It seems hard to believe now, but in 1953, Dr. Seuss’s picture books were just a side gig. Like most commercial illustrators, he spent the first half of his career as a kind of Renaissance man, bouncing between advertising, men’s humor magazines, political cartoons, novelty records, and movies. That last one was an especially intriguing footnote in the man’s career, earning him Oscars for best documentary short and feature and putting him in touch with all-stars like Frank Capra and the crew of Looney Tunes.
Knowing all that, maybe it makes more sense that Dr. Seuss made a live-action movie that few people have ever heard of. But the fact is, nothing about The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. makes much sense. When I watched it while visiting my family, my dad and sister both walked in on it and walked out with “What the fuck” written all over their faces. High praise, as far as I’m concerned.
In his essential biography, The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing but the Seuss, Charles Cohen quotes “Dream Stuff” from the movie’s soundtrack as a metaphor for its existence:
Dream stuff, dream stuff,
Ever-fleeting, ever-shifting.
Yet we could keep it from drifting
If we’d only dare.
Grasp that world you’ve been to,
Carry it right into bright blue day.
Cohen says, and I agree, that Dr. T was the most successful attempt to bring the “dream stuff” of Seuss’s line art into the “bright blue day” of the third dimension. Of course, given that the competition mostly consists of Jim Carrey and Mike Meyers in their horrifying fursuits, that’s not saying much, but Dr. T is an astonishing translation of Seuss’s imagination onto the screen. He’s only credited with “story and conception,” but it’s hard to imagine most of the movie’s visual elements coming from anywhere else, and Cohen confirms that Seuss’s script was covered in sketches of how it would look onscreen.
Cohen also notes a few of the many Seussian trademarks that made it into the film — the ever-present disembodied hands of the Happy Finger Institute, with their big floppy gloves like the Cat in the Hat’s, are all over Seuss’s earlier work, and they’d become the central image of his later book Hunches in Bunches. You may recognize Judson and Whitney, the conjoined twins joined at the beard, from Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?, Oh the Things You Can Think! and plenty of others, including this sadly evergreen political cartoon. Other motifs are so unmistakably Seussian there’s no use trying to list every time he returned to them, like the titular Dr. Terwilliker’s pom-pom adorned slippers or the wonderfully lopsided, Arabesque architecture, beautifully realized at larger-than-life size, loomed over by gargoyles that couldn’t have come from any other artist’s pen. (I think one of them might be a cousin to Horton Hears a Who’s Vlad Vladikoff.) And if there’s no specific precedent for Zabladowski the plumber’s wonderfully loopy, overcomplicated sink tree, it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Seuss coming up with it.
Seuss wrote all the songs, and his trademark rhyming nonsense is all over them:
I want my leg-of-mutton sleeves and in addition to those,
I want my cutie chamois booties with the leopard skin bows.
I want my pink-brocaded bodice with the fluffy, fuzzy ruffs
And my gorgeous bright blue bloomers with the monkey feather cuffs.
But even the prose dialogue is Seuss all over, with its deadpan absurdity and playful warping of midcentury and invention of his own slang: Dr. Terwilliker’s piano lessons are “a racket,” and he keeps the heroic Bart’s mother in a “lock-me-tight.” He finds room for other forms of wordplay, like when Dr. Terwilliker pulls his minibar out of a wonderfully Seussian gadget hidden in that hideous carpet and offers Zabladowski, “schnapps, sake, slivovitz, Schwepps, tequila, turtle tears, or just plain cocoa.”
Of course, there’s a fine line between artistic trademarks and flat-out self-plagiarism, and Seuss crosses it at least once by naming his hero Bartholomew Collins — just a few letters away from Bartholomew Cubbins, of Bartholomew and the Oobleck and The 500 Hats of…(which is just a decimal off from The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., come to think of it).
Either way, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T’s translation of Dr. Seuss’s “dream stuff” to the Columbia soundstage is its greatest strength — and it also explains how it’s been so thoroughly memory-holed. When I reviewed Oh the Thinks You Can Think!, I noted Seuss had less darkness in him than most creators of children’s stories. Dr. T proves that this has as much to do with the simplicity of his art as anything. Seeing these off-kilter buildings and machines coexist with real people turns Seuss’s dream stuff nightmarish. That time I mentioned wasn’t the first time I saw Dr. T. I had watched it back when I was in the target audience, and I enjoyed it far less. It unsettled me in ways I couldn’t quite understand.
I think I do now. For one thing, Dr. T is one of the few Seuss projects to actually kill anyone, and since they’re played by real people, it feels much too real — and as a kid, Dr. Terwilliker quoting a Shakespeare play I hadn’t yet read didn’t do much to lighten the mood. Neither did the weird anti-logic of how it’s done — by cutting their beard with hedge clippers. The same goes for the slapstick torture in Dr. T’s dungeons. It’s not so easy to laugh at when it seems to really be happening.
There’s an oppressive nightmare logic to the scattershot plot, which mostly consists of the worryingly young Bart getting chased around long hallways by vaguely evil forces. The movie doesn’t give you any chance to get your bearings either. The opening scene is one of the strangest, the credits playing across a foggy, abstract stage of balls balanced on cones before green-jumpsuited men with multicolored nets come in to chase Bart.
The color palette is subtly unsettling in its own way, especially the sickly grey-and-salmon of Mrs. Collins’ chambers and the velvet-draped, beige-gold and maroon of Dr. Terwilliker’s. (Now, I can appreciate that shag-carpetted monstrosity as the monument to proudly tacky taste it is. I don’t know if John Waters has ever mentioned Dr. T. as an influence, but I like to think it was his comic book origin story.) There’s a persistent asymmetry that sets off a kind of subconscious imbalance, in the crooked stairways and doorways, the drunkenly listing towers, and especially in Jean Louis’s wonderful costumes. And mainly especially Mrs. Collins’ work clothes, cocktail dress on one side, business suit on the other, and navy-blue sequins all over.
But most of all, Seuss and director Roy Rowland struggle with the elusiveness of that ever-fleeting dream stuff. What works on the page works differently on the screen, and they frequently lap childlike whimsy into flat-out inexplicability. Joining two brothers joined at the beard is brilliant — putting them on roller skates is a couple dozen steps too far. And when the film suddenly switches to half-speed for an unremarkable scene of Bart hopping across rooftops or Zabladowski and Terwilliker have a fussily choreographed hypnotic duel I can only describe as how people who’ve never seen interpretive dance imagine interpretive dance, I have to agree with my dad and sister. Faced with that, what reaction is there except confusion?
And while Seuss is generally in top form, his song “Get-Together Weather” dials the silliness up past where it’s funny and becomes merely inane, not helped at all by its apparently random insertion into the plot:
What marvelous weather for cooing and billing,
For yodeling, warbling, gargling, trilling!
What marvelous weather for dally dom dilling!
What marvelous weather, hey hey what a day!
And the reality of human bodies inhabiting this dream space injects it with a queasy sexuality. (How much partial nudity is in this movie? The answer may surprise you!) Seuss and crew seem to have realized this, which might explain the framing sequence where the main story of Bart being enslaved on Dr. Terwilliker’s 500-boy (each with ten fingers, hence the title) piano is just a dream he has when he dozes off during his lessons. Well, that and baldfaced Wizard of Oz ripoff. They even pull the “and you were there!” trick, which only adds to the surrealism since even the “real world” is populated by people with names like Terwilliker and Zabladowski.
So I don’t know if I can call The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. a great movie, or even a good one. But it’s endlessly fascinating. By bringing Seuss’s stories and drawings from the page to “bright blue day,” Dr. T. reminds us with a shock just how surreal and dangerous the beloved author really is. More accurately, it’s pure nonsense. I’m not talking about the usual meaning of absence of logic. I’m talking abot the meaning Seuss’s forebears Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear intended, a kind of alternative logic, the kind we believe in before we’re old enough to know better.
You can see it when Bart robs Dr. Terwilliker’s safe but leaves a hand-scribbled IOU to make it square. Or in the climax when Terwilliker traps Bart and Mr. Zabladowski in a tiny cage made of pipes bending every which way. Zabladowski matter-of-factly explains that his can of Air Fix (“It fixes air!”) works by “a simple scientific principle….I raise the cork from my bottle, a tiny, invisible hand reaches up from the bottle — it pounces, smell’s in the bottle, nobody smells it.” Bart suggests that they could “just pour the smell-catching gookum out and put some music-catching machinery in.”That “machinery” is the guard’s hearing aid and whatever junk Bart has in his pockets, including but not limited to bubble gum, buttons, a yo-yo, and a whistle. And it works! The only catch is that this unknown substance might be “atomic,” which is defined exactly as vaguely as it would be in a Cold War kid’s mind.
And then there’s the dance of the musical prisoners, every bit as unspokenly homoerotic as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ famous “Ain’t There Anybody Here for Love” the same year. The piano-worshipping Terwilliker has imprisoned all other musicians beneath his castle, where Bart finds them. What’s whimsical on the page once again turns confusing onscreen, as the near-nude prisoners in their shredded tuxedoes parade around green body paint applied as unevenly as it was on the invaders from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. One quartet plays xylophone with huge pastel mittens and fey, unquestionably gay-coded body language. And the strange Seussian instruments (of music? torture? both?) add an air of S&M to the whole sequence.
But as far as queer-coded camp goes, you could hardly hope to do better than Hans Conried as Dr. Terwilliker. A prolific character actor at the time, Conried is remembered today mostly for his work as cartoon villains Snidely Whiplash and Captain Hook. That leads to another unnerving disconnect between simplified cartoon and filmed reality when you see just how unnaturally he has to twist his lip to get his voice to do that.
As for camp, how else do you describe a character who devotes a whole song to getting dressed, including such femmy articles as a “purple nylon girdle with the orange blossom buds” and a “peekaboo blousе/with the lovely interlining madе of Chesapeake mouse.” The Simpsons crew have cited “Do-Mi-Do Duds” as an inspiration behind Mr. Burns’ classic “See My Vest” sequence. And it’s hard not to see a little Burns in Terwilliker when he tosses shovelfuls of cash from a tasseled velvet wheelbarrow into his safe or complains about “idiotic cock-eyed flumdummery.”
But what really sticks with me about Dr. T is the sheer dream/nightmare power of its imagery. Cohen chalks up the movie’s incoherence to studio interference (didn’t mean to put that rhyme there, but since I’m writing about Seuss, I’ll take it), especially in softening the plotline of Dr. Terwilliker’s hypnotic imprisonment of Bart’s mom. I couldn’t disagree more — the moment she fails to recognize her son is twice as shocking because it comes out of nowhere. And then there’s the climax, as Bart’s Music Fix throws the soundtrack out of sync, actors talking with no sound coming out but the bubbling of the bottle and their last words sped up and repeated maddeningly. With Terwilliker defeated and all his students free to bang out “Chopsticks” off-key (I love the touch of the one sad little kid who actually wanted to perform). As Bart fails to notice his Music Fix going atomic behind him, the joyous anarchy turns horribly dissonant, and like any good nightmare, it ends in an abrupt burst of violence.
I could go on for hours. The Evolution of the Arm compared Seuss’s unsettlingly sparse layout for the Jiboo section of Oh, the Thinks to the great Surrealist Giorgio de Chirco. You could say the same for this shot of Bart caught by a searchlight at the top of a ladder to nowhere, with some of Sacha Schenider’s Lighthouse-inspiring Hypnosis for flavor.
There’s the uncanny valley effect of the dungeon elevator operator, his glistening half-nude body, his inhumanly long fingers, and his stiff, perfectly round hood. Bart speeding down a firepole through rainbow-colored rooms. Running past what appears to be an avant-garde video installation of two gloves in darkness, banging tunelessly on a piano in an endless loop. The pop of red or green in the dull gray pipes Bart is always crawling out of. But I won’t waste your time. All I’ll say is see it. You still might not believe it.