WONDERLANDS: ALICE IN WONDERLAND, 1983

When we think of Alice in Wonderland, we tend to think of Sir John Tenniel's illustrations as much as Lewis Carroll's words. Tenniel's expert crosshatching gave life to bizarre characters like the Mad Hatter, the Mock Turtle and Humpty Dumpty. This 1983 theatrical production of Alice tries to capture the look of Tenniel's art by making everything black and white, with fussy little pen marks everywhere. The result is certainly interesting to look at, if a bit busy and kind of ugly. The characters sometimes look a bit like zombies who have been spattered with black ink.

But while the production is very faithful to certain aspects of the story, it gets pretty wacky in other ways - the Cheshire Cat, for instance, is portrayed by former 7 Up pitchman Geoffrey Holder as a big, bald black guy with a kind of creepy, Caribbean Morpheus vibe.

If the Mad Hatter in the clip below seems familiar to you fans of early '80s arthouse cinema, that's because he's Andre Gregory, the "Andre" from My Dinner with Andre. In that film he proved to be a much more agreeable mealtime companion to Wallace Shawn. He's positively bitchy to poor Alice, here.



Alice is portrayed by Kate Burton, Richard Burton's daughter. Richard Burton has a brief but memorable role later on as the kindly and addled White Knight from Through the Looking Glass. (This adaptation, like many others, mashes together Wonderland and Looking Glass as if they were all one story.)

If I seem a little non-committal about this Alice, it's because even now, going on three decades later, I'm still not sure what I think of it. You know that weird, unsettled feeling you got watching that clip? That's pretty much how you'll feel the whole way through.

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