The film opens in the United States, where a German magazine writer named Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler, the star of all three films in Wenders’s loose “Road Trilogy,” which also includes 1975’s Wrong Move and 1976’s Kings of the Road) has spent three weeks driving through the country, ostensibly to write a story about the American landscape. Suffering from writer’s block and an increasing sense of ennui brought on by the sameness of what he sees everywhere he goes (cheap motels, television commercials, endless stretches of interchangeable highway), he has been unable to write a word, and all he has for his frustrated editor (Ernest Boehm) is a stack of Polaroids he has been obsessively taking, but without providing any emotional or artistic catharsis (“It just never shows what you’ve seen,” he says, a lament that contrasts with Wenders’s profound ability to capture the essence of both landscapes and cityscapes with minimal fuss).

Determined to finish the piece, Phillip decides to return to West Germany, but discovers at the airport that all flights into the country have been delayed by a strike. While he is there he meets a young mother, Lisa (Lisa Kreuzer), and her precocious 9-year-old daughter Alice (Yella Rottländer), who are in the same situation. Having just broken up with a man, Lisa is trying to get back to Munich, but she doesn’t speak any English and needs Philip’s help. They end up becoming friends and traveling together, but something is amiss when Lisa disappears on a side trip, leaving Alice in Phillip’s care with a note telling him to meet her in Amsterdam. He dutifully follows that plan, but when they arrive in Amsterdam, there is no sign of Lisa and, this being the pre-cell phone, pre-Internet era, he has literally no idea what to do with her. Alice tells him that she knows where her grandmother lives, so armed with a photograph of the grandmother’s house and little else, they set off.

Thus, the majority of the film follow Philip and Alice as they wander through the Ruhr region of Germany, fruitlessly trying to find her grandmother’s house. Philip has little interest in the girl outside of unloading her on someone else, and she is hardly a picture of preadolescent innocence (although she has an immediately lovable cherub face and huge, gleaming eyes). She is often surly and irritable, and she can’t always be trusted to tell the truth. In other words, she is a realistic 9-year-old from an unstable home, rather than a sugar-coated movie approximation of a child. Yella Rottländer gives a beautifully naturalistic performance, generating sympathy and affection without any cute affectations or mannerisms. As the adult, Philip is technically taking care of Alice, but their relationship flows both ways, as each has something to offer the other. Philip, numbed by his alienating time searching the U.S. for something meaningful, finds in Alice not some simplistic notion of “life,” but rather a deep sense of genuine connection, the kind that reminds him that there is more to the world than neon signs and endless TV commercials. Alice similarly benefits from the connection they forge during their time together, particularly because Philip doesn’t treat her like a child. Rather than becoming surrogate father-daughter, they become friends—unlikely friends, but friends nevertheless.

Wenders, who both wrote and directed, allows their chemistry to develop naturally, often times in scenes that don’t have any grand narrative significance, but are also not overly self-conscious detours into narrative abstraction, as so many European art films were fond of doing at the time to prove their anti-Hollywood bona fides (he also manages to coax out an ending that is both ambiguous and somehow reassuring; not quite “happy,” but not arty-despondent either). Unlike the subsequent films in the Road Trilogy, in Alice Wenders nails a particularly difficult-to-hit sweet spot between the conventional pleasures of the road movie and its focus on relationships forged while traversing the open country and the more oblique gratification of unforced naturalism. Shot in grainy 16mm by Wenders’s longtime cinematographer Robby Müller, Alice in the Cities is a beautiful paean to the simple joys of human connection, even between and among those who would seem to have nothing in common.

Alice in the Cities Criterion Collection Blu-Ray
Alice in the Cities is available exclusively as a part of the three-disc “Wim Wenders: The Road Trilogy” boxset, which also includes Wrong Move (1975) and Kings of the Road (1976).
Aspect Ratio	1.66:1
Audio	German/English/Dutch Linear PCM 1.0 monaural
Subtitles	English
Supplements	Alice in the Cities Audio commentary by director Wim Wenders and actors Rüdiger Vogler and Yella Rottländer New interviews with Vogler, Rottländer, and actor Lisa Kreuzer Outtakes from the film “Restoring Time,” a 2015 short about the restoration work done by the Wim Wenders Foundation Same Player Shoots Again (1967) and Silver City Revisited (1968), two newly restored early short films by Wenders Wrong Move Audio commentary by director Wim Wenders New interview with Wenders, directed and conducted by filmmaker Michael Almereyda New interviews with actors Rüdiger Vogler and Lisa Kreuzer Super 8 footage from the film’s production Kings of the Road Audio commentary by director Wim Wenders Outtakes from the film New interviews with actors Rüdiger Vogler, Hanns Zischler, and Lisa Kreuzer
Distributor	The Criterion Collection
SRP	$99.95
Release Date	May 31, 2016
VIDEO & AUDIO
All three films in Criterion’s “Wim Wenders: The Road Trilogy” boxset feature new 4K transfers that were commissioned by the Wim Wenders Foundation with help from the German Federal Film Board and supervised by Wenders himself. As none of the films were given significant theatrical distribution in the U.S. during the 1970s and have never been released on DVD in Region 1, this is a major moment for American fans of Wenders’s cinema. Each of the transfers was sourced from the best available elements. Alice in the Cities was transferred from the original 16mm negative, which had sustained serious damage and deterioration from years of printing to the point that some sequences had to be replaced with a 35mm duplicate negative that was made in 1988 (although I could never tell which was which); Wrong Move and Kings of the Road were both transferred from the original 35mm negatives. All three films were given extensive digital restoration and color correction in 2K, which has them looking probably better than they have since they first premiered in the ’70s. Alice in the Cities looks quite a bit different from the other two films, mainly because it was shot on 16mm, so it has a grainier, more textured look. Wrong Move is the only color film in the set, and the transfer nicely replicates the relatively subdued hues of Robby Müller’s cinematography. Kings of the Road is probably the best looking of the three; its 35mm black-and-white cinematography is beautifully transferred with sharp detail and excellent contrast. It is also the darkest film in the set, with several scenes shot in near darkness (all three films used primarily source and natural lighting). The soundtrack for each film was transferred from the 17.5 mm magnetic tracks and were digitally restored. Wrong Move and Kings of the Road were both remixed into 5.1-channel surround while Alice was kept in its original monaural mix. For the surround mixes, the primary beneficiary is the music, which is given substantial heft and spaciousness in the multi-channel mix. All of them sound quite good, especially given the rough, low-fi nature of the productions and the heavy use of source sound.
SUPPLEMENTS
This boxset has been a long time coming and has been heavily anticipated for years, and I don’t think any Wenders fans will be anything short of elated at the supplements Criterion has put together. Each film has a dedicated audio commentary. Alice in the Cities’ German-language commentary features director Wim Wenders and actors Rüdiger Vogler and Yella Rottländer; Wrong Move and Kings of the Road both feature a solo track by Wenders, with the former being in English and the latter being in German. The Alice in the Cities disc also includes a half-hour featurette of interviews with Vogler, Rottländer, and actor Lisa Kreuzer; 16 minutes of silent outtakes from the film; “Restoring Time,” a short documentary about the restoration work done by the Wim Wenders Foundation; and two of Wenders’s early 16mm short films, Same Player Shoots Again (1967) and Silver City Revisited (1968), both of which have been recently restored. The Wrong Move Blu-ray includes a new interview with Wenders that was conducted by filmmaker Michael Almereyda and runs for more than an hour, as well as new video interviews with Vogler and Kreuzer (22 min.) and four minutes of silent Super 8 footage from the film’s production. Finally, the Kings of the Road disc includes 21 minutes of silent outtakes from the film and a half-hour featurette that includes interviews with Vogler, Kreuzer, and actor Hanns Zischler.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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