TV review

Jonathan Miller (1966)

I had it in my head that it was screened in the BBC’s Wednesday Play slot and it looks as if this may be right:  the original broadcast was on 28 December 1966, which was a Wednesday.  (In those days there wasn’t uninterrupted ‘holiday season’ programming – or consequent interruption of much of the usual scheduling – from Christmas Eve through to New Year’s Day.)  The film went out on the BBC at 9pm.  Jonathan Miller, who introduced this screening at BFI, joked that the Corporation had scheduled it late because they feared he would do something ‘adult’ and probably Freudian with the material.  He didn’t bother to add that, since the film was broadcast during the Christmas holidays, plenty of kids would probably have stayed up to watch in a way that wouldn’t have been allowed by parents during the school term. I don’t think I did see it at the time, though (I know my parents watched it).  It must have been repeated but I’m not sure I’d ever seen it all the way through until now.   My experience of watching the film in NFT2 was strongly coloured by Miller’s introduction, and my reaction to that.

I’ve always resisted Jonathan Miller’s dogmatism – I like to think on principle but I know that it’s partly because I want to disagree with particular opinions that he’s expressing (his contempt for religious belief, in particular).  His range of achievements and his sonorous, unequivocal articulacy combine to give him a compelling intellectual authority.  But once you’re removed from the gravitas of his presence and free to think more clearly about what he’s said, you may find yourself saying, ‘Hang on a minute … ‘.  A few months ago, I saw Miller in one of those five-minutes-with interviews on the BBC news website.  At one point in this conversation, he asserted the impossibility of post-mortem mental survival on the grounds that the conscious life of human beings is inextricably linked to physically-based experience.   As he was laying down the law, what he said seemed unarguable:  it was only after the five minutes were up that I could think of examples of brain activity – conscious and unconscious – that didn’t depend on the spatio-temporal awareness that Miller insisted was essential to mental life.  It’s not that I believe in life after death but I don’t think Miller’s particular refutation of its possibility is unanswerable.

Dreams are obviously a prime example of events that we seem to experience outside corporeal space and time.  In his BFI introduction, Miller was dismissive of surrealist art’s manipulation of dreams and of the clichés of dreams on screen – swirling mist, highly polished tiled floors, ‘Daliesque perspectives’ (his examples).  He rejected Freudian or other symbolic interpretations of dreams, which he thinks are merely a confused reflection of experiences that have occurred in the dreamer’s waking life.  (When Miller stressed the ‘commonplaceness’ of dreams, my instant reaction was to think ‘Speak for yourself’.  It seems likely that dreams express, to a considerable extent, the dreamer’s predispositions.  Carl Gustav Jung believed dreams to be deeply meaningful and his mind was steeped in mythology:  a dragon penetrating the depths of Toledo cathedral and emerging with a mouthful of jewels seems to have been a pretty standard dream for Jung.  Because he thinks they’re meaningless, Jonathan Miller’s dreams may well tend to the commonplace.)  It was puzzling after this introduction to find that Miller’s Alice in Wonderland, in a number of respects, resembled a conventional screen representation of a dream.  En route to the room in which she grows and shrinks, Alice looks out on a geometric vista of staircases and down a dreamlike corridor of the kind Miller affected to despise.  Some of her outdoor perspectives too come across as dreamscapes more than landscapes.  In more highly populated sequences – the pool of tears group and the packed gallery for the Knave of Hearts’s trial – the mildly disquieting, rhubarb-rhubarb burbling on the part of those assembled, occasionally interrupted by animal noises, evoke dreams on film more than any ‘real’ dreams of my own that I can remember.  And of course Miller doesn’t jettison essentially oneiric features of the original, like the effortless movement from one location to another.  (That was one aspect of dreams which, in his introduction, he acknowledged without disparagement.)

Miller’s Alice sometimes seems to be trying to avoid the obvious as a matter of principle but the changes he makes don’t seem to add up to anything consistently or imaginatively new.  For example, Alice doesn’t fall down a rabbit hole – instead she runs down a gentle slope and under a dark, low bridge.  But although this eschews the familiar image from Lewis Carroll, you’re still likely to read what you see as a descent into the unconscious.  Miller also explained in his introduction at BFI that he wanted to get away from the ‘tedious’ animals, reasonably pointing out that he didn’t think it made sense to hire expensive actors then disguise them in fur and whiskers.  Fair enough, but in doing so he loses not only an enjoyable aspect of the original but also the sense of a child’s world view being populated by animals (which, because the child is closer to fairy tales and other fantastic material, can behave more variously than in an adult imagination).  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is often described as a children’s book that isn’t really for children and dispensing with the animal paraphernalia may be a further move in that direction, although Miller didn’t address in his introduction whether the fact that the characters retain their animal names would puzzle children watching the film.   The casting and acting suggest some uncertainty about how far to go with removing the ‘animalism’.  Michael Gough, as the March Hare, has a face that seems right for the animal but doesn’t, in his (very good, droll) performance, try to deliver essence-of-hare.  Alan Bennett as Mouse attempts to be both don-like and mouse-like.  Michael Redgrave doesn’t suggest a caterpillar either physically or in the way he’s decided to play the part.  The actual animals on display, as well as the Cheshire Cat, include the Duchess’s baby-piglet and the hedgehogs to be used as croquet balls.  (There are no real flamingoes to beat them with.)

Miller also seemed to see the de-animalisation of the characters as helping to sharpen the distinction between adults and children in Carroll’s story.  He said that he saw the grown-ups as people disappointed by life.  This certainly comes across strongly in the characterisation of the Mock Turtle – John Gielgud’s vocal musicality gives his lines a lyrically nostalgic quality.  But I don’t see how disappointment is reflected in most of the other characters:  what unifies these adults much more is that Alice finds them annoying.  That may well reflect an adolescent’s impatience with the grown-up establishment that appears to hold foolish sway but a sense of what might have been – or what was once, and is no longer – isn’t much evident in what either this Alice or the audience gets from those she meets.   Referring to William Empson’s ‘The Child as Swain’, Miller talked about the Victorian view of the child as an innocent who would in time be corrupted by the world.  He seemed clear that Lewis Carroll held this view strongly, and regretfully, and the implications of change, physical change at least, are obvious enough in the original Alice.  For both these reasons, presenting Alice as pubescent is a reasonable take on Carroll, even though the convention has been to present her as younger.  Miller explained that the girl he cast, Anne-Marie Mallik, looked to him a ‘sober Victorian child’, miles away from the conventional ‘blonde pixie’ he wanted to avoid.  He stressed too that the film begins and ends with quotes from Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood’.  These remarks all suggest that he wanted to present a genuine Victorian envisioning of Alice.  But the first shot of Anne-Marie Mallik shows an adolescent face – it works more as a counterpoint to than an endorsement of the Wordsworth lines being read in voiceover.  The image emphasises a thick-lipped, sensual mouth and Mallik’s head is framed by foliage in a way that suggests something coming into bloom:  she might as well be Lolita as Alice.

Anne-Marie Mallik, fourteen at the time, isn’t, however, a sexual presence in most of what follows – in fact, she’s not much of a presence of any kind.  This Alice seems bored and remote from most of what she experiences.  It’s difficult to connect this with anything Miller said either in the 1966 Radio Times interview which formed part of the BFI programme note or immediately before the screening. Mallik is so inexpressive that it’s hard to see what Miller intended her to do.  I remember my father saying that ‘the Alice wasn’t the genuine article’ and I think he was right:  the only way the performance works is as a Rorschach blot.   The adult players, including many big names, are a mixed bag.  Alison Leggatt has a fine bossy irrationality as the Queen of Hearts.  Leo McKern, in drag as the Duchess, shows considerable comic verve.  There’s a fussy, camp vibrancy in Wilfrid Brambell’s White Rabbit.   Peter Cook is unsurprisingly abominable as the Mad Hatter and Malcolm Muggeridge gets by as the Gryphon only because he’s paired with Gielgud and the gulf between them in terms of thespian skill is quite funny.  The main disappointment is Peter Sellers as the King of Hearts:  he seems continually undecided as to whether to do a Goon voice or try for a characterisation that’s more subtle and elusive.

The tone of Miller’s film is mildly anti-Victorian and anti-clerical:  the two things converge at the start of the Knave of Hearts’s trial when we hear a church choir singing ‘Immortal, invisible, God only wise’.   (I heard Miller years ago talk about where he got this idea from.  If I remember rightly, he recalled walking past a church when he was a student in Cambridge, hearing the hymn pulsing out from it, and – as a young man both Jewish and atheist – feeling doubly alienated by the sound.)   Yet this Alice in Wonderland seems in retrospect as much a product of its time as the original.  In addition to the celebrity cast, there’s Ravi Shankar’s sitar music, which seems not so much to evoke the Raj and lost empire (as Sight and Sound suggests) but anticipate the transcendental summer of 1967.   (Some of the lighting and vegetation in this Wonderland also has a psychedelic flavour.)  I’ve been unfair in regarding Miller’s largely off the cuff remarks in NFT2 as his considered position – but he speaks with such certainty that it’s hard to receive his words in any other way.   I guess I should have stayed for the Q&A after the screening but the film seemed so much at variance with what Miller said he was after, and the BFI person sharing the platform seemed so much to want us to feel pleasurably intimidated by Miller’s genius (‘I’m sure you’ve got lots of questions but who’s going to dare to go first?’), that I made for the exit.

Postscript:  The BFI’s ‘Alice’ season, timed to coincide with the release of Tim Burton’s film, includes, thanks to some remarkable restoration work on the original, passages from the oldest known screen version of the Lewis Carroll story, directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, and made in 1903.  These extracts are showing on screens in the ground floor entrance and elsewhere round the building (and a somewhat longer version, although still only around ten minutes’ worth, is available in the BFI Mediatheque).  The fragmented quality of this footage and the primitive staging add a fascinating layer to the material.  For example, when the pack of playing cards comes running through a park towards the camera, the amateurishness of the sequence makes them look unquestionably like a group of children from everyday life.  But in combination with the jerkiness of the film they seem strange as well as commonplace – genuinely dreamlike.

13 March 2010