Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

Film and TV productions across the years

Alice's Adventures In Wonderland starring Fiona Fullerton made in 1972

introduction	picnic and rabbit	the pool of tears	caterpillar to duchess	a mad tea party
a game of croquet	the lobster quadrille	the trials beginning	odds and ends	next film

f course, Alice does manage to shrink herself back to door-size, courtesy of an "eat me" cake and more chroma-key work, and she escapes from the rabbit, guinea-pig gardeners and Bill the lizard (played hilariously by Julian Chagrin, a fine comedian and mime artiste).

In the forest, Alice rests on a mushroom for a while, then meets the grumpy Caterpillar. The actor here is Sir Ralph Richardson, a very famous film and theatre actor indeed.

After following the caterpillar's advice and collecting two pieces of mushroom, Alice meets Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, played by real-life twins Fred and Freddie Cox. Many Alice adaptations include the Tweedle brothers, but they really belong in "Alice Through The Looking Glass" of course.

And so Alice's journey continues as she goes to see the Duchess. Peter Bull, another fine actor, plays the Duchess as a pantomime Dame, bellowing out the "Speak roughly to your little boy" song without compromise.

Patsy Rowlands as the pepper-shaking cook, takes that character to new levels of insanity, and Fiona Fullerton's face seems to register real panic as the crockery is hurled around the set. The bedlam also seems to upset the baby (a real one), who bursts into real tears.

The Cheshire Cat is played by Roy Kinnear and it's a shame that the scene between Alice and the cat in the tree, although filmed, was deleted from the final print. Kinnear was a first class comic actor and, in this production, his talent is underused. Always hilarious, he was famous for "corpsing" anyone (un)lucky enough to share a scene with him. Sadly he died in an accident during the making of a later film "The Return of the Three Musketeers".

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