The Strange, Grotesque, and Occasionally Funny 1933 Version of Alice in Wonderland

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.
AGFA is currently fundraising to raise money for new 35mm prints. Terror Tuesday and Weird Wednesday ticket sales for the month of August will go to support that cause. To donate separately, click here.

It happens sometimes in conversations that I have a moment of reflective dissociation. When I realize that I’m mirroring, to an extent. I’m matching the energy of the person I’m speaking to, and I’m giving them what they want, or at least what I think they want, instead of engaging in a dialectic or expressing opinions. I’ll catch myself exhaling a bromide, speaking nothingness into the air, and realize that the person before me must see me as a cloud of dust. I wonder if maybe there’s nothing concrete to me at all. For if all I do is mirror then there exists no consistent perception of me, and if there is no consistent perception of me, my perception of myself is unmoored. In these moments I exit my body. I watch the words leave me, hollow and formless, smoky letters and phonemes that hang in the air as forms and slowly vaporize with no meaning attached to them. I watch this smoke ascend and think, “Whoooo arrrre youuuuuu?”

I don’t know if Lewis Carroll ever felt this way. There is a lot of debate over what demons he was wrestling in writing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but it’s neither here nor there, as he’s left us with a work suffused with existential questioning. Even when taken at face value, as a child’s dream in which the ordinary objects and animals around Alice become animated and surreal, on each stop in her journey she is subject to ontological interrogation. By the Cheshire Cat, by the Queen of Hearts, and most bluntly by the hookah-smoking caterpillar, all of whom relentlessly demand, “Whoooo arrrre youuuuuu?” Taken out of her context, Alice can only reply that she’s not so sure. She’s in another world. All her signifiers are gone. 

It’s a heady children’s book, but the whimsical imagery makes it pretty ripe for film adaptations. In 1933 though, critics were skeptical. The book has the tenuous narrative thread of a dream. Alice hops along a series of non sequitur encounters, with the only cohesive element between them being the absurdity of the whole thing. We are simply to accept that there are no rules and that any attempt to discern a through line in the story (and more broadly, in one’s own existence) is folly. The story has its climax in trial with the Queen of Hearts—and this feels like a culmination only with the tension of not wanting Alice to lose her head. There is no foreshadowing that leads to this point. Everything simply happens apropos of nothing, which is where critics took issue. They thought that it might work as a bedtime story, but that most people wouldn’t have the patience to sit through a 76 minute film with such thin offerings of character and story. 

This assumption proved mostly correct. Director Norman MacLeod made no effort to give the sequence of events a linear flow, so despite the short runtime, the episodic nature of the story makes it feel much longer and a bit clunky. In keeping true to the original story, there’s also no real attempt to build the character of Alice. She poses an endless stream of existential and epistemological queries, but never pauses for reflection or examines what answers she may have already been given. She remains more object than subject, simply a recorder of events, so it’s inevitable to feel as alienated from her and as annoyed by her as the brusque inhabitants of Wonderland. In the end, the film is simply a record of a child’s dream—and sitting through the retelling of another person’s dream does not induce phantasmagoric thrall. 

But this film does that, despite the narrative shortcomings. Story is only a piece of the film format. Visually, this film is wild. In this production, MacLeod tasked himself with the physical realization of a dream world. Achieved through sets and practical effects, this is no small feat. Those enamored with Greta Gerwig’s Barbieland can trace a direct line to Alice in Wonderland’s immersive set, manifested through the visionary work of art director William Cameron Menzies. Though sets and production design have been an essential aspect of filmmaking since the form’s inception, Menzies originated the role of the art director as a distinct voice of the creative team. Prior to Alice in Wonderland, he’d distinguished himself through his work on Raoul Walsh’s 1924 film, Thief of Baghdad and Roland West’s The Bat, and would later go on to win an Oscar for his “use of color for enhancement of dramatic mood” in Gone With the Wind in 1940. 

One wouldn’t think it would take over 15 years to come up with a succinct job title, and it implies that the role is an afterthought, but Menzies’ work gives Alice in Wonderland the entirety of its visual aspect. The film owes everything to his exquisitely rendered Wonderland, a giant set constructed to varying scales to reflect Alice’s shifts in size and perspective. The massive door through which Alice must shrink to enter Wonderland must have been 16 feet high and across, a functioning set piece behind which lies another, slightly smaller door. The forest is clearly artificial, but does not feel contained, and the path which snakes though it leads to several full-scale houses. The influence of German Expressionism is apparent in the trippy antechamber in which Alice first imbibes of the distorting potions. Stylistically, it all feels right, and one can see how directly Disney was influenced by Menzies’ design. And 90 years later, none of it feels incipient or crude. 

Equally impressive are the visual effects, achieved in-camera, which feel like the trick photography of the Victorian seance craze, conjuring ectoplasm and gauzy specters. As Alice shrinks and grows, her form becomes a warbling transparency, achieved through an overlay. It’s a difficult technique and the effect holds up for the modern viewer. When the body of the Cheshire Cat dissolves into the ether, leaving only its wide, disconcerting grin hanging in the air, it’s seamless. The combination of an in-camera fade and an actor in phosphorescent makeup works as well as any digital effect and feels much more tangible.

It’s hard to have the same reverence for the costumes: They’re horrifying. The film is clearly intended for children, but it’s hard to imagine how anyone could have seen the masks, makeup, and full-body suits employed here as anything but grotesque and disturbing. Everything is just a little off. Straightforward animals like rabbits and sheep look less like plush toys and more like amateur taxidermy. A strange turtle-cow hybrid (played by Cary Grant!—this is when actors were bound by studio contracts) is meant to elicit pathos, but is just upsetting. Ditto for Humpty Dumpty, though W. C. Fields is such a scene stealer, the bad prosthetics and puppetry can be forgiven. Most frightening are the humanoid characters, whose faces all look like rubber Nixon masks that have been flattened with an iron. The sentient pork chop that resembles the 1980s claymation California Raisins is also fodder for nightmares. One wonders how many people involved in the film had children.

The costumes are, in fact, so bad that for many that is the main takeaway from the viewing experience, overriding the flawless execution of the other departments. The leading adjective modern viewers use to describe the 1933 Alice in Wonderland is “creepy.” It really prompts one to ponder time as a signifier. How much does our temporal context inform how we perceive something? Were these costumes creepy to a 1933 audience? It doesn’t seem that they were. Reviews in 1933 weren’t great, but none of them mention the costumes. Were children (and adults) not scared? Not until modern write-ups do reviewers refer to the film as nightmarish. Is the bridge between us and those alive not even a century ago that far? 

A little, I think. Culture is such a strong informer of perception, and era is an aspect of culture. Maybe our signifiers are different now. Our interpretations of our perceptions cull from the zeitgeist and they rely on the looking glass. We’re all mirroring. It is, frankly, a very silly prompt for such serious musings, but it’s in the spirit of the story to come away with unanswerable questions. Are my feelings and sensibilities fed to me? Is there anything essential to me at all?  Whoooo arrrre youuuuuu? I can’t venture to answer, lest I untether myself from these perceptions I call reality and find myself in Wonderland.