Alice in the Cities [Alice in den Städten] **** (1974, Rüdiger Vogler, Yella Rottländer, Lisa Kreuzer) – Classic Movie Review 5441

Writer-director Wim Wenders’s 1974 German drama tells a clever, bittersweet parable story about the relationship between a German journalist Phil Winter (Rudiger Vogler) and a little nine-year old girl called Alice (Yella Röttlander) he gets stuck with after encountering her mother at a New York airport.

This Seventies cult movie favourite is a typical Wenders piece, beguilingly filmed in Robby Müller’s attractive black and white cinematography. Wenders’s uneven, but mostly riveting film comments effectively on American-European culture clashes.

The tale, which uses a typical road-movie format to explore the relationship of surrogate parent and child, hits the highway somewhere between Paper Moon (1973) and Wenders’s later Paris, Texas (1984).

Also in the cast are Lisa Kreuzer as Alice’s mother Lisa, Edda Köchel, Lois Moran and Chuck Berry (as himself), plus a director cameo by Wenders as Man by Jukebox.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5441

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