Blue Sky Casting #3

I’m always kind of dissatisfied with adaptations of Lewis Carroll. The Svankmajer ALICE is pretty good, but as an adaptation I never felt it caught the tone of the book, that calm, dreamy feeling, where Alice perceives things as strange alright, but not VERY strange. I like Jonathan Miller’s BBC version, especially the dignified cast and the decision not to use big prosthetic makeups, but the Ravi Shankar score seems like a fashionable gesture rather than a shrewd artistic choice. I can remember as a kid being put into quite an odd state by the Disney version, but looking at it now it’s more HELLZAPOPPIN’ than Charles Dodgson. DREAMCHILD, scripted by Dennis Potter, is nice, but not all it should be.

Wouldn’t it have been great if some far-thinking British producer had brought Luis Bunuel to the UK, just after L’AGE D’OR, to film both the Alice books, back-to-back?

He could have had the cream of British stage and screen working for him – probably some of the same names Miller had in the sixties : Gielgud, Finlay Currie — as well as people like Ernest Thesiger (The Mad Hatter), Alastair Sim (The Duchess), Charles Laughton as the ultimate Humpty Dumpty…

But we can only dream of this, and if we are going to dream, we should dream of absurd and baffling things, so I give you:

 SAM PECKINPAH’S

ALICE IN WONDERLAND

The White Rabbit — L.Q. Jones

The Dodo — Randolph Scott

The Caterpillar — Emilio Fernandez

The Duchess — R.G. Armstrong

The Cheshire Cat — Ernest Borgnine

The Mad Hatter — David Warner

The March Hare — Warren Oates

The Dormouse — Slim Pickens

The Queen of Hearts — Ida Lupino

The King of Hearts — Robert Preston

The Griffin — Kris Kristofferson

The Mock Turtle — Bob Dylan

Alice — some Mexican whore.

Dylan = Turtle. You can see what I mean, right?

“Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia — OFF WITH HIS HEAD!”

Debbie Does Xanadu.

 

This may or not be news to you people, but I am able to say that Orson Welles helped edit a hardcore porno film in the seventies.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0194635/

Purely, I gather, as a pseudonymous favour for his great ally, the late lamented Gary Graver, whom Welles needed to shoot material for his still-eagerly-awaited THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. Welles cut the porno while Graver gathered footage for TOSOTW.

According to the IMDB reviewer, this Graver movie is actually pretty good. Although whether we can rely on the opinions of a person calling themself babycarrot67is questionable. Be that as it may, the flick stars Georgina Spelvin, who took her name from a traditional Broadway pseudonym, the theatrical equivalent of Hollywood’s “Alan Smithee”. G.S. got her start doing the catering on THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES and took over the lead role when the star had to drop out — a very traditional showbiz story rags-to-riches story, that!

Anyhow, I don’t want this to get bandied about as another bogus tale of Welles’s “fall from greatness” of the kind mostly Hollywood-type writers are so fond of, since their own lack of artistic ambition is justified if they can point at Welles and say he was a failure. I’m just tickled by the odd conjunction of the CITIZEN KANE auteur and the world of onscreen penetration, and it’s one more – admittedly puerile – reason for us to rush out and buy Joseph McBride’s Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813124107/ref=ord_cart_shr?%5Fencoding=UTF8&m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE

Thanks to ”Lucan” for the top-notch goss.

Now THAT’S shadowplay!

Brilliant scene from “Barnyard” Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST.

The Professor Quadri character in this scene is given Jean-Luc Godard’s home phone number, a sign that Bertolucci was ready to “kill” his hero, JLG. The professor’s murder perhaps also echoes Pasolini’s death, and Pasolini was Bert’s other cinematic mentor. This is the film where Bertolucci conclusively stepped out from their shadows.*

Jonathan “J-Ro” Rosenbaum once wrote, superbly, that Fritz Lang’s THE INDIAN TOMB contains “the only cave in movies that’s worthy of Plato’s,” but Bertolucci and Storaro here evoke that same cave beautifully, in a professor’s study in 1930s Paris…

*As David Ehrenstein points out, very politely, in the comments below, I am talkng insane bollocks here, since at the time of IL CONFORMISTA’s production, Pier Paolo Pasolini was still VERY MUCH ALIVE. So Bertolucci’s film is one of a select few that Predicts The Future.