Go Ask Alice

I saw this movie when it came out on television in 1973. I was 13 years old at the time. I would rate this movie as a 10. The reason being, it scared the hell out of me when I saw it. It came at a very influential time for me. I knew nothing about drugs, I knew no one who had taken drugs and I had never experimented with drugs at that time.

I was later exposed to drugs, they were very prevalent in the seventies. They were everywhere. I had tried marijuana, and a couple other drugs, but never acquired them for myself and never made it my lifestyle. Because of this movie, I was afraid of where it would take me, and that I wouldn't be strong enough to come back from it.

The characters were strong enough, the movie was good enough, the story was told well enough. well enough in fact to haunt my dreams every time I stepped over the drug line and I think that's why it was made, and it did the job it was supposed to do. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

This movie would only be appealing to me if I were on drugs just like the main character Alice (Jamie Smith-Jackson) was. At times, I could barely follow the story line because the scenes jumped around quite a bit. In these scenes, the acting seemed as if the actors will still reading off the scripts. The emotion just wasn't there. The characters just stood there, said their lines, and a new scene was up. The jumping from one scene to the next caused some editing problems. Not enough of the story was told. For example, when Alice meets Chris (Jennifer Edwards) in the shop. Alice is dressed and her hair is done. The next scene Alice and Chris are dressed like twins with their hair ironed. I was confused on how she would change so fast. The dialogues between all the characters were short and not a lot of important things were said. One line was, ` Now you're holding,' said by Jan (Ayn Ruymen) and then it was the end of that scene. The movie didn't grab my attention. This may have also occurred because I read the book before hand. The movie switched a lot of the scenes around and removed some of the characters. But they can only do so much with a movie taken from a book.

Ordinary 15-year-old teenage girl, feeling like an outcast at a new high school, falls in with the stoner crowd after being offered hallucinogens at a party. Eventually, she's a runaway living on the streets and, after returning home to her well-meaning but naïve parents, is stuck with a bad reputation among her peers--and labeled a 'fink' when she turns in a fellow teen druggie. TV-made "message movie", adapted from the fictional cult book by Anonymous (Beatrice Sparks), purports to pack a punch, but instead seems tentative and a bit awkward (this mostly due to the inexperienced younger actors in the cast). William Shatner (as Alice's natty father) and Andy Griffith (as a priest who works with dopers and drunks) seem to be cast for their name value, although both do solid work in small roles. Jamie Smith Jackson handles the lead with sensitivity and sincerity, and the picture gets a solid B for effort.

I hope the movie is released one of these days because it would definitely bring back memories. I have not seen it since I was in Junior High School in the late '70's (they used to show it at school, perhaps as a scare tactic) but I still remember the book and the movie as having a profound influence on why I never touched drugs. I now understand this was not a true story but at the time I couldn't get over "Alice's" story and the consequences of using drugs. I still own a copy of the book and re-read it from time to time. I would love to see the movie again but wouldn't be surprised if I found it very dated and wonder why it affected me so much back then.

In the early 1970s, America was still in denial about drugs. Like the parents of Alice in this film, "other" kids use drugs and the risk to their own kids is minimal. So, this film where the fictionalized "girl next door" and her fall into drug dependence is meant to wake up folks to the potential horrors of drugs.

Jamie Smith-Jackson stars as Alice, though oddly established actors like William Shatner, Ruth Roman and Julia Adams are listed at the top of the credits--and Jamie in the middle. I say this is odd because Shatner, Roman and Adams really were barely in the movie at all and the film is about Alice! As for these screen veterans, Shatner and Adams especially did great impersonations of blocks of wood. Perhaps the film made them too out of it--and they were a bit hard to believe as their characters weren't fully established. As for newcomer Smith-Jackson, she did a pretty good job helming this film.

The big star of the film, however, is the writing. The story didn't come off as trite or that whitewashed (at least for a made for TV movie) and was good entertainment and a nice public warning about drugs. A very good and well made film overall. And, considering I have worked in drug rehab and with prison populations, I have seen first hand the horrors that might befall those who make the choice to use drugs of all types--including alcohol.