Blue Sky Alice

“Blue sky casting” is a screenwriter’s trick — you imagine anyone you like, living or dead, in a role, and that hekps you find the character’s voice. If you’re writing for Jeff Goldblum or Michael Redgrave, different things happen. What you probably shouldn’t ever do is cast the person you were thinking of — there’s an exciting tension that happens if you cast, say, Joan Cusack, in a role written with, say, Myrna Loy in mind.

It’s also a fun exercise: here’s a fantasy cast list for Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. I found as i was coming up with it that it was tending to a mid-1950s feel, and naturally British. But it began when Fiona proposed Peter Lorre as the Dormouse.

It turns out I’ve been carrying in my mind various casting ideas for Alice, and they cam tumbling out and were joined by others…

It just seems crazy that Kenneth Williams never played the Mad Hatter. Put it down to typecasting — the Carry On films, though hugely popular, rendered all the actors uncastable in anything other than sitcom or sex farce. The two main productions KW would have been eligible for, Jonathan Miller’s rather wonderful TV Alice in Wonderland, and the execrable musical ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, have excellent Hatters in Peter Cook and Robert Helpmann respectively, but Williams would have knocked it out the park.

It’s kind of obvious that Jimmy Edwards, extravagantly-tached comic actor, should be the Walrus, but I think Norman Wisdom is very close to Tenniel’s drawing of the Carpenter. It’s starting to look like this production belongs in the mid-fifties to sixties.

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Not for any physical resemblance, but the wide-eyed dithering innocence John le Mesurier brought to his work in Dad’s Army seems to suit the King of Hearts nicely. And he practically plays the role in Gilliam’s JABBERWOCKY.

I feel that Irene Handl deserves a crack at the Queen of Hearts — though associated with working class roles (she argued with Billy Wilder about how to play cockney dialogue), she was actually quite posh, seemingly, and derived her characterisations from her observation of her family’s maids when she was young. And she’s the most versatile and surprising and funny of actors, seriously underused. (If you were doing it later, Prunella Scales would be immense, and she’s a lot like Dodgson’s own drawings.)

I’ve always seen Lionel Jeffries as the White Knight. He has such an air of melancholy. I can never read the Knight’s verse without tears springing unbidden to my eyes. Same with Lear’s The Jumblies: “Far and few, far and few…” an incantatory lament.

Okay, granted, Roger Livesey has to be a contender too.

Charles Gray as Humpty Dumpty, because.

When I look at Tenniel’s White Rabbit, I see Edward Everett Horton, which makes it odd that Paramount cast him as the Mad Hatter in the 30s version. They should have borrowed George Arliss for the Hatter and given Horton the rabbit. Fuck Skeets Gallagher. But if we’re going for anxious British players of the 1950s, maybe Alastair Sim? Or Alec Guinness, but there you’d be opening up a can of worms. Who could he NOT play? We know he’d make a magnificent Duchess:

And that’s a role which should really be done in drag, for compassionate reasons. Peter Bull was pretty perfect in the seventies abomination. Leo McKern would be good too.

Peter Sellers is maybe the only man to have played motion picture versions of the March Hare AND the King of Hearts, and he’s another can of worms if we let him in. But in the Miller piece he does the unimaginable, improvising Lewis dialogue in character, so he should be essential. Since this would be early, chubby Sellers, maybe we should be thinking in terms of the caterpillar, a somewhat shadowy figure in the illo.

If we’re having Sellers, then Spike Milligan would be a fine Frog Footman (see YELLOWBEARD for some exemplary footmanning from SM).

Based on Tenniel, there can be no question that the White King and Queen are Thorley Walters and Joan Sims. though Handl is another possibility for the latter. The Red Queen could be Flora Robson or Patricia Hayes, but I’m going for Yootha Joyce (energy) whereas the Red King, apparently dreaming the whole thing like in INCEPTION, doesn’t ever wake up and so it seems like wasted effort to cast a celebrated thesp. Might as well be John Wayne.

Miller cast Finlay Currie as the Dodo, an impressive feat — the only human actor to LOOK like a dodo. But he’s too old, since Dodgson based this didactic fowl on himself, incorporating his stutter — Do-do-Dodgson. Trying to find an actor not aged in the 1950s, with Dodgson’s sad eyes and an impressive beak, I stop at Richard Wattis.

Cecil Parker, arch-ovine, must be the Sheep, a rarely-filmed character but one with great material. I suppose the sheep should really be female, but drag is allowed. We’re through the looking glass, here.

The Gnat also has some really good jokes, and is never presented onscreen — perhaps because Tenniel didn’t deign to draw him. Another tutelary figure — you can really tell the author is a lecturer — he could really be played by anybody from Terry-Thomas to Robert Morley. The latter is more pompous, so he’d do, but then for heaven’s sake why not Noel Coward? Or Dennis Price, who quotes Lewis with relish in Mike Hodges’ PULP?

Of course, given the period, we can have perhaps Britain’s greatest child actor in the title role, Mandy Miller (MANDY, THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT), and by happy coincidence it appears she’s a fan of the author:

Randy Cook suggests Benny Hill for the Cheshire Cat. What are your thoughts? I presume that, like me, you have been carrying casting ideas for Alice around in your heads for decades.

Ealing Hands

When I think of it, there are a surprisingly large number of Ealing films I haven’t seen. Now that I’m interested in Pat Jackson (Miss Jackson if you’re nasty), my attention focussed on THE GENTLE TOUCH (aka THE FEMININE TOUCH), a typical Ealing group dynamic movie about student nurses. Of course, an Ealing take on this subject is quite a bit from, say, a Roger Corman one, but it’s not exactly devoid of “shocking” material, from suicide to questioning the cruelty of God to some frank talk about virginity and colostomy bags.

And all in luminous Technicolor! It’s a surprising choice of subject to show off the process, but Paul Beeson’s work is radiant, excelling in a sunset scene where the golden light and blue shadows recall Leon Shamroy’s Hollywood work.

Best-known ministering angel is probably flame-haired Adrienne Corri, a Scot cast as an Irishwoman on account of all that red hair. She plays it with her strongest Scottish accent and a couple of notes of stage Irish. But she’s fun! Belinda Lee is the soft-spoken lead, good actor but written insipid; Diana Wynyard is the Matron and she’s AWESOME — good in the original GASLIGHT, but better here, and Mandy Miller from MANDY is a child patient with a dicky heart. Delphi Lawrence marries a doctor (“I thought he was a confirmed bachelor!”) and is automatically fired because nurses aren’t allowed to marry in 1956, apparently (!).

Very glad I saw it. Some of the compositions in group shots are stunning, and there are some snappy montages, but otherwise we don’t see Jackson’s more bold and imaginative choices, which I suspect he only resorted to when working on nonsense he thought was beneath him. Too bad, that.

But hey, Technicolor! 

Jackson did another medical drama, WHITE CORRIDORS, which I’m curious about, and I also want to see his early documentary/quasi-documentary stuff (some with Humphrey Jennings).

Gas-s-s-s

What is Peter Van Eyck doing under your floorboards? See THE SNORKEL, the film that dares to ask that question.

Directed by former David Lean cameraman (GREAT EXPECTATIONS) Guy Green for Hammer films, this is a bit like one of their psychological thrillers — think of TASTE OF FEAR or PARANOIAC — but it’s less of a knock-off of LES DIABOLIQUES. Intriguingly, it does something fresh with the locked-room mystery, starting with a complete revelation of how the trick is played, and following a suspenseful investigation, like an episode of Columbo, in which the dramatic tension is generated largely by the question of how the killer will be caught.

The first stand-out scene is the very beginning. No credits. Van Eyck moves around an opulent apartment, taping up the doors and windows, turning on the gas lamps, and then attaching the titular snorkel to his bulging Dutch head and hiding in a trap door. Rubber tubes connect his snorkel to the fresh air via a drainage pipe. Meanwhile his wife suffocates in the locked room, an apparent suicide.

Titles.

And then a great suspense sequence as the body is discovered, the police called, an investigation made, and Van Eyck’s stepdaughter (Mandy Miller) informed of her mother’s death. All with Van Eyck still snug beneath the boards, sweating and listening. I was seriously thinking that the entire movie would play out like this, with characters coming and going, trying to figure out the motiveless suicide, while PVE awaits his chance to escape.

But the movie dispenses with this promising idea, then recovers smartly with enough intrigue and decent work from the players. The story is by Antonio Margheriti, interestingly enough — the worlds of British Hammer horror and Italian gialli rarely intersected — and the script is by the reliably leaden Jimmy Sangster, assisted by Peter Myers. So the dialogue isn’t too smart, but the structure is nice.

A word on Mandy Miller. This is the last feature film of a great child actress. She has a brief, memorable scene in THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT, and a leading role in MANDY, both for Ealing Studios and Alexander Mackendrick. Ealing films are revered in Britain but only seem to gradually becoming known outside. Mackendrick’s THE LADYKILLERS was arguably boosted by the Coen brothers’ wretched remake. Criterion have released Robert Hamer’s KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS, which is also a favourite film of Bertrand Tavernier. So the situation seems to be changing.

Filmmaker Greg Pak once asked me what else Alexander Mackendrick had done, since he admired SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS so much. Well, THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT features arguably Alec Guinness’s best performance, and is a devastatingly wicked satire on all forms of human political thought, enlivened by Mackendrick’s shooting style, heavily influenced by Fritz Lang’s German work. MANDY is an emotional pile-driver about a deaf-mute girl which is striking for its time (1952) in the way it challenges patriarchal attitudes — quite a radical thing for a boy’s club like Ealing. Seven-year-old Miller is astonishing in it.

She’s a bit less natural as a teen in THE SNORKEL, but so is everybody (co-star Betta St John is another former child actor, having popped up in LYDIA), and this kind of genre material, and Sangster’s dialogue, are not made for total realism. But she’s charming and has a few brilliant moments, as when she torments her mother’s murderer on the beach by singing an extemporised song about snorkeling (she’s just figured out his secret).

The other smashing scene is when Miller returns to the death villa to look for clues at night, a little visual concerto of shadows and gliding tracking shots, point-of-views and reactions. It’s beautifully shot by Hammer regular Jack Asher, more often confined to slightly lurid Eastmancolor imagery — ex-cinematographer Green no doubt had strong ideas about what he wanted visually.

Overall an enjoyable yarn, and a cute insight into the days when snorkels were pretty new stuff, and therefore subject to suspicion — could this innocent-seeming tube-and-mask arrangement be an instrument of death?