Visual mediums don't correlate to each other on one-to-one bases. Put more simply: Illustration and, say, the movies, operate on different principles, afford their artists different liberties, and express the same sensations in different ways. Take an image that communicates quirky whimsy in a children's book and translate it to the screen. The results might end up reading as odd, alien, and downright unsettling.
See? Like that! If your parents read to you from the library of Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss to you and I) then even sans context, this little weirdo, decked out in sludge-green baggy pajamas and wearing a spotlight on his noggin, will likely feel familiar, but not the way he would if we saw him in a book. To look at him, you'd guess his primary employment is chasing after children in their recurring nightmares. He doesn't cut the same figure we expect from the characters that populate Geisel's work, so fancifully designed that they can only be described in anapestic tetrameter.
Meanwhile, ol' Spotlight Head appears to be camouflaged for recon missions. He's probably pretty good at that, too, or would be if not for the giant lamp on his head. Happily, the lamp helps him carry out his secondary assignment: catching kids on the lam in the dead of night. That's what he's doing in the screenshot above: seeking out young Bart Collins (Tommy Rettig), the child protagonist of 1953's The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, a musical fantasy picture directed by Roy Rowland and co-written by Allan Scott … and the good Dr. Seuss himself.
The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T met with such a baffled reception from viewers and critics alike that Geisel never bothered writing another screenplay in his lifetime. No one really knew what the film was, or what to do with it, or how to engage with it — and 52 years after the fact, sympathy is due to them.
There aren't many movies like The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, from either then or from now, because there are no authors like Geisel or institutions like Dr. Seuss, whose imagination runs so deep that appreciating his writing means wondering if what we're reading is actually a travelogue. As surreal as his worlds are, they're presented with such frank confidence and clarity that, after a while, they start to take root in our minds as genuine.
None of this is germane to poor Bart, though. The movie's only just begun and he's already hoofing it around what looks like a black box theater, decked out in a silly hat to match his pursuers'.
It's easy to imagine Bart as a drawing from one of Geisel's countless absurdist books, and it's easy to sense that imagined drawing's droll, eccentric spirit. But that spirit is absent from this shot of Rettig, which is not to say that he's unspirited; just that a cap with a hand jutting out from its crown, the phrase "happy fingers" stitched over its front panel, is a queasy accessory to see on a flesh-and-blood boy. Adding to the effect is Bart's efforts at outmaneuvering Spotlight Head, joined by a squad of other viridian men equipped with rainbow-hued landing nets.
The consolation to this introductory sequence, kicking off The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T with neither ceremony nor context, is that it's a dream. The men close in on Bart; Bart crouches down in the fetal position; the film's cinematographer, Frank Planer, blurs up the scene, then comes back to focus on Bart as he wakes up from his nap, rubbing his eyes over the piano in his living room. What a relief! Spotlight Head and his basil-toned gang don't exist! Bart is safe, or safe-ish, because you do not want to conk out in the middle of a piano lesson with Dr. Terwilliker (Hans Conried, famous as the voice of Captain Hook in Disney's Peter Pan).
Here is planted the seed of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T's narrative: Bart hates learning the piano. It's possible he actually just hates learning it from Terwilliker, a haughty, imperious perfectionist who seems like he would be better suited conducting dictatorships than piano lessons for kids.
"I want you to practice and practice and practice until you are perfect," Terwilliker snaps at Bart, because if modern child psychology teaches us anything, it's that children follow orders to the letter when they're barked at, and they also strive for perfection in everything that they do.
Fortunately, Terwilliker has other places to be, other lessons to attend, other youths to traumatize, and leaves Bart with the only adults in The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T deserving of his time, attention, and admiration: his mother Heloise (Mary Healy) and August Zabladowski (Peter Lind Hayes), their friendly neighborhood plumber. August is a constitutional working stiff, and apparently unfamiliar with the proverb "little pitchers have big ears." As far as he's concerned, Terwilliker is a "racketeer," a sentiment Bart parrots to Heloise, who's none too happy with August's carefree and colorful language.
"It's not an easy thing to bring up a boy without a father," Heloise tells him, half a lament and half a scolding. Here, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T sets the structure for what's to come: Bart has a discipline problem, because once again, since neither Heloise nor August seem to realize it, he's a preadolescent and thus has the attention span of a squirrel with the impulse control of a Border Collie. But what do adults know? Sometimes, it takes a squirrelly Border Collie to save the day.
In Bart's case, it's really "save the daydream." No sooner than he's woken up from one snooze, he's off to another, where Terwilliker holds court over him in a huge atrium defined by what looks like an equally huge bartop winding around its walls. It's actually the world's largest two-tiered piano, outfitted with enough stools to seat Terwilliker's 500 other students.
No one else is present in the scene apart from him and Bart, though. The others arrive tomorrow morning. For now, Terwilliker is savoring "the eve of my greatest triumph," as he proclaims to Bart. Tomorrow, for the grand opening of Terwilliker's Happy Fingers Institute, Bart, the Dr.'s "number one boy" (as if the "unwholesome child endangerment" vibe the movie cultivates isn't pronounced enough for you), and those 500 students will play "the most beautiful piece ever written," according to Terwilliker: "Ten Happy Fingers," his original composition, naturally.
It's the screenplay's "hey, that's the name of the show" moment: 500 boys, 5,000 fingers, all tickling the ivories at the behest of Dr. T. And now you know.
Fascist critique is fundamental to Geisel's work, a motif likely lost on parents reading the Sleep Book, Green Eggs and Ham, or Hop on Pop to their kiddos in one torturous tongue-twisting sequence for bedtime. But that common element exists in books like Yertle the Turtle, and in his wartime propaganda cartoons roasting Adolf Hitler. Geisel was into anti-nationalist politics and mocking authoritarian strong men before it was cool. (Lest we let him off the hook, he made a few explicitly racist cartoons, too, though his prejudice against Japanese people seems to have dissipated later in his life.)
Is Terwilliker that bad a guy, speaking relatively? He's only forcing a small company of kids to play his half-assed song. He isn't invading neighboring sovereign countries or engineering mass-exterminations of people he deems genetically "lesser." But Geisel bristles at the evils of conformity and autocracy, even in Bart's twisted personal reverie. The docile acquiescence Terwilliker demands from his pupils, guards, and even Heloise, hypnotized to do the tyrant teacher's bureaucratic bidding, is antithetical to Geisel's free-mindedness.
Ultimately, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T continues that career-long devotion to the marriage of sociopolitical commentary with surrealist language and imagery.
"Surrealist," for what it's worth, is a generous way of putting it. Frankly, the lengths Rowland and his team go to construct the movie's dream world, where most of the narrative takes place, come out on the other side of "children's books" and land near "horror cinema." A majority of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T's set dec and art design is nothing short of pure nightmare fuel, distilled by a crew that worked in an unventilated space and went loopy inhaling solvent fumes.
These disembodied hands, for instance, look like scrapped concepts from the Nightmare on Elm Street film series, props intended for a likewise dream-adjacent setting. Meanwhile, this sculpture, made in Terwilliker's likeness …
… is an echo of Christopher Lee from his Hammer Horror era, which isn't what a child wants to look at when they're practicing for a concert, or otherwise wandering the halls of a topsy-turvy stronghold that's fenced in with electrified barbed wire. Bart sees things in Terwilliker's lair that no kid should, though as a silver lining, that relief of his teacher's mug might just be freaky enough to keep him from napping during the day.
Eventually Bart sees a much more welcome sight: August the plumber, because of course the boy's idol would play a part in his dreams. "What am I always doing?" August replies when Bart asks what he's doing in the joint. "I'm putting in sinks." Terwilliker's institute might be a marvel of impossible architecture, but it still has to hew to plumbing codes. Even better news for Bart is that Heloise is around, too, but August couples that with the shocking news that she's working for Terwilliker, "second in charge of the whole Happy Finger racket."
August tries to soothe Bart's nerves with some good old fashioned 1950s American patriarchy ("I hate to speak badly about mothers. Motherhood is the noblest institution in our land."), but the kid doesn't buy it, and runs off in search of Heloise, passing more uncomfortable Seussian signifiers along the way, until he does find her …
… answering Terwilliker's phones and browbeating his underlings over a botched batch of Happy Fingers beanies. The fingers on this lot aren't happy enough. They should be gay and carefree. These ones? They're bowed and bummed out, as Heloise appears to be when Dr. T storms into the room scolding her for missing Bart, though this display of insensitivity is mild compared to how he reacts upon hearing that Bart is missing. After swearing to Heloise that he's going to send the boy to the dungeons, he sends the building into DEFCON 1.
No spotlight headed men needed here in the Happy Fingers Institute; perilous construction and legions of guards, led by brothers Whitney and Judson (played by real-life brothers Robert and Jack Heasley), conjoined at the beard instead of the hip, provide more than enough coverage to locate Bart. A ladder to nowhere may seem like a design flaw, but it's actually quite handy for corralling unruly boys.
Bart manages to evade the lot — this is, after all, his daydream — and finds his way back to August, who, after a bit of winsome guilt-tripping and cajoling, agrees to confront Terwilliker over his nefariousness and maltreatment of both Bart and Heloise.
What do powerful men always do when they're called for their gross misconduct? Defend, deny, deflect, and not necessarily in that order. Terwilliker makes his case as a victim of rumormongering in two ways: defensive melodramatic protests and bribes. (A breathy reassurance from Heloise helps, too.)
They ply August with cigars and fine cuisine, arrayed on trays and drawers stored in the wall and the sofa cushion, plus a tower of adult beverages floor in the floor; schnapps, sake, slivovitz, Schweppes, tequila, "turtle tears", and cocoa, plus "vintage pickle juice" from the institute's very own "pickle vineyards". August takes the bait, and the film cues one of its musical numbers, "Get Together Weather."
Here, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is most recognizably the product of Dr. Seuss' love of sing-song rhyming. The sequence barely qualifies as "child friendly" because August is clearly thirsty for Heloise. (Which, in fairness' interest, may as much be the character as Hayes himself, who had been Healy's real-life husband of 13 years when the movie premiered.) To Bart's dismay, and no small amount of disgust, Terwilliker's ruse works, and August rules that nothing foul is afoot.
Oops! You turned your back too soon, August! Despite all Bart's rage, his mom is trapped in a cage.
He takes the plumber's naivety as rank betrayal, creating a rift between them that opens and closes in the 5 minutes it takes for Bart (correction: Tony Butala, Rettig's playback vocalist) to sing the film's next song, "Because We're Kids," a sad little ditty lamenting the power differentials between adults and children.
Nothing like a kid with the blues to warm a grown-up's resigned heart. August agrees to take out all the sinks he's installed to forestall the institute's opening, if Bart can pay him in American dollars and not the piffling currencies Terwilliker comps him with, like this is Steven E. de Souza's Street Fighter and he's M. Bison.
Once again, Bart runs off into the institute. All of its bizarre visual and audio delights aside, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T suffers from its hopelessly repetitive plotting. Speaking of Street Fighter, the back-and-forth structure feels right out of a video game, many decades before video gaming's birth. To an extent, that feels appropriate in terms of reflecting Bart's inability to sit still. He can't help himself. Besides, he's an intrepid soul. Most kids would stumble upon a fixture like this by turning around and running:
Not Bart! He cozies right into these welcoming arms, just in time for the door to raise and a stream of goons to march through. (Again, a video game.) The threat evaded, Bart sneaks deeper into the belly of the beast, finds Terwilliker's bedroom, and steals the key to his cash vault from the metronome where he keeps it. (You guessed it: video game!)
But rather than the dough, Bart snatches the paperwork Terwilliker has filed for August's disintegration, setting off alarm bells and instigating a chase scene that sends Bart sliding into the bowels of the beast — the institute's dungeons. The warden, Stroogo (Henry Kulky), informs our plucky hero that Terwilliker means to capture all musicians "what play all other instruments," a callback to the doctor's pretentious contempt for scratchy violins, screechy piccolos, and nauseating trumpets.
In other words, every poor schmuck to touch a woodwind, string, or brass instrument ends up interred at Happy Fingers, where the lack of sunlight apparently turns their skin "pea soup" green. (Did Geisel have prasinophobia?) That's probably why Bart ducks behind a rock when a troupe of undoubtedly not happy prisoners spill into a cavernous room for an extended and noisome performance, "Dungeon Ballet."
The song ends. Bart returns to August for the umpteenth time and finally convinces him of Terwilliker's villainy by handing over that disintegration order. Bart pricks August's thumb with a needle in an impromptu blood oath, a final bonding ritual — the kid's been burned by August before, after all — then bandages up their boo-boos.
August's hero mode activated, he frees Heloise from confinement using a blowtorch (kids: don't try this at home), then takes out Whitney and Judson in a rollerskating duel by severing their beard with hedge shears (kids: really don't try this at home). It's all for naught, though, as Terwilliker's henchmen apprehend them. He eulogizes the two fallen beardos by quoting Hamlet ("fellows of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy"), sends Heloise back to her cell, and escorts Bart and August back to the dungeons.
If you're still on the fence about whether The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is appropriate for young'uns or not, the "elevator scene" should help you over the edge.
Before the theatrical release, Columbia Pictures cut the film to ribbons as a solution to unflattering test audience reactions. They cut it again in 1958 for a second release and removed this grim interlude, where the Elevator Operator (Alan Aric), in classic executioner attire, warbles the name of each dungeon floor to a lurching score of Terwilliker's hated instruments: off-kilter strings, trilling woodwinds, booming percussion.
First floor, assorted simple tortures: molten lead, chopping blocks, hot boiling oil. Second floor, jewelry department: leg chains, ankle chains, neck chains, wrist chains. Reaching the basement is practically a relief for Bart and August, even though they know they're basically doomed. At least they're not gonna get the oil.
But Bart has a better idea: they're gonna get out of that cell and put an end to Terwilliker's mad schemes. And they're going to pull a page out of MacGyver's book to do it. (Like video games, MacGyver is an invention of the 80s, but still.)
That bottle of AirFix August keeps in his pocket? Bart's going to turn it into a bottle of SoundFix. If AirFix can Hoover unwelcome odors from one's surroundings into the bottle, then it should work for sounds with proper reverse engineering. Right?
Nevermind Bart's faulty deductive logic and scientific reasoning, he's in a bind and he clearly has an active imagination, quite like Geisel. Besides, there's no time for deus ex machina nitpicks. The other 500 boys are arriving at Happy Fingers for Terwilliker's performance, and the man of the hour is decked out in a getup best described as "third world warlord by JoAnn's Fabrics."
Idi Amin, eat your heart out.
The good news is that Bart's improvised contraption works and sends the performance of "Ten Happy Fingers" into chaos. It's hard to appreciate the effect on paper, given the aural shenanigans that ensue when Bart uncorks the bottle. The better news is that the contraption is atomic, which scares off the guards and persuades Terwilliker to let the boys go free, who pay him back for his brutality by swarming him and, presumably, tearing him to pieces.
Okay, they probably don't tear him to pieces. But they do drag him off stage and out of the rest of the movie, just as the bottle starts spewing red smoke — a sign, according to August, to clear the vicinity. For once in The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, Bart takes an adult's advice to heart and attempts to flee, but he's too late! The mixture is going full nuclear on him!
Godzilla has become such a teddy bear of late — a colossal thunder lizard, but a teddy bear all the same — that it's easy to look past the 1954 original's awesome power as an allegory for the terror of nuclear ordnance. The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T hits that same note with infinitely less grace and lasting iconography; contextually, it wouldn't invest in such concerns. Bart is nine. What does he know about the bomb? Next to nothing, it's reasonable to guess, though of course Rowland, Geisel, and Scott did know, as adults, what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki just eight years prior. Maybe the film has more to say about atomic power than its kooky stream of consciousness plotting implies.
Whether Bart is brushed up on recent world history or not, he doesn't like the idea of eating an explosion; as he cries out in mortal dismay, he wakes up and realizes that he was, for the second time, dreaming.
Or was he?
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