Wonderland Watch: Alice in Wonderland (1933)

Well, this was an interesting one.  I meant to tune in for the first fifteen minutes to see what this movie was like, and then realized I'd watched the whole thing.


Alice in Wonderland (1933) is a visual whirlwind and a march of once-big-now-mostly-forgotten actors with a few screen legends appearing along with their contemporaries.  Disney's Alice in Wonderland is an excellent version for the kiddies as Disney's studio really, really knew how to tell a story.  This version feels a bit more, actually, like reading Alice in Wonderland books.  To modern eyes, it's a bunch of rando weirdness occurring, the context and references lost to time, the gags now just bizarre and unsettling events unspooling before our eyes.

85% of the actors are so covered, they're unrecognizable if you don't know their voices.  Which is why, when a young Cary Grant shows up as The Mock Turtle, it truly is a shining moment in cinema.

Cary Grant (right) addresses Alice.  I shit you not.

 It's a strange, strange movies with those odd, pre-1960's stabs at realism mixed with cuteness that just produce terror in the modern viewer's eyes.  The script feels a bit jangly, separate scenes all written for Alice to pass through, interconnected skits, yes.  But there's no tone to the thing other than "holy shit, I cannot believe I'm seeing this."

WC Fields as Humpty Dumpty.  No, I'm serious.

It's a strange movie, not one for the kids, necessarily (the ending is just freaky-deaky).  But still fun, and surprising enough that if you're me, you just plow right through it.

Don't take my word for it.  Here's the whole movie in public domain at Archive.org.