Mrs. Alice Hargreaves, née Alice Liddell, the "real" Alice in Wonderland, is brought to America at age eighty to receive an honorary degree from Columbia University on the centenary of Lewis Carroll's birth -- a promising germ of an idea, that promises more than it delivers. It does deliver some rapier-like cultural clashes between Victorian English gentility and Depression American coarseness; and it delivers some tasty bits of literary chat: Dodgson's stutter, the rudeness to him of Tennyson. In flashbacks, however, the hand of guilt (or of Freudian analysis) clamps down rather hard on poor Mr. Dodgson, and Ian Holm (who looks too old, by the movie's mathematics, to be just thirty) responds with too openly tormented a portrayal: "Have you thought about whom you might like to m-m-marry?" In fantasy sequences, the Alice in Wonderland characters out of Jim Henson's Creature Shop lower the level with a thud. And stock shots of New York City as it once was, though charming on their own account, do not fit in. With Coral Browne; written by Dennis Potter; directed by Gavin Millar. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd
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