GENRE: Fiction/Contemporary Horror
PURCHASE: link
BOOK GRADE: A
FILM GRADE: B
FROM PUBLISHER: Karen Spages is brutally murdered seconds before her first communion. Is her twelve year-old sister Alice responsible?
I love you. I don't want to kill you. I can't help myself.
SPOILERS BELOW
The film leaves out the entire beginning of the novel. In it we see more of how emotionally immature Alice is and see more of her disturbing behavior. Karen (played by Brooke Shields in the film) is outside thinking about how she's about to receive her First Communion. She takes a pink ball out of her raincoat and bounces it. Someone is watching her from two stories above (I think she's outside of her apartment building) and they're wearing a "garishly tinted mask of a woman's smiling face." Right after, at home, Alice is thinking about how she thinks her mother (played by Linda Miller, Jackie Gleason's daughter, in the film) likes Karen more. Alice hates and despises Karen for "stealing" their father's love away. Their father, who is divorced from their mother, has sent Karen a porcelain doll as a communion gift that has a rotating head with three faces on it. We see it in the film later. Alice is jealous of that. She walked into Karen's room and slapped a doll out of its carriage "then dug her fingers into its hair and savagely smashed its head against the side of the carriage. Unsatisfied, she pressed the pillow over the doll's beaming expression." She was getting ready to set it on fire with matches but was startled by her mother calling for her.
Alice is on her way to play at an abandoned factory and realizes she's forgotten her creepy clear mask. She stops by a candy store and buys another one just like the one she already has, for forty-nine cents. It's a Jackie Kennedy mask. The film just shows her looking through the window at them.
The part where Alice, in an act of jealousy from Karen getting a gold cross from Father Tom, pulls a doily containing glass figurines off the table and claims it was an accident, wasn't in the film.
The part where Alice drops a pitcher of milk when she's in the kitchen with her aunt Annie, in the book when Catherine goes into the kitchen to see what's happening, Annie has Alice by the shoulders and is shaking her, but that doesn't happen in the film.
The part where obese landlord Alphonso is pressing Alice up against the wall/door with his body in the novel, in the film he's got her backed up to the wall/door and is trying to kiss her.
The part near the end when Mrs. Tredoni's in the confession booth, the film leaves out the part where she masturbates as she's talking to Father Tom, "Listening to his vibrant voice, she understood she was the bride of Christ in his body and blood. Her soul was illuminated by a burst of holy light as her fingers stoked the inferno steaming her flesh." That part of the scene was pointless and I'm glad it was left out of the film.
The novel goes into Alice's parents, Catherine and Dominic's, background. They met and began dating in high school. Dominic went off to college and they married during his junior year and Alice was born before he graduated. Their pastor, Tom Hale, is their friend from high school. Catherine is thirty-five. Dominic owns an advertising firm.
The novel goes into the background of Mrs. Tredoni. She's from Italy and her family was killed off during WWII. She was raped by both American and German soldiers. She came to New Jersey, where the book and novel are set, and took refuge in a church. She became the mistress of Father Giovani. She became his secretary. She got pregnant with a daughter by him, Michaela, who died from a blood clot to the brain at age eight. When she got pregnant, he got her a fake marriage license to a fictional Ralph Tredoni, sent her to Washington, D.C., then after the baby was born, got her a fake death certificate for Ralph and brought her back to New Jersey to act as a widowed mother of an infant, where she resumed being his lover and secretary at the rectory.
In the novel, Dominic and Alphonso are stabbed in the crotch as well as other places but the crotch parts are left out of the film.
Film is set in 1961 but no date is given in the book. In the book Alice, at age twelve, is only one year older than Karen but Wikipedia says in the film Karen's only nine years old. I'm wondering if they changed it because Brooke Shields, who was really ten while filming, looks younger than eleven.
MY THOUGHTS: I like the novel better than the film because of all the extra information on the characters. I especially like the added content about Alice's behavior. The film didn't capture anything more than just major hostility with her. I don't like who the killer is nor the reason for the murders and attempted murder.
This was filmed during the summer of 1975 and released about 1.5 years later, in November 1976 under the name Communion, then rereleased in the USA in 1977 under the title Alice Sweet Alice, which is when the novel was released under the original movie title. I have no idea why the novel came out then and not in 1976 and why it didn't have the movie's title of Alice Sweet Alice.
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