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DVD Tuesday: 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T: Weirdest Movie Ever!
The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T courtesy Sony Pictures
DVD Tuesday: A children's movie to give adults nightmares — dare to enter the mindscape of Dr. Suess via The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T!
I'm not a huge fan of most children's films and never have been, but The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953) is a mind-boggler, and as regular FlickChick readers know, I love having my mind boggled.
Regular suburban kid Bartholomew "Bart" Collins (Tommy Rettig, star of TV's Lassie… OK, co-star) hates taking piano lessons and really hates his paino teacher, the tyrannical Dr. Terwilliker (Hans Conried). He'd rather be playing baseball or hanging out with Mr. Zabladowski (Peter Lind Hayes), the plumber who always seems to fixing something in the Collins house. But Bart's widowed mother, Heloise (Mary Healy), believes piano lessons build character, so there's no getting out of them.
Hence Tommy's extended nightmare — which lasts most of the movie — about being trapped in the bizarre world of the Terwilliker Institute, where Dr. T has built a monstrous piano that seats 500 unhappy, imprisoned children. They arrive in yellow school buses surrounded by armed guards, their suitcases are searched for contraband toys and sports equipment — and Mrs. Collins is Terwilliker's stern right hand and wife-to-be.
The Terwilliker Institute set looks like De Chirico paintings, all oddly angled corridors, ladders to nowhere and hard, menacing shadows, surrounded by barbed wire and lit with sky-scraping searchlights. Terwilliker's enforcers include an odd pair of roller-skating gentlemen who share one single long, gray beard, and the dungeon is full of unfortunates who dared to play instruments other than the piano. (They even have a little dance number designed by noted choreographer Eugene Loring.)
Don't even get me started on the little blue beanies topped by yellow hands the kids are forced to wear — creepy. Short of the short, Salvador Dali-designed nightmare in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, Dr. T probably the most authentically surrealistic vision in the history of Hollywood films.
And that's before you get to the Freudian nightmare of Mrs. Collins — a vision in stern, rhinestone glasses and super-glam, blue-sequined evening gown — surrendering to the sinister allure of Dr. T, soon to be — sob! — Bart's new dad.
And let's talk about Dr. Terwilliker: Hans Conried acted in dozens of films, but is best known as a voice artist — you've heard him in everything from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show to the 1970 animated TV version oh Dr. Suess' Horton Hears a Who. His insinuating, oddly accented voice is peculiar in that Vincent Price way, and Conried puts a cheerfully unnerving spin on Suess' signature wordplay, especially in the number that celebrates dressing up for the big recital. His sartorial musings include "undulating undies with the marabou frills," a "purple nylon girdle with the orange blossom buds" and "peek-a-boo blouse with the lovely interlining made of Chesapeake mouse" — none of which, fortunately, he actually wears. He just ends up looking like a deranged drum major.
The whole film is weird, perverse, wildly imaginative and a hit at parties, especially if drinking is involved.
Things to Consider:
Do you think the recent live-action Dr. Suess movies How the Grinch Stole Christmas or The Cat in the Hat do justice to his unique style?
How about the animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas?
What are the pitfalls of adapting Dr. Suess' very particular vision?
People often use the word "surreal" to mean weird, but real surreality is hard to evoke on film, and it's rare. What examples can you think of?
Send your movie questions to FlickChick.
Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.
Previously in DVD Tuesday:
Shoot 'Em Up
Freeway
A Mighty Wind
It's a Wonderful Life
Waitress
Laura
Cop
All About Eve
Severance
Sweet Smell of Success
Daughters of Darkness
The Crazies
Blade Runner
Zodiac
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
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Jan 29, 2008 3:26 PM
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Another great review Maitland! 
I have not seen this movie in many, many years but surreal is the best way to explain this movie. The first time I saw it I was unsettled and I couldn't figure out why; perhaps it was all the Freudian subtext?
I'm not a film critic, but I'd have to say there are 3 films that I find surreal: Fellini's Satyricon, Kubrick's 2001, and Lynch's Eraserhead. I agree that surreal is often confused with weird, and while each of the 3 movies I list could be called weird, for me, they evoked an odd, unsettling experience that resulted in a massive headache (always a sign that my senses are on overload).
2001 is a great example; the ending always leaves me speechless and feeling like I just had an out of body experience. And do I really need to say anything about Eraserhead? The chicken is just beyond weird and pushes this movie into surreal for me!
Smike
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Jan 29, 2008 10:48 PM
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Smike -- always good to hear from you!
I agree 100% about all three films, for totally different reasons.
For me, 2001 is an attempt to parse rationally notions that defy the boundaries of rational minds: How do you contain the idea of the vastness of space or a machine that can think and feel?
Eraserhead always reminds me of what a friend said as we left Blue Velvet, which was that it was like two hours of doing bad drugs with people you don't like.
And Satyricon always calls to mind the phrase "the past is a foreign country," which exists simultaneously in my mind with the notion that people have always been the same. That's why we can still read Greek plays or the works of William Shakespeare and understand exactly why those characters do and think and feel what they do.
'Tis a puzzlement... except that it's not -- that's the appeal of surrealism. It bypasses the rational for the atavistic.
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Jan 29, 2008 11:22 PM
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I'm afraid this movie is a smidge to obscure for me, I've never even heard of it. Perhaps it isn't so strange, since I was raised on Astrid Lindgren (you know, Pippi Longstocking) and Roald Dahl, not Dr. Seuss,
When it comes to surrealist movies, all movies I can think off falls into two categories, the first one being movies about dreams. Eternal Sunshine, Mulholland Drive and Wild Strawberries all contain extended dream-sequences which can fairly be described as surrealist, as can most movies with dream-sequences. It is not so strange, perhaps, seeing as a regular old dreaming is pretty surrealist itself.
(by the way, a little off-topic note: I love Mulholland Drive with a burning passion. I just rewatched it just a few days ago, for something like the seventh or eighth time, and it moves me to tears every time. If you put a gun to my head and force me to name my favorite movie, nine times out of ten it'll be Mulholland Drive)
The second category is kids-movies, and especially cartoons. I mean, sure, Hayao Miyazaki is surrealist as hell, but I would say most Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons are even more so. The best of them is certainly Duck Amuck, which besides being hilarious and generally the best cartoon of all time is also a touch existential. Good ol' Donald Duck also got his surrealism on, in shorts like Clown of The Jungle, where he is tortured by a jungle-bird that defies reality in every way possible (my favorite bit is when the bird paints a door on a rock, runs through it, Donald crashes into it, becomes stunned and the bird poses him for a picture with water coming out of the camera. No wonder poor Donald goes batty at the end). This cartoon is often shown edited down, by the way, since the ending where the bird pleads for its life and Donald starts shooting at it with a machine-gun, laughing like a Bond-villain, was deemed a little too violent for the youngest viewers.
Obviously, most cartoons are like this, I just picked two of my favorites.
(I should point out that I'm not trying to make some sort of taxonomy of film here, I'm not saying that all surrealist movies are either about dreams or for kids. I'm just saying that the movies I can think of, in this moment, happen to be about those things.)
(I also just realized that I tend to overuse parentheses. Must learn to avoid that)
I don't know why this technique works so well on kids, but I'd hazard a guess that they have a much easier time to suspend disbelief than adults, and also that they get much more immersed in the story, almost to a point where plot or reality doesn't matter. I remember seeing Howl's Moving Castle with a young niece of mine, and while I liked the movie very much, I gave up fairly soon on following along with the plot. My niece, on the other hand, all of five years old, was completely engrossed by it and was following every twist and turn. Afterwards, she couldn't really recall any of the salient details, but in the moment she wasn't confused at all. She was just along for the ride.
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Jan 30, 2008 12:29 AM
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Best as I can grok surrealism I find it in Pasolini's films as much as anywhere. No surprise that he and Fellini were associated. And Maitland, I could not agree with you more about Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. No insult to you Oskar (honest) but I think David Lynch is the emptiest vessel in Hollywood. Well, maybe second to Henry Jaglom.
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Jan 30, 2008 2:32 AM
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DaMess: Oh no, I'm not offended, not at all. But you should know that now you are my mortal enemy! I shall make it my mission in life to destroy you!
Honestly speaking, I don't really like Eraserhead, Lost Highway is terrible and I have no strong feelings either way for The Straight Story. Blue Velvet and The Elephant Man great movies (although I can understand why people dislike the former), but the problem is that in my mind they completely fade in comparison to Mulholland Drive. That movie is so monumentally fantastic, so mindblowingly awesomely spectacular that nothing he had ever done previously can ever really measure up. Not in my mind, anyway. I can talk for hours about that movie, but that's not really what this blog post is about, so I shall quietly back away from praising it now
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Jan 30, 2008 3:17 AM
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Thanks Oskar. You've given me reason to activate my OO status.
But, as Steve Allen used to say, all seriousnesss aside, my experiences with Lynch films kept me from Mulholland Drive. It goes way back to VHS days when I rented Wild At Heart for what I soon realized was a second time. I had disliked so much the first time I guess my brain had wiped the memory clean. I tried to watch Eraserhead because of the buzz but geez it was tedious and unwatchable. I suppose I should give Elephant Man a chance one of these days but overall Lynch's films make me feel like a prisoner. I am baffled by people's affection for his work.
It's not unlike the way I feel when confronted with the popularity of David Hasselhoff, Regis Philbin, reality TV or Britney Spears I am just so not in that world that it's hard to believe that it even exists. BUT I'm always willing to have my horizons expanded so if you can give me some Lynch tips that will help me spot what I may be missing then I'll give it a shot.
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Jan 30, 2008 4:55 AM
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I actually love Eraserhead, though that's in part because I saw it when it first played midnight shows in New York and it was -- here's that term again -- mind boggling. Not so wild for Blue Velvet, but I think the bad drugs/people you don't like idea works for both: They're deeply dark excursions into a really creepy mindset.
And though I know this sounds like the world's biggest cliche, when I interviewed David Lynch -- for Blue Velvet, at the last automat in New York -- he was sweet as sweet can be. No darkness visible.
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Jan 30, 2008 10:03 AM
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So Oskar, can I ask, if someone puts a gun to your head and forces you to name your favorite movie, what would you name the other one time out of 10? And why would you tell this oddly curious gun-toter that your favorite is Mulholland Drive only 90% of the time? Just curious. 
I have to say that surrealism is not my bag, and I've never even heard of The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. I don't know, I just think that the subconscious mind and dreams are such complex things that any attempt to put them in a 2-dimensional medium like film or art doesn't do it justice. Dreams are weird (whether "weird" means surreal or just bizarre), and they don't make sense when you try to explain them in detail to someone else, but somehow they make some kind of sense to you. Truthfully, I find people telling me about their dreams boring. Surreal films don't make sense to me and maybe that's the point, but I find them boring.
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Jan 30, 2008 10:41 AM
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That movie is so monumentally fantastic, so mindblowingly awesomely spectacular that nothing he had ever done previously can ever really measure up. Not in my mind, anyway. I can talk for hours about that movie,
Then maybe you can explain it to me, cause I didn't get it. It was weird.
I've never heard of 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, but it does sound weird. Maybe even too much for me to watch.
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Jan 30, 2008 1:50 PM
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OMG!!!  ROTFLMAO!!! Maitland, you SO nailed the experience of Eraserhead - brilliant!!!
Oskar, I am now desperate to see Clown of the Jungle - how did I miss this?!? I'm glad you brought up animation - because I would have to add Akira to surreal. To paraphrase Maitland, I felt like I was on an acid trip without having dropped acid seeing that movie in the theater.
And Leah, don't give up on The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T just yet; it's by far better than any of the current Dr. Seuss schlock out there, and sometimes surreal is beautiful.
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Jan 30, 2008 10:57 PM
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I saw The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T when I was young, and it made a lasting impression on me. I wonder what I would think of it if I were to see it today at my "advanced" age!
Although Hans Conried was great in many things and did wonderful voices and narrations (such as Horton Hears a Who, as you mentioned), I believe it was Edward Everett Horton who narrated the Fractured Fairy Tales. Hans Conried was heard on the The Bullwinkle Show as the voice of Snidely Whiplash. I suppose it is possible that they both narrated Fractured Fairy Tales at one time or another, but I can find no confirmation that Hans Conried ever did that narration. They both had great voices for narrations and cartoon characters.
By the way, when I watched Tommy Rettig and Lassie, the show was called Jeff's Collie. I thought the name of the show wasn't changed to Lassie until after the cast changes to Jon Provost and June Lockhart. However, I could be mistaken.
Thanks for the memories!
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Jan 31, 2008 12:35 AM
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Well you're on your own with Eraserhead Maitland. It made me feel like I having to pee in church but can't get up until the sermon's over...As for Lynch, I'm perfectly willing to accept what a nice guy he is. In fact he has said thiings in interviews that I agree with strongly (one is his assessment of Philadelphia) and actually made me inclined to like him which, in turn, makes me want to like his movies. But I have been burned so many times I'm unwilling to give him a shot anymore.
And I wish there was a positive connection between niceness and talent. I always liked Ike Turner's early music but wouldn't want to have hung out with him. At the same time Michael Bolton could find a cure for every disease known to humankind and be a living saint but I wouldn't listen to his music even if threatened with waterboarding!
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Jan 31, 2008 2:34 AM
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