Alice in Wonderland

This star-studded 1933 black-and-white production wasn't the first film based on Lewis Carroll's books, but it was the most lavish to date—a big Hollywood effort designed to look like the original storybook illustrations sprung to life. W.C. Fields (griping and quipping as Humpty Dumpty), Cary Grant (voicing the Mock Turtle), and Gary Cooper (wearing a bald cap and comical tufts of white hair as the bumbling White Knight) are the biggest stars, but it's the roll call of character actors that enliven the film: Edward Everett Horton, Edna May Oliver, Ned Sparks, Louise Fazenda, and others whose faces and voices are more familiar than their names. Under strange and sometimes grotesque masks and costumes, and at times replaced entirely by life-sized puppets, these game thespians give Carroll's nonsense verse and surreal dialogue the snap of a screwball comedy. Charlotte Henry holds her own as the imaginative and unflappable Alice, unfazed by the crazy dialogue and strange creatures. Joseph L. Mankiewicz and William Cameron Menzies (who also designed the film, although uncredited) draw from both of the Alice books to deliver a clever and perfectly Carrollian script, while Marx Brothers veteran Norman McLeod ably directs with a rapid pace. Although episodic and a bit stagey at times (with effects that are predictably primitive), this is still one of the most creatively surreal films to come out of Hollywood's golden age. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)