WONDERLANDS: ALICE IN WONDERLAND, 1933

In the coming days, we'll look at just a few of the many, many screen versions of Lewis Carroll's classic story, Alice in Wonderland.

No matter what you do with Alice, no matter how much you try to bland it out and cute it up, it's still a Freudian free-for-all with babies turning into pigs for no reason at all, caterpillars smoking hookahs, and a cat that disappears leaving only its grin behind. It's fascinating to look at the various versions of Alice and see how the story was handled in different eras, what they chose to emphasize or leave out. Often, an Alice adaptation says a lot more about the filmmakers than it says about Carroll's story.

1933's Alice in Wonderland, like a lot of Wonderland adaptations, also includes a lot of material from Carroll's Wonderland sequel, Through the Looking Glass. The film was an all-star production, featuring Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, Gary Cooper as the White Knight, and, in this clip, none other than W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty.

The film is generally pretty faithful to Carroll's text, and it brings the various creatures of Wonderland to life using pioneering special effects makeup that is both amazingly effective and hideous. Bear in mind, as you watch this clip, that this was long before the days of CGI and rubber prosthetics. They didn't even have the technology to superimpose Field's eyes onto Humpty's egg-head, so presumably they just encased him inside of some big, hot, uncomfortable puppet head and rolled the cameras as long as they could until he got too cranky and they had to give him a break for scotch and cigars.



Fields makes a surprisingly good fit as Humpty Dumpty, doesn't he?

The film isn't currently available on DVD, but at this writing the whole thing can be seen on Youtube starting with this clip. If you've only got time for an excerpt, this is the one to see, featuring the truly nightmarish Mock Turtle, Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee as beer-gutted schoolboys with melting faces, and a Fleisher Brothers cartoon version of The Walrus and the Carpenter. Jesus, this thing makes Un Chien Andalou look like an episode of Full House.

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