WONDERLANDS: ALICE IN WONDERLAND, 1966

Jonathan Miller's 1966 version of Alice in Wonderland does away with the animal costumes and other fantastic visuals and depicts the story in a relatively earthbound way, with Alice (Anne-Marie Mallik) as a sullen teenage girl spending a long afternoon wandering among a bunch of highly eccentric, upper-class types in Victorian dress as sitar music plays in the background.

This version is slow, sometimes even tedious, but it has its own weird fascination and the cast is a dream, featuring some of the hippest satirical comics and respected theatrical actors of the era. Here we see Alice at the Mad Tea Party, being bored by Michael Gough as the March Hare, Alan Bennett as the Dormouse and Peter Cook (sounding like a kind of English Popeye) as the Mad Hatter. This long, puzzling and disturbing sequence represents the rest of the film pretty well.

Mallik never acted again, which frankly isn't too surprising. The best you can say is that she carries off total disinterest very well.




Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site? Send us an email.