“Alice in Wonderland”
20th Century-Fox, 1976
Starring: Kristine DeBell, Larry Gelman, Bradford Armdexter
Director: Bud Townsend
The plot: This X-rated musical comedy opens when Alice (DeBell), a timid librarian, rebuffs her boyfriend’s more intimate advances. She falls asleep reading Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” and dreams she is in Carroll’s fantasy, loosely following the original plot with the familiar characters, albeit with a highly eroticized bent.
Why it’s good: As chronicled in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 film, “Boogie Nights,” the “Golden Age” of X-rated films in the ’70s was the rich cousin to the poor, mindless, straight-to-video relation that passes for erotica today. Films like “The Devil in Miss Jones,” “Behind the Green Door,” and “Nightdreams” boasted actual plots, competent dialogue, credible acting, and excellent production values. The people who made these films were filmmakers, even if the movies were considered porn. Cute-as-a-button Kristine DeBell carries the day here, doing a fine job singing the opening number, “Growing Up” (assuming this is, in fact, her voice), the best song in a polished, if predictable, score by Bucky Searles. DeBell’s engaging performance is complemented by some recognizable mainstream television actors such as Larry Gelman (as the White Rabbit), and the film maintains a clever and light, even whimsical touch, from start to finish. It’s another example of the sensibility of a more permissive and innocent, but less cynical age.
Should I watch it? Carroll’s two classic books featuring Alice’s adventures, have, over the last century, inspired some darker interpretations, even before Carroll’s own personal obsessions came to light. Various adaptations include live-action films, cartoons, ballets, stop-action animation, and guerrilla theater; a pornographic musical was probably inevitable. The innocence and Victorian prissiness of Alice, as well as the subtextual fears of the unfamiliar, a changing body, growing up, and the absurdity of adulthood, all make for fertile Freudian psycho-sexual rumination. This movie does not do that, but it’s certainly no surprise that children’s tales like “Alice” and “Little Red Riding Hood” (adapted in 1984’s “The Company of Wolves”) lend themselves readily to the erotic. (Bruno Bettelheim’s book “The Uses of Enchantment” is a landmark work on this very subject.) Producer Bill Osco had made mainstream adult films, as well as 1974’s Flash Gordon parody “Flesh Gordon,” before undertaking “Alice.” The film was released by General National Enterprises with an X rating. Its popularity came to the attention of 20th Century-Fox, which cut three hardcore minutes, snagged an R rating, and released it to the soft-core and drive-in markets, where it was a success — to date, the film has grossed over $90 million. DeBell was a Playboy cover girl before this, then went on to appear with Bill Murray in “Meatballs” and countless sitcoms. Director Bud Townsend also appears, as do composer Searles, actor Bradford Armdexter (as Humpty Dumpty), and screenwriter B. Anthony Fredericks, a true auteur. The Subversive Cinema DVD contains both the cut and uncut versions.