Movies - Other

Dreamchild [1985] Coral Brown

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• Rate this torrent +  |  -

Torrent info

Torrent Files List

Torrent description

http://bayimg.com/LalejaAcl

Dreamchild (1985)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089052/

FULLSCREEN

Dreamchild is a 1985 drama film produced by Verity Lambert, directed by Gavin Millar and written by Dennis Potter. It stars Coral Browne, Ian Holm, Peter Gallagher, Nicola Cowper and Amelia Shankley and is a fictionalized account of Alice Liddell, the child who inspired Lewis Carroll\'s famous Alice in Wonderland stories. The story is told from the point of view of the elderly Alice (now Mrs Hargreaves) as she travels to the United States from England to receive an honorary degree from Columbia University celebrating the centenary of Lewis Carroll\'s birth.


Coral Browne ... Alice Hargreaves
Ian Holm ... Reverend Charles L. Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll)
Peter Gallagher ... Jack Dolan
Caris Corfman ... Sally Mackeson
Nicola Cowper ... Lucy
Jane Asher ... Mrs. Liddell
Amelia Shankley ... Little Alice
Imogen Boorman ... Lorina
Emma King ... Edith
Rupert Wainwright ... Hargreaves
Roger Ashton-Griffiths ... Mr. Duckworth
James Wilby ... Baker
Shane Rimmer ... Mr. Marl
Peter Whitman ... Radio Producer
Ken Campbell ... Radio Sound Effects Man & voice: March Hare

The film evolves from the factual to the hallucinatory as Alice revisits her memories of the Reverend Charles Dodgson (Holm), in Victorian-era Oxford to her immediate present in the unruly wonderland of Depression-era New York.

Accompanied by a shy young orphan named Lucy (Cowper), old Alice must navigate her way through the modern world of tabloid journalism and commercial exploitation and come to peace with her conflicted childhood with the whimsical and repressed Oxford don whose deep affection for her produced one of the most beloved classics of children\'s literature.


Makeup and creature effects for the film were created by Jim Henson\'s Creature Shop. Six complexly detailed creatures, rather malign, as they are in the book, were made. The Gryphon and the sorrowful Mock Turtle live among ledges of rock on a darkling seashore. The March Hare has broken yellowish teeth and soiled looking whiskers and he seems to be chewing even while he\'s speaking. He, the Mad Hatter, and the Dormouse, and the Caterpillar too, \' converse in the same matter of fact, egalitarian manner that the visiting Alice does.\'

Puppet movement and choreography was developed by American actress and choreographer Cheryl McFadden (later Dr. Beverly Crusher on the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation) who worked with Henson on Labyrinth and The Muppets Take Manhattan. Due to a problem with work visas, McFadden was unable to receive full credit in the film.

The film\'s score was composed by Stanley Myers.

The Chinese costume sequence in the film depicting Dodgson taking Alice\'s portrait at Oxford is based on actual photographs he took of her and her sisters. Dodgson, an early pioneer of photography, was considered one of the world\'s first portrait photographers.

Dennis Potter\'s obsession with pop entertainment of the 1930s is obvious in the film. \"I Only Have Eyes for You\" is sung at a tea dance at the Waldorf Astoria and Mrs. Hargreaves has a scene at a radio station that serves no great purpose except to allow viewers to hear a crooner\'s rendition of \"Confessin\'\".

The Depression-era setting of the film is in 1932, when Alice turned 80, two years before she died in 1934.


The film was reviewed favourably by the eminent critic Pauline Kael who praised the performances. \"Nothing I\'ve seen Coral Browne do onscreen had prepared me for this performance. In the past she seemed too bullying a presence; she was too stiffly theatrical for the camera and her voice was a blaster. Here, as Mrs. Hargreaves, she has the capacity for wonder of the Alice of the stories, and when she\'s overtaken by frailty her voice is querulous and fading.\" \"The bright, poised , subtly flirty Alice at ten [is] played by Amelia Shankley, whose conversations with her sisters have an angelic precision. The sound of these imperious little-princess voices blended in idle chitchat is plangent, evocative. It makes you happy and makes you respond to the happiness of the Reverend Mr. Dodgson as he loiters outside the little girls windows, eavesdropping.\" \"Ian Holm, who plays Dodgson, has to achieve almost all his effects passively, by registering the man\'s acute and agonizing self-consciousness and his furtive reactions to what goes on around him; it\'s all there in Holm\'s performance.\"

related torrents

comments (0)