Alice in Wonderland

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).

This is pretty bad all the way around. Even with the limited resources and technology available, it could have been decent. To start with, Alice looks like she's about 35. I guess the actress was 18 but she looked much older. The costumes are like the ones you could buy in the Halloween rack at Walmart. Everything is stilted and posed. I was really hoping to enjoy it for its historical significance, but the script is dull and the characters don't seem to be doing much. Sometimes it might be a good idea to get away from those illustrations from the original books. That was the curse of the 1933 version. Here, the characters are even more costume than substance. Of course, there's no star power here either.

Apparently, this is the first talkie transmutation of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" to screen. Most others seem to rate this version relatively low, but it does surprisingly well in one important aspect of adaptation: retaining and cinematically translating the nonsense. Of only two years later, Paramount's 1933 iteration is good example of how stilted Alice movies can be. Sure, this low-budget 1931 film is a creaky early synchronized-sound film, has poor production values (the Mock Turtle part looks especially lousy), isn't particularly faithful to the source (e.g. a love affair between the White Rabbit and the Duchess), and the acting is atrocious, but it moves at a brisk pace and without the hindrance of ever appearing to take itself seriously. Indeed, for the first time in film history, the spectator heard some of Carroll's nonsensical wordplay to go along with the picture's visual imagination.

Setting the pace and tone from the start is a jazzy tune by Irving Berlin during the credits and opening shots, which is recycled from "Puttin' on the Ritz" (1930). Relatively rare for an early talkie, another early scene features a score as Alice's image is stretched and shrunk while staggering beside giant mushrooms--the film's only reference to the character's growing taller and smaller from the book. The picture jumps right into Wonderland, too, without the preamble of it being framed as a dream--although, of course, it still ends that way--or of her following the White Rabbit. Alice even seems to be breaking the fourth wall without a direct address to the audience with the first words spoken in the picture. The primitive special effects have a charm to them, as well; these include spinning images, use of distorting lenses, blurred images, superimpositions, iris masking, stop-substitutions and dissolves. Also somewhat unusual for a film from 1931, the camera movement has zing to it, including beginning shots with quick adjustments to focus on a character. There are many of these during the Mad Hatter's tea party, with some seemingly employed to disguise the editing, as though the camera is flowing between characters in a continuous tracking shot of their conversation. The only thing I think needlessly slows down the proceedings are the fade outs between episodes. Regardless, thanks to its pace of shot succession and scene dissection, the average shot length here of 9.75 seconds (my count) is good for a 1931 talkie.

Moreover, while the acting is generally poor, including actors looking off in strange directions (the Duchess and Alice not looking at each other while talking in one scene stands out), the Cheshire Cat stumbling through his lines, and some awful singing, everyone appropriately plays it light. Alice adaptations after the Disney cartoon tend to focus on the frightening aspects of the story, and some are decidedly more for adults than children, so it's refreshing to see this brisk early talkie have fun with the nonsense. Ruth Gilbert does a good Alice, too, in the respect that she plays the wide-eyed, slack-jawed and excitable dumb blonde part well. That Alice seems to be having fun makes all the difference.

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.

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.