About a year and a half ago, I wrote a column lamenting the very small number of video cassettes available to those of us who like historical documentaries. That situation hasn’t improved much since, but 1 have found some consolation in the fact that video stores do carry a good many fiction films with historical settings, many of which never got the theatrical attention they deserved. Here are several rentable, small-scale films you may have missed and which especially interested me because of the way they portrayed the past:

This lovely, little-noted British film manages to evoke equally convincingly not one but two historical periods. It concerns an eighty-year-old Englishwoman of considerable hauteur, Mrs. Alice Hargreaves, who is the little Alice all grown up to whom Lewis Carroll told his stories. In 1932 she comes to America for the first time to accept an honorary degree from Columbia University on the occasion of Carroll’s centenary. The scene shifts effortlessly back and forth between her pretty, pastoral Victorian childhood and the gritty bustle of Depression-era New York, and in and out as well of Mrs. Hargreaves’s troubled dreams. She has never fully understood the nature of her long-ago relationship with Carroll—a.k.a. the Reverend Charles Dodgson, played here with eerie power by the veteran character actor Ian Holm—and has done her best to shut it from her mind, believing, because her mother had burned all her letters from Dodgson, that there must somehow have been something furtive and wicked in it. Events conspire to make her finally see what happened whole, and to make her peace with the past. Potentially distasteful subjects are dealt with here in perfect taste—the heedless cruelty of children, the lonely, stuttering clergyman’s own misunderstood feelings toward his young charges—and, as Mrs. Hargreaves, the Australian actress Coral Browne is brilliant. In this beautifully wrought film even a cast of immense and singularly disturbing puppets that portray characters from the Alice books as they might appear in your worst nightmare—built by Jim Henson, the Muppet man—somehow seem to fit right in.

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