Alice in Filmland

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 466, 28 May 1948, Page 13

Alice in Filmland

Train (of ITMA), two of the BBC’s most popular broadcasters, recently took an unusual part in the making of a film of Lewis Carroll’s children’s classic Alice in Wonderland. Neither of them was seen at all, but this is something to which radio stars are accustomed. Human actors, including Stephen Murray as Carroll, Pamela Brown as Queen Victoria, and David Reed as the Prince Consort, will be seen in the Prologue, set in Oxford where Carroll was a don, and in the Epilogue. All the action in Wonderland will be performed by puppets, the sole exception being Alice herself, played by a young British star, Carol Marsh, who is eighteen years old. The film, a Franco-American concern, in which the Union General Cinematographique of France and Lou Bunnin Productions of America are collaborating, is being made in two versions, French and. English. The English director is Dallas Bower, who was assistant director in Laurence Olivier’s film Henry V and was well known in the BBC’s television staff before the war. The film is being shot’ in France, where all the puppets were made, but a very important part, the recording of the puppets’ voices for the English version, was recently completed in London. Some were the voices of characters from the Prologue, whom Carroll is said to have had in mind when writing Alice; others were specially engaged, and here Joyce Grenfell and Jack Train came into their own. Train, a master of mimicry, speaks over a dozen dialects with ease and can make his voice high or low, harsh or sweet, with equal facility. To test all these capabilities to the full he was} required to impersonate the Caterpillar, the Dodo, the Mouse, the Mad Hatter, the Executioner and the Knave of Hearts. Joyce Grenfell, brilliant revue artist and author too, was the Dormouse, the Eaglet and the Duchess who sang a very odd song to her baby, while two other well-known broadcasters, Felix Aylmer and Ernest Milton, were the Cheshire Cat and the White Rabbit. J GRENFELL and Jack