GREAT BRITAIN: The Mad Cocktail Party

“‘No room! No room!” the Hatter and the March Hare cried out “when they saw Alice coming. “There’s plenty of room,” said Alice indignantly, and she sat down. . . .

In a well-meant campaign to boost their own fast-growing film industry, many of London’s critics have long been inhospitable to Hollywood exports. Last week, even before he had arrived in London, they told Walt Disney there was no room. “I am getting quite sick,” wrote the Daily Herald’s Chanticleer, “of all the publicity about Disney and his team of whimsical technicians, sailing here on the Queen Elizabeth….” When Snow White’s creator finally arrived, Britain’s press was waiting at a lavish combination cocktail party and press conference at the Savoy, paid for ($400) by RKO.

“It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,” said the March Hare. “Your hair wants cutting” said the Hatter.

Stiffly, British critics sat in a semicircle and told Disney what was wrong with his movies. “I hope,” sniffed a middle-aged lady in a black hat, “that Alice in your future production will speak with a British accent.” “I am going to try to find someone with what I would call a good international accent,” answered Disney, pacifically. “I just could not persuade poor Mr. Disney,” wrote weedy Jympson Harmon in the next day’s Evening News, “. . . that we will not stand for our beloved Alice becoming an international character. . . . Let him make a separate sound track for the film he sends us.”

“I’m glad they’ve begun asking riddles” said Alice; “I believe I can guess that.” “Do you mean you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare. “Exactly so” said Alice. “Then you should say what you mean.”

In the Daily Express, Critic John Grime was indignant because (said Grime) Disney had announced that he was going to Eire to hunt leprechauns. “… A greater piece of hocus-pocus publicity was never foisted on a realistic world,” wrote Grime. Disney had carefully explained that he was going to Eire to look for story ideas for his forthcoming The Little People.

“This is typical,” wrote one friendly critic, Norah Alexander of the Daily Mail, “of the flatfooted, unimaginative British approach. . . . I was sorry Mr. Disney should get such a frozen shoulder on his arrival. . . .”

“At any rate” said Alice, “I’ll never go there again. . . . It’s the stupidest tea party I ever was at in all my life.”

Disney went off to Eire where he made a remark with no trace of English accent: “If people would think more of fairies they would forget the atom bomb.”