Dreamchild

Alice Hargreaves, eighty years old, sails to New York to receive an honorary degree from Columbia University marking the centenary of Lewis Carroll's birth. Nineteen-thirties America greets her with reporters and radio spots as though she were the mascot of a children's book. The further back she looks, the closer she comes to naming something she has never named: how unsettling the grown man's attachment to her as a child actually was. Dennis Potter's screenplay does not soften it, and Ian Holm plays Carroll with his stammer and his shame both in view. The Wonderland creatures were built by Jim Henson's workshop and designed to menace rather than charm; it was the first film the shop worked on outside the Henson company. Coral Browne carries the older Alice.