Change Your Image
CyranoR
Reviews
The Little Minister (1934)
A sweet, little-known film
Its tender sentimentality is out of fashion today, of course, and has been for decades. But that's the point -- and that, for me, is the beauty of this film: it's positively luminous with an innocence and understated nobility that put our postmodern "edginess" to shame. I have to wonder if we've lost the capacity to experience and appreciate such rarefied sweetness of feeling. A sadly neglected film, with one of Katharine Hepburn's incomparable early performances -- radiant, charmingly quirky, and more emotionally expressive than a dozen Garbos. Sad, too, that co-star Robert Beal never crashed into the upper ranks of stardom; I saw tremendous potential in that performance.
Alice in Wonderland (1933)
A Paramount all-star classic
Whatever happened to this wonderfully odd version of Lewis Carroll's classic? Unavailable on video (as of this writing) and not seen on television by this reviewer since the 1960s, it appears to have vanished without a trace. If so, yet another early Hollywood treasure has been sadly lost.
Remembered through the haze of several intervening decades, this film comes closer than any other version to capturing the look of Tenniel's drawings and the quirkiness of Carroll's off-center whimsy. Norman Z. MacLeod (the best of the early Marx Brothers directors) had a field day with his all-star ensemble cast of Paramount's finest -- including, among others, W.C. Fields, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Edna May Oliver, Jack Oakie, and underrated ingenue Charlotte Henry as Alice.
The film deftly weaves the two halves of the story ("Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass") into a coherent whole. True to the sensibility of many early Paramount comedies, this "Alice" mingles giddy humor with a touch of lyricism -- never cloying or saccharine, just endearingly sweet.
Let's hope this virtually forgotten classic resurfaces on video or on one of the cable movie stations. It's too joyous and important a film to be consigned to the dustbin.