tonally, it does have more of Carroll's tart absurdism than many subsequent screen interpretations. However, the pedestrian execution makes it less than persuasive as entertainment either for kids or for adults.

As others have said, this Alice looks too old, but otherwise she's perfectly all right. She went onto a long career mostly on stage (including several premiere Eugene O'Neill productions) and in early television. This movie doesn't really work, but as a whimsical misfire it's not really any worse than Paramount's big-budget, starry "Alice" a couple years later. And it's short enough to satisfy your curiosity without turning into a real slog. Yes, it's "stagy," but no more so than most movies that came out in 1931.

This film opens up with a catchy theme song, written by future Oscar winning composer, Irving Berlin. Then things start to fall apart from there. Alice looks about 30 years old, but after looking closer to the cast list, it turns out Ruth Gilbert (Alice), was actually 19 in this film. In the original novels, Alice is explained as between 7-8 years old. In the 1951 Disney classic, she looks about thirteen. I always assumed Alice would be an average of 10-15 years old in these films, from what I have seen in the 1951 classic. So when 19 year-old, Ruth Gilbert, looks 30, playing a 13 year old, that means, we are back to low-budgets, bad make-up and bad costumes. This is where the trouble begins with this film. Alice in Wonderland (1931), opens right up with Alice, already in Wonderland. There is no scene in the beginning of the film, explaining why she falls asleep. She is just there already.

This is the first talkie for the character of Alice. An interesting, early attempt at breaking the fourth wall, has Alice talking to the camera/audience, with a blithering speech, that makes no sense. The use of the camera is primitive, even for 1931. You can tell the crew was inexperienced with sound film. Sound film was in its fourth, full year of use in the film industry at this point. The B-Team, low-budget crew, hired for this film, allowed the camera sound noise to be heard in the background of the film. Alice's first shot at a sound film has most of her dialogue muffled by camera gears grinding in the background. The audio in this film is bad, even for 1931. The poor audio issue is very distracting and adds to the fact that this is a badly made movie. I was wondering why this film had such a low rating. Now I know.

The entire film production is low budget, looks amateurish and shows the inexperienced nature of the crew. The use of the camera is archaic at best. This is a film by a low-budget, independent film company, named Metropolitan Studios in New Jersey. The film did not do well at the box office and was panned back in 1931 too. Now comes the stage acting. The Cheshire Cat is a dude, in a bad costume, with bad make-up on, who keeps screwing up his lines. For being the moment when sound film was finally here, so the filmmakers could take advantage of all that new dialogue and all those new plot points, which were things they couldn't do in the silent era, they fumbled the ball badly, in Alice in Wonderland (1931).

The first sound version of ALICE IN WONDERLAND exists in a shoddy copy, with fuzzy details, an echoing sound track, and performers who seem to be reciting their lines instead of performing them, even when they are not doing Lewis Carroll's butchering of popular children's songs of his era. The characters are made up for pantomime, as they typically were on stage and in the movies, but Bud Pollard's cast of unknown and forgotten performers aren't much fun. You can skip this one.

Pretty much everything about Metropolitcan Studios' "Alice in Wonderland" is terrible. The camerawork is often cheap and the picture out of focus, the costumes terrible and disturbing, the acting is just awful as the leading lady often stares off into space like she's stoned, and the overall effect looks like an amateur community theater production...no better. I can see why the 1933 and 1951 versions are almost infinitely more famous. In fact, it's a chore just to finish the film....even though it is less than an hour in length.

While it might sound like I am exaggerating, but among the over 22,000 films I have so far reviewed on IMDB, it's clearly one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Tedious and awful....and I'd rather eat my own foot than see it again. Don't say I didn't warn you.

This first sound film strip of Lewis Carroll's literary classic can be seen as a B-movie attempt even by the standards of the time, but the film was definitely shot on a very low budget. The unknown actors, the still inexperienced director and the incomplete craftsmanship behind the scenes are undermined in their effect by the madness of the visual design, because: The costumes and scenery are, also due to the often taken frontal shots and the interspersed songs, today probably the Stuff little devils were made of. Creepy masks, grotesque and not just cheap-looking backdrops, as well as the facial expressions of the leading actress Ruth Gilbert, consistently take the viewer on a historical-cinematic journey through time in images that could be recycled in places into nightmare sequences of modern films today. It's a pity, of course, above all, the severely slimmed down version of the original novel, which hardly gives the actors and those working in the background air to breathe original air. In principle, one has to state that hardly a book page was left unturned to squeeze this story into just over 50 minutes of film. This film is above all interesting, due to its historical side effects, it - and above all its promo pictures - triggered a real Alice hype in the then cosmos of theater and cinematic acting. However, Bud Pollard's version of the story itself could not benefit from this long-term effect and in cinematic fashion this picture finds its long-term effect above all through the nature of the shots and the crazy and terrifying costumes. If you plan to write a book about the history of the Carroll film adaptations, you should take a look at this film, because the strip has its place in this series. But looking in for fun would not do justice to this period photograph and such a project would only be very promising if you use historical glasses with lenses cast from a love of cinema. All in all a piece of contemporary history, but paradoxically not a big hit for the cinema itself.