Alice in Wonderland **** (1933, Cary Grant, W C Fields, Gary Cooper, Charlotte Henry) – Classic Movie Review 1418

‘I’ve often seen a cat without a grin – but a grin without a cat!’ – Alice. Three cheers for director Norman Z McLeod’s all-star, high-budget classic 1933 movie version of the two Lewis Carroll classic children’s novels Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Alice in Wonderland rejoices in getting the best value out of its marvellous cast, and it’s splendidly lavish and gorgeous looking. The movie is entirely live action, except for the Walrus and the Carpenter sequence, animated by Harman-Ising Studio.

It exactly captures the zany, surrealist spirit of the stories and the style of Sir John Tenniel’s Victorian sketches from the books. But, alas, the spirited all-stars are forced to give prostheticised performances under acres of gunge, makeup and elaborate costumes, and that makes it hard to tell who is who. And unfortunately the screenplay is a tad under-cover too, with the writers Joseph L Mankiewicz and William Cameron Menzies having problems driving a clear direction through the line of the plot, which also drew heavily from Eva Le Gallienne and Florida Friebus’s then-recent stage adaptation of Alice.

Nevertheless there’s enormous pleasure and joy to be found in a superlative film that casts Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, W C Fields as Humpty Dumpty, Gary Cooper as the White Knight, Jack Oakie and Roscoe Karns as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Edna May Oliver as the Red Queen, Edward Everett Horton as the Mad Hatter, Charles Ruggles as The March Hare and Baby LeRoy as The Joker.

Though American, like almost everyone else in the movie, Charlotte Henry is absolutely fine and dandy as Alice, in her first leading role. When the Paramount studio was looking for a young girl to play Alice over 6,800 were auditioned. A Paramount talent scout saw Charlotte in the play she was appearing in at the Pasadena playhouse and arranged a screen test on a Monday morning. A week later, she began filming. The studio’s press department made much of her uncanny resemblance to the character as it appeared in the original Tenniel drawings.

You might hope for colour, but cinematographers Henry Sharp and Bert Glennon make it look a gleaming treat in black and white. Lovely though it is, Paramount perhaps over-sold it as ‘The Entertainment Miracle Of All Times!’ How could any film live up to that? Paramount put virtually all their contract stars thrown into the movie to try to stave off bankruptcy and thought that an all-star movie would save the studio. This failed as the public couldn’t be recognized their favourite stars in the film. It was two Mae West-Cary Grant movies, She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel (both 1933), that saved the studio from bankruptcy. Shame Mae West isn’t in Alice in Wonderland, it might have been a hit!

The original running time was 90 minutes, but when it was bought for US TV in the late 1950s, it was cut to 77 minutes. Universal Studios released the cut version to DVD on March 2, 2010, marking the film’s first home video release, though it was occasionally broadcast on cable channels such as Turner Classic Movies.

Its box office failure cast doubt whether a live-action fantasy could be successfully presented on the screen until MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939). In 2014 it remains the only major live action Hollywood-produced film directly to adapt the original Alice stories. Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland used the title but is a sequel to the original story.

A new young star was expected to emerge in Charlotte Henry but, when the film did poorly at the box office, it was the usual story of an actress ruined by a negative association. Even so she was also typecast. ‘I no longer existed as Charlotte Henry’, she said. ‘With that costume, I was transformed in their minds to the creature they had read about as children. My identity was gone.’ Her car licence plate, in true looking-glass style, read ‘ECILA’.

In the early 40s, she retired from the movies and moved from Hollywood to San Diego, where she ran an employment agency with her mother, then became executive secretary for 15 years to the Roman Catholic Bishop of San Diego. She was happily married to Dr James J. Dempsey and continued with her acting, appearing in several stage productions at the San Diego Old Globe Theatre. She died of cancer in April 1980.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1418

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Self-portrait of John Tenniel, around 1889.