by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our next Hans Conried vehicle, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr.
T, is a bit more famous, and certainly is a
better movie — it was produced by Stanley Kramer’s independent company for
Columbia in 1953 (Columbia signed Kramer after the explosive success of his early
United Artists films Champion and
Home of the Brave in 1949, but
the dismal box-office records of this and other flops he made at Columbia
caused them to cut him loose … just before he made the “psychological Western” High
Noon at United Artists, and it was another
blockbuster hit!), directed by Roy Rowland and written by a man who was born
Theodor Seuss Geisel but achieved worldwide fame as children’s author “Dr.
Seuss.” I was a bit surprised that his credit billed him as “Dr. Seuss,” since
in 1953 I’d assumed he was still using the name “Ted Geisel,” and it’s listed
as the only live-action film made of anything by Dr. Seuss during his (or
Geisel’s) lifetime. It was apparently inspired by a piano teacher from hell
Geisel had as a kid, who rapped him across the knuckles with a pencil when he
mis-fingered a passage. In the film the kid is Bartholomew “Bart” Collins
(Tommy Rettig, a favored child actor in the early 1950’s), whose mom Heloise
(Mary Healy) is a widow doing her best to raise him as a single parent. The one
thing she’s done to him he doesn’t like is to make him study piano under the
imperious teacher Dr. Conrad Terwilliker (Hans Conried), author of the “Happy
Fingers Method,” which basically teaches kids to play piano by having them
learn a song of stupefying banality called “Ten Happy Fingers” which they’re
forced to sing as they play. (The songs for the film — there are enough of them
it qualifies as a musical — were written by Marlene Dietrich’s favorite
songwriter Frederick Hollander, with lyrics by Seuss/Geisel — Marlene Dietrich
and Dr. Seuss, one degree of separation!) In the opening scene we see Bart
Collins dancing among objects that look like alien plants, only just before the
opening credits he wakes up and we see he’s only been dreaming after having falling asleep during a boring practice
session. Terwilliker turns on him and viciously screams that the next day Bart
and all Terwilliker’s other pupils are going to give a grand concert, and he’s
not going to let the whole affair be ruined by one stupid kid who doesn’t want
to practice. The next time Bart has to play the piano he falls asleep again and
has an extended dream which forms the bulk of the picture; in it, Dr.
Terwilliger runs a prison camp at which boys are taken against their will and
forced to give up any objects they might actually have fun with and practice
for the upcoming concert at which all 500 of Dr. T.’s pupils will perform that
horrible song at once on a huge piano whose keyboard seemingly extends to
infinity. (One wonders if Dr. Seuss got the idea for this from the huge piano
art director Herman Rosse built for the 1930 film King of Jazz, in which nine pianists are shown plunking away and
supposedly playing “Rhapsody in Blue.”)
In the prison he sees his mom,
hypnotized to be Dr. T.’s second-in-command and also his fiancée, though Bart —
proving that they didn’t break the mold after they made Deanna Durbin — wants
his next father to be August Zabladowski (Peter Lind Hayes, top-billed), the
honest if somewhat naïve plumber who in the real-life framing sequence was
repairing a sink in the Collins home and sighing with unrequited love for Mrs.
Collins. In the dream sequence he’s at the Terwilliker compound installing 500
sinks, one for each of the pupils scheduled to play at T.’s super-concert, only
what he doesn’t know — but we and Bart both do — is that Dr. T. plans to
torture and execute him after the job is done. T. is also playing the nice but
dumb plumber not in U.S. currency but in “pastoolas,” which couldn’t help but remind
me of “doublezoons,” the fictitious currency surrealist writer Boris Vian
invented for his novel Mood Indigo,
though Vian carefully avoided including any information that might give us any
idea of how much a doublezoon was worth in any actually existing currency,
while Seuss explains that August’s fee of 20,000 pastoolas per sink is only
$20. (“Find me a better job, and I’ll take it,” he ruefully tells Bart.) The
plot is full of hair’s-breath escapes as Bart tries to escape the prison camp,
which is essentially The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari meets The Wizard of Oz (there’s a lot in common between Margaret Hamilton’s
Wicked Witch and Conried’s Dr. T., and he has a goon squad much like the
Winkies in the 1939 Oz movie),
including leaping off the top of a tall ladder to nowhere and surviving because
he turns his T-shirt into a parachute (though later when he’s stuck on an
equally free-hanging ledge he doesn’t think of doing the same trick again).
There’s also a marvelous ballet sequence involving all musical instruments that
aren’t pianos — earlier, when Bart had complained to Dr. T. in the framing
sequence that “maybe the piano isn’t my instrument,” he thundered, “What other
instrument is there?” (I was
hoping for a sequence something like the one in the 1939 film Non-Stop
New York, in which a child-prodigy
violinist runs away from his parents and his manager and turns up hanging out
with jazz musicians and carrying a saxophone. That would have been a bit dated
in 1953, though five years later we could have expected the kid to be an
aspiring rock-’n’-roller picking up an electric guitar!) Instead there’s a
vision of hell in which the other instruments and their players are doomed to
dance eternally; one rather kvetchy
imdb.com “Goofs” commentator sniffed, “Throughout the whole of the instrumental
scene, with the various performers, there are so many continuity, revealing and
a/v mismatch goofs that it would be impossible to record them all” — to which I
responded, “It’s supposed to be a DREAM, you moron!”
The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T had something in common with The Twonky besides Hans Conried being in both; its first
previews went wretchedly, and Columbia forced Kramer and director Roy Rowland
(whose best films are quite a bit different from this — the MGM noirs
Scene of the Crime, 1949, and Rogue
Cop, 1954) to reshoot much of it, cutting
out all the bits of social commentary (including a reference to gas chambers in
Dr. T.’s torture dungeon, obviously inspired by Dr. Seuss’s fierce opposition
to the Nazis well before most Americans knew or cared what horrible things they
were doing to Germany) and replacing a lot of the songs. That only made the
film an even bigger money-loser, though it’s acquired something of a cult in
recent years because it’s the only attempt to do a live-action film of anything by Dr. Seuss during his lifetime. At that, I
wondered at times during the film if it might have worked better as an animated
feature, with only the real-world framing sequences in live action; animation
would probably have softened the rather edgy material and put the film more
into what we think of as the world of Dr. Seuss. The 5,000 Fingers of
Dr. T. has enough of a cult reputation that
punk-rock singer Jello Biafra once named it as his all-time favorite movie
(maybe he responded to Bart Collins’ rebellion against what Dr. T. and Bart’s
own mom considered “good music”), and it’s certainly dazzling visually, while
its plot lapses and surrealistic elements can be attributed to it depicting a
dream. Also it’s interesting to note that Stanley Kramer originally wanted
Danny Kaye to play Dr. T. (he’d have been good but wouldn’t have been able to
tap the almost otherworldly evil of Conried’s performance) and Bing Crosby as
August (he’d have sung better than Peter Lind Hayes, but he was too old for the
part and wouldn’t have been as good for it as a personality), and that Peter
Lind Hayes, who had got his start in movies in Warner Bros. shorts in the
1930’s opposite his real-life mother, Grace Hayes, playing his mother on screen, this time appeared as the
wanna-be boyfriend of Mary Healy, his real-life wife at the time.
