That movie, 1974\u2019s Alice in the Cities,<\/em> proved to be a breakthrough for Wenders, codifying the dreamy, sentimental existentialism that became his signature. Vogler stars as Phillip Winter \u2013 a surname the actor would have in several Wenders films \u2013 a depressed journalist with writer\u2019s block, lost in America. Winter has been assigned to write an essay explaining the U.S. to German readers and he\u2019s hopelessly adrift, taking Polaroids of desolate landscapes and driving around aimlessly, listening to rock n\u2019 roll music on the radio. He gets himself fired and must return home. Eventually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Into all this ennui drops Alice, a nine-year-old played by Rottl\u00e4nder in one of the movies\u2019 great child performances. The little girl is visiting New York City with her flighty single mother (Lisa Kreuzer), currently inattentive in the midst of a bad breakup. There\u2019s some difficulty getting tickets back to Germany due to an airline worker\u2019s strike, so they all have to settle for flying to Amsterdam instead. Somehow, a friendly gesture from Winter turns into a babysitting gig, one that gets extended indefinitely when he\u2019s looking through binoculars on the Empire State Building\u2019s observation deck and spies Alice\u2019s mom checking out of their hotel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With all the garment-rending hysteria over child endangerment today \u2013 little girls in peril have become a fetish item for certain segments of the population \u2013 it seems far-fetched to the point of science fiction to imagine a woman entrusting her kid to a friendly stranger she\u2019s just met, assuming that this kind fellow will get Alice to Amsterdam in one piece while she sticks around and sorts stuff out with her boyfriend in NYC. But perhaps things were different 51 years ago, or maybe Alice just has a terrible mom. Either way, there\u2019s no movie if you don\u2019t accept the premise, so roll with it and be rewarded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nothing about the trip goes according to plan. After a bevy of planes, trains, and automobiles, they finally get back home, where Winter is supposed to deliver Alice to her grandmother\u2019s house. Except she doesn\u2019t know where it is. Alice also doesn\u2019t know her grandmother\u2019s first name \u2013 she\u2019s a kid, she calls her \u201cGrandma\u201d \u2013 so they wind up driving around all over Germany trying to find a house that matches an old picture Alice has in her wallet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Winter is told earlier in the film by a former lover that he\u2019s \u201cbecome a stranger to himself,\u201d and this miserable mope knows nothing about entertaining nine-year-olds. The great fun of Alice in the Cities<\/em> is how he engages with the child as if she were a peer, gradually snapping out of his depression in her company. Alice isn\u2019t a cute screenwriter\u2019s creation who is going to teach him important life lessons, but rather an interesting little person he comes to enjoy spending time with. At one point Winter tries to do the responsible thing, leaving her with the police for them to handle it. But Alice gives these clueless cops the slip pretty quickly. By then she\u2019d rather be with her buddy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The old crank softening up under the influence of an adorable moppet is one of the movies\u2019 oldest tropes, and it\u2019s one that almost always works. (As someone who spends an enormous amount of his free time being bossed around by his nieces, I am especially susceptible.) But Wenders shoots this old Hollywood canard with artful, European restraint. Shot in gorgeous 16mm black-and-white by the genius cinematographer Robby Mueller \u2014 one of the best to ever do it \u2014 it\u2019s a visual study of vast landscapes and bodies in motion, never getting anywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Except they\u2019re getting somewhere emotionally. Winter and Alice grow closer, imperceptibly at first, but by the end their bond has become enormously moving. None of this feels predetermined or orchestrated for the camera, perhaps because the film was mostly improvised, with non-professional actors filling out the bit roles. Wenders claims that he misplaced his copy of the script early in the shoot and never bothered getting another one. Instead he\u2019d just tell his actors the gist of their scenes and let them feel their own ways through them. That\u2019s why Rottl\u00e4nder\u2019s Alice never comes off like a typical movie kid; she\u2019s behaving like a real one would.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The director can be glimpsed at a diner jukebox early in the film, playing the Count Five\u2019s \u201cPsychotic Reaction.” It\u2019s impossible to count all the jukeboxes, diners, highways, old muscle cars, and rock n\u2019 roll in Wenders\u2019 films, which seem to run on an outsider\u2019s dreams of an idealized Americana. At a low point, Winter attempts to cheer himself up by going to a Chuck Berry concert. The clumsily intercut footage is borrowed from a D.A. Pennebaker doc and doesn\u2019t match Mueller\u2019s lighting at all, but that doesn\u2019t matter because Wenders simply had to get Chuck Berry singing \u201cMemphis, Tennessee” in his film. Understandable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Winter is the filmmaker\u2019s stand-in, trying in vain to explain what he loves and fruitlessly piling up Polaroid photo after Polaroid photo of these sparse landscapes and open roads, throwing them aside and complaining that the camera can never capture life the way you see it. It\u2019s only after his trip with Alice that he starts taking pictures with people in them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Alice in the Cities” is streaming on the Criterion Channel<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/alice-still-1024x614.jpg\")
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