![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() T’s dungeon, has the prisoners rhythmically slugging one another and making music on what could be weapons or even stylized instruments of torture.Īlthough it has since become a cult film, “The 5,000 Fingers” was a resounding flop, as both a movie and marketing event. The dances, by Eugene Loring, who choreographed Aaron Copland’s “Billy the Kid,” are funny, fluid and intentionally far-fetched. Geisel contributed some classic Seussian patter to the German theater composer Frederick Hollander’s music. Kramer directed much of picture uncredited.) Mr. The direction, by the versatile if impersonal Roy Rowland, is straightforward. Given the movie’s eccentric nature, production values are surprisingly high. T, one of many splendidly strange musical numbers, anticipates the spell-casting duels of the comic book Dr. Healy’s real-life husband and show-business partner), must be coaxed to join Bart in the struggle against the music teacher’s totalitarian racket. Adding to the allegory, the adult hero, an all-American plumber named Zabladowski (Peter Lind Hayes, Ms. Geisel published in the New York tabloid PM. T, foppish and lanky, seems modeled after the wartime caricatures of Adolf Hitler that Mr. The compositions at times parody Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” while Dr. Terwilliker (Hans Conried, who was the voice of Captain Hook in Walt Disney’s 1953 animated “Peter Pan”). In both, parents are subject to external mind control, although, in “The 5,000 Fingers,” Bart’s widowed mother (the singer and TV personality Mary Healy) isn’t brainwashed by Martians but indoctrinated by the mad Dr. It would make a perfect double bill with “Invaders From Mars,” William Cameron Menzies’ similarly hyperdesigned exercise in candy-colored Expressionism and paranoid fantasy, which had materialized several months earlier. T,” now out on Blu-ray from Mill Creek, was both a film of its political moment and a pro-kid, anti-adult statement for the ages. (It never happened.)Ī nightmare dreamed by a 10-year-old boy, Bart (Tommy Rettig, later of the TV show “ Lassie”), “The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. Nor was any other anti-fascist musical children’s film expected to precipitate a merchandising bonanza. The film’s producer, Stanley Kramer, that most earnest of Hollywood liberals, never oversaw anything comparable to this extravagant Technicolor vision of a tyrannical piano teacher’s quest for world domination. T” (1953) was, and is, one of a kind - and the only feature-length live-action movie to have been conceived, written and designed by the illustrator Theodor Geisel (1904-1991), otherwise known as Dr. ![]()
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