Richard Fleischer (1967)

It already had its place in film history as a vastly expensive flop and a particularly notorious example of how money could buy a Best Picture Oscar nomination.   I wanted to see it because of the key role that was consequently played by Doctor Dolittle in Mark Harris’s book Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood.   Since I read Harris’s great and gripping story of the road to the 1968 Academy Awards, I’ve kept seeing ‘Doctor Dolittle’ in television listings and getting briefly excited.  It had always turned out to be the Eddie Murphy version – until the last day of 2010.

If you drew up a list of essential ingredients for a successful family musical in the 1960s, you might include:  well-defined and engaging characters; comedy and romance; decent songs, well sung and choreographed; amazing or at least appealing visual effects.  Doctor Dolittle – based on books by Hugh Lofting, which were reckoned in their day to be classics of children’s literature (but which I never read) – fails on all counts.   Leslie Bricusse, who ended up with the credit for the screenplay as well as for writing the music and lyrics, was nothing if not conscientious:  you can hear in several tunes an anxious attempt to repeat the success of a recent screen hit (Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music) or hit performance (although the genuinely jolly, Oscar-winning ‘Talk to the Animals’ is actually rather undermined by the fragmenting effect of Rex Harrison’s speak-singing).  Herbert Ross had a long and successful career as a choreographer and director but his work here wasn’t part of it:  the dance routines are lost in the elephantine picture’s relentless lack of rhythm.  Most sequences in Doctor Dolittle look to be executed as if getting them in the can was the extent of the film-makers’ ambition.  You can understand why Richard Fleischer was under pressure to show the huge expense of the production and that’s often all he appears to be doing.  There are pointless long shots of tiny figures in a landscape or aerial shots of crowd scenes that might be expected to preface or conclude a scene but which are shoved into the middle of numbers.  The two-headed llama, the Pushmi-Pullyu, would have been fine in a provincial rep pantomime of the time but it’s ludicrous as a pièce de résistance in a Hollywood blockbuster.  The eventual appearance of the Great Pink Sea Snail, which the doctor and his team go sailing the high seas in search of, is breathtakingly anti-climactic.

The romantic strand is bewildering.   The doctor’s sidekick Matthew Mugg carries a torch for the beautiful Emma Fairfax but Matthew’s a humble Oirish working man and Emma, niece of the blustering, bullying General Bellowes (Peter Bull), is posh so you have to wonder if they can end up together (Doctor Dolittle is set in an English village called Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, in 1845).  Emma is antipathetic towards Dolittle in a way that must be the prelude to falling for him but there’s a thirty-year age difference between the actors playing the pair.  By the closing stages, simple Matthew seems simply to have forgotten he was keen on Emma.  She parts from the doctor – not sure she’ll ever see him again – but while Emma is tearful Dolittle seems pretty indifferent.  The film ends with the news that they’ll be reunited back in Puddleby but we don’t see the reunion (perhaps just as well).  The hook of the material – the Noah’s ark of animals ranging from domestic to exotic – is, to an extent, foolproof, but only to an extent.  Dolittle’s conversations in animal language are unimaginative, to say the least, and the voicing of his parrot Polynesia (by Ginny Tyler) is pathetic.  Thanks to the clumsy, let’s-just-get-through-this desperation that suffuses Doctor Dolittle, the animals often look as if they’re being wheeled on and off just to have their presence recorded, although the chimp Cheeta does arguably the best acting in the film.

The humans are depressingly charmless and Rex Harrison isn’t the worst of them.  I was looking forward to loathing him all over again but his playing is so relatively accomplished and unstrained in this company that Harrison is occasionally a relief:  even when he’s reprising Professor Higgins, he’s inoffensive.  The downside of his effortlessness is that he fails to animate Dolittle’s eccentricity.  Anthony Newley is a performer who, when he’s not centre stage (and his histrionics on screen are scaled for the back row of the upper circle), might not be there at all:  playing unobtrusively interesting is out of his range.  As Matthew, Newley sings abominably (with the trademark blaring whine on the long notes).  But at least he can do a character – even if, most of the time, he overdoes it:  after two and a half hours, I didn’t understand what Samantha Eggar and William Dix were supposed to be playing.   Dix, who was never heard of again, is stunningly unappealing as a young lad called Tommy Stubbins.  He’s maybe meant to be a sparky village urchin but his diction is that of a comedy toff (he pronounces ‘boat’ as ‘bait’ etc).   Eggar, whose brief flirtation with the big time ended with this film, makes Emma snotty and dissatisfied even when she’s meant to be falling in love with Dolittle:  it’s a baffling (and very stiff) performance.  As Willie Shakespeare, the super-cultivated leader of the ‘savages’ on Sea-Star Island, Geoffrey Holder looks understandably uncomfortable.

The only person I enjoyed watching or listening to was Richard Attenborough, in a brief appearance as the bluntly mercenary circus owner Albert Blossom.  When Blossom claps eyes on the Pushmi-Pullyu, he sings ‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It’ with mounting, rapacious glee.  The look of the creature hardly justifies the routine but Attenborough gives a vivid demonstration of what a first-class character actor can do with very little material (even if it’s obviously not him doing the dancing at the end of the number).   The commercial exploitation of the Pushmi-Pullyu brings (more) censorious words from Emma and there’s the odd moment in the film – Dolittle’s criticism of fox-hunting is another – that makes the whole enterprise seems momentarily less obsolete  than the film otherwise appears.   The expensive box-office failure of Doctor Dolittle is widely regarded as sounding the death knell for big, popular musicals although it’s worth remembering that, just a year later, Oliver! made a lot of money and won six Oscars, including Best Picture – and presumably without Columbia resorting to the kind of bribery that 20^th Century Fox tried with Dolittle.

1 January 2011