Shot at the Royal Victoria Military Hospital, the corridor is a substitute for the expected depiction of her physically falling down the rabbit hole and into Wonderland.
Who plays the mad hatter in alice in wonderland windows#
The reconceptualising of the fantasy elements of the narrative into strange realism is evident from the early scene in which Alice pursues the White Rabbit (Wilfrid Brambell) along a long corridor lined with open windows and billowing white curtains. 5 The glaring realness of the Victorian era in black and white is rendered dreamlike, not least because of Ravi Shankar’s sitar score that connects the film with both the psychedelia of the 1960s and the orientalism of the 19 th century. (In MGM’s 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is played by sixteen-year-old Judy Garland, making her twice as old as the character in L Frank Baum’s Oz books.)Ĭonsciously rejecting the fantasy and whimsy of Disney’s animated feature, Miller adopts a ‘somber, naturalistic tone’. In this respect, Miller follows the cinematic tendency to cast girl protagonists as much older than in their original literary depiction. Miller’s Alice is portrayed by fourteen-year-old novice actress Anne-Marie Mallik, who often looks expressionless or bored, with much of her speech occurring in voice-over narration. 4 Carroll’s original drawings of seven-year-old Alice in his handwritten manuscript Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (1864) bear little resemblance to Tenniel’s, just as the animated Alice from Disney’s 1951 film is also distinct. As a character, she is often regarded as ‘ambiguous’ and ‘an imaginary surface upon whom historically changing desires and fears are projected’. In addition, Miller wanted to focus on the disturbing, odd and dreamy aspects of the novel, rather than rehearsing the well-worn meanings that it had accumulated through John Tenniel’s iconic illustrations and its playful nonsense humour. … they saw childhood as a short, unruly episode set aside with the express purpose of training the sober, responsible adult But for all this, the Victorian looked back to childhood … acknowledging that the innocent child was often closer to wisdom and sensitivity than they in their grown-up gravity could ever hope for. Miller intended the film to capture Victorian ideas about childhood, which he described as embodying a tension between discipline and nostalgia:
Even before the film had aired, a moral panic erupted about childhood innocence being sullied by ‘adult’ inflections. The program’s adult orientation meant that it was certified with an X-rating 2 and would be scheduled after the nine o’clock watershed that marked the end of suitable viewing for children. It was shot on 35mm black-and-white film and, contrary to a well-established tradition in pantomime and film, did not use animal costumes for iconic characters such as the White Rabbit and the Caterpillar, nor any special effects.
1 Miller’s television play was not intended for child viewers. The descendant of the girl who inspired Lewis Carroll to write the most influential children’s book in the world was concerned that the film would make her grandmother ‘appear into some sort of strange person’ when ‘he was not’. In November 1966, Mary Jean St Clair, the granddaughter of Alice Liddell, expressed anxiety about Jonathan Miller’s upcoming Alice in Wonderland adaptation for the BBC’s Christmas schedule.
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