Blu-ray Review: Alfred Sole’s Alice, Sweet Alice on Arrow Video

Arrow Video has made a commendable effort to ensure that Alice, Sweet Alice finds its rightful place in the horror film canon.

Alice, Sweet AliceAlfred Sole’s Alice, Sweet Alice conjures a stifling atmosphere, one in which strained infrastructures, especially an ideologically divided Catholic Church, are unable to help diseased minds. The film opens with a young girl, Karen (Brooke Shields), preparing for her first communion. Karen’s mother, Catherine (Linda Miller), and well-meaning preacher (Rudolph Willrich) are so excited for Karen that they overlook the deranged behavior of the girl’s sister, Alice (Paula E. Sheppard). After starting to wear a yellow raincoat (a nod to Don’t Look Now) and a translucent mask that suggests a smiling albino face decked out in garish make-up, Alice bullies Karen, stealing her clothes and toys and leading her to a warehouse and briefly locking her behind a sliding door. Throughout these episodes, Sole focuses on crosses, religious statues, and a creepy Janus-faced doll, emphasizing the violence festering under a righteous community’s nose, as well as a split between tolerance, especially of more modern relationships, and wrath and judgment in the key of the Old Testament.

As other critics have claimed, the term “slasher film” is inadequate to describe Alice, Sweet Alice, which shows murders to spring from a patchwork of motivations and tensions. Karen is strangled at her communion by a diminutive person in a yellow raincoat and translucent mask—a scene that Sole stages with an intimate yet offhand quality that’s authentically shocking. One can hear the sounds of the communion, a theoretical bastion of safety, as the life is squeezed out of the girl, as well as feel the ease with which the killer commits this trespass. The church is rarely filmed in the sort of master shots that might inspire feelings of grandeur; rather, Sole favors cramped medium shots and close-ups that induce claustrophobia. The characters always appear to be cramped together in the church, on top of one another, and their homes are composed of similarly small passageways. One of the most vivid of Alice, Sweet Alice’s settings is a pea-green angular stairway that sometimes suggests “found” German expressionism, with neighbors who always seem to be within earshot.

Alice is naturally suspected of Karen’s murder, though Catherine, in denial about the hostile relationship between her daughters, remains oblivious to Alice’s predatory tendencies. This willed ignorance is partially understood by Sole to be a reaction to Catherine’s sister, Annie (Jane Lowry), an uptight shrew who treats Alice with contempt, and who resents that Catherine went against the church and had Alice out of wedlock with her now ex-husband, Dom (Niles McMaster), who returns to town to investigate the mystery of Karen’s death.

Advertisement

Sole allows these reverberations, particularly the parallel bitterness existing between Catherine and Annie and Karen and Alice, both of which have been intensified by religion, to gradually assert themselves into our minds. Yet Alice, Sweet Alice isn’t exactly an indictment of the church, as Catherine and Dom’s splintered relationship is also portrayed as a gateway to chaos, primarily for Catherine’s distracted nature and unwillingness to face the truth of her family. For instance, a pathologist (Lillian Roth) virtually begs Catherine to keep Alice in therapy to little avail, especially after Alice claims the killer, after another attack, to be Karen.

Sole paints a rich and febrile portrait, then, of how society enables dysfunction on multiple fronts, from the domestic to the religious to the psychiatric. (The police are shown to be restorers of order, though they serve that function almost inadvertently.) The filmmaker also invests his narrative with references to classic horror films, most notably Psycho, though his own direction lacks Alfred Hitchcock’s polish, which in this case is a blessing. In the film’s best sequences, particularly the moments following Karen’s murder, Sole allows for tonal inconsistencies that reflect the true shock of violence. In such instances, Alice, Sweet Alice turns momentarily shrill, with actors screeching their lines almost directly to the camera—a device that expresses pain and refutes the fashions with which many horror directors rush through the grief process haphazardly in order to move the narrative along.

In other moments, though, Sole’s directorial control is magisterial. Annie’s near murder, when she’s stabbed on the stairway, is framed in a prismatic image, with a mirror reflecting the assault back on itself and suggesting, once again, the intense insularity of this world. (Other such images show characters nearly encased by religious totems.) Later, as Dom is taunted by Karen’s killer, Sole fashions a close-up of a face wearing the mask, looking at Dom from a higher vantage point. Sole lingers on the eyes behind the mask, which are gleaming with fury and, more disturbingly, a kind of grace that might come from acting on and expunging one’s suppressed emotions. In this scene, the mask becomes a symbol for the failures of all the infrastructures under this remarkable film’s purview, as this object also fails to efface insanity.

Advertisement

Image/Sound

Arrow Video’s new 2K restoration of Alice, Sweet Alice is positively gorgeous. The autumnal colors that dominate the film’s palette have a rich earthy presence, while other hues—such as the red of spilled blood and the green of the hideous stairwell—pop luridly off the screen. Most importantly, every color here has a highly differentiated presence that stands in stark contrast to muddier prior presentations of the film, which should hopefully increase awareness of the film’s artistry. Meanwhile, grain textures are healthy and appealing, though image clarity is also superb, which is to say that the film looks vibrant yet evocatively lived-in at the same time. The monaural soundtrack is also dynamic, rendering a wide spectrum of diegetic sounds—running, stabbing, door slamming—with dimension and body, while also affording Stephen Lawrence’s eerily airy score the prominence it deserves.

Extras

A new commentary with writer Richard Harland Smith offers an engaging deep dive into the symbolism of Alice, Sweet Alice, discussing with particular acuity the film’s understanding of the hidden worlds that children foster, and how these worlds parallel those of the adults. (One example is Alice’s suggestively satanic version of a confession booth.) Smith also provides considerable biographical information on the film’s participants, which is complemented by the archive commentary by director Alfred Sole and editor M. Edward Salier. Sole generously cites the contributions of his collaborators, especially Salier, whom he says “saved him” by helping to fashion suspenseful rhythms from his footage.

Meanwhile, several new interviews—with composer Stephen Lawrence, actor Niles McMaster, Sole, and others—offer updated discussions of the film, which is also known as Communion, as well as alternate views of its making and its storied release pattern. Another new interview, with horror filmmaker Dante Tomaselli, is a more personal account, as Tomaselli is Sole’s younger cousin, who remembers soliciting the older man for advice on his own scripts, which now include an in-the-works remake of Alice, Sweet Alice. Other goodies include deleted scenes, a tour of film’s memorable shooting locations, TV spots, the trailer, alternate opening titles, and even an alternate cut of the film, called Holy Terror, which features different footage. Rounding out a very extensive package is a miniature version of the film’s poster, and a booklet featuring an essay by Michael Blyth that contextualizes Alice, Sweet Alice within the giallo, the blossoming American slasher film, and exorcism narratives.

Advertisement

Overall

With this beautiful restoration, Arrow Video has made a commendable effort to ensuring that Alice, Sweet Alice finds its rightful place in the horror film canon.

Score: 
 Cast: Paula E. Sheppard, Linda Miller, Mildred Clinton, Niles McMaster, Jane Lowry, Rudolph Willrich, Michael Hardstark, Alphonso DeNoble, Garry Allen, Louisa Horton, Tom Signorelli, Brooke Shields  Director: Alfred Sole  Screenwriter: Rosemary Ritvo, Alfred Sole  Distributor: Arrow Video  Running Time: 107 min  Rating: R  Year: 1976  Release Date: August 6, 2019  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.