Click here to visit our movie review section for more!
Dr. Dolittle (1967)
~Review by Grawlix (July 2025)
There are some movies whose production is vastly more interesting than anything they can offer up on the screen. Doctor Dolittle is such a movie. This is no small feat, since Doctor Dolittle offers up a quite a lot on the screen. But all of its flash and verve still manage to pale in comparison to the absolute maelstrom that raged behind-the-scenes. A financial disaster for the studio that drew a mixed-at-best reception on release, and remains largely forgotten today, Doctor Dolittle, in the unlikeliest of possible ways, may yet be one of the most influential films in history.
Based on the series of children’s novels about the titular adventurer who can talk to animals, attempts to make a film about the character go almost as far back as the publication of the first story in the early 1920s. When 20th Century Fox finally secured the rights in the ‘60s, they decided they wanted to go big. Really big. WC Fields once said: “Never work with children or animals” (they’re unpredictable and tend to pull focus, whether deliberately or not). Doctor Dolittle’s cast was mostly animals; some 1,200 all told, with additional ones added via puppetry, costuming and other effects. Also, one of the main cast members is a child. They wanted idyllic locations, and the production essentially occupied an entire English village for months, heedless of the uncooperative weather, increasingly irritable residents, and local quarantine laws that effectively made hundreds of animals trained outside the country a wasted effort. They also had to navigate some sketchy racial content in the source material which, considering the books were written in the 1920s, set in the 1820s, and featured the world traveling exploits of genteel Englishman, was not insignificant, and 1967 was absolutely not the time to get it wrong. Oh, yeah, and they decided to make it a musical. And cast Rex Harrison in the lead. Who can’t sing.
Those last two were as much calculated risks as virtually every other decision made in regard to the film. Musicals had been an industry staple for decades, but by the 1960s they’d arguably reached a saturation point. The New Hollywood movement was just getting underway, and Doctor Dolittle would end up being released the same year as such fare as The Dirty Dozen, The Graduate (released the same week), and Bonnie and Clyde. On the other hand, The Sound of Music had been released only two years before and blew the doors off box offices across the country, raking in the modern equivalent of over $2 Billion (adjusted for inflation) and briefly holding the title of highest grossing film of all time. Ironically, though, the phenomenal success of The Sound of Music may have helped to hasten the decline of the musical genre as a whole, as every studio in Hollywood started cranking out ever more musicals in an effort to ride what they believed was a new wave of popularity. Some of these were good films, but a lot weren’t. Wanna guess on which side of that line Doctor Dolittle landed?
And Harrison really couldn’t sing worth a damn, but that didn’t stop him from winning the Best Actor Oscar in 1964 for My Fair Lady (another musical, for the uninitiated). He didn’t really sing in that one either, but he managed to fake his way through by employing a sort of “talking on the beat” style of pseudo-singing (debatably a sort of sprechstimme, if you want to get fancy with it) that was, anyway, apparently good enough for both the Academy and audiences. And, as it would turn out, the whole “talking on the beat” thing would prove to have more of a future than musical film connoisseurs of the day might have imagined. In a way, Harrison was ahead of his time.
Honestly, Harrison’s lack of vocal chops was one of the more minor issues with his inclusion. For one thing, he was pushing 60 when he made the film while Samantha Eggar, who played his ostensible love interest, was some 30 years his junior. He was also apparently just a real general-purpose prick on set who considered both the material and his co-stars beneath him, though, to his credit, he proceeded with gusto anyway, in an apparent attempt to demonstrate his superiority by example. His bad behavior was exacerbated by the fact that enough personnel shakeups occurred after he signed on that he contractually had the option of walking off the production at any time (while still being paid, naturally) and, as such, allowed him to wield considerable power over and above what came with being the top billed actor on the project. By the time filming wrapped, he was almost universally despised by the rest of the cast.
Full disclosure here: I’m personally not a fan of musicals. Stopping a story dead for a song and dance break every few minutes is generally not my idea of a good time, but I can be swayed. South Park and Team America: World Police, the musical remake of Little Shop of Horrors, all have given me plenty of entertainment. Hell, even Bugsy Malone (1976) can scratch a nostalgia itch since I liked it as a kid. But it’s an uphill climb for sure. When Harrison is serenading a lonely sea lion like he’s trying to seduce it, I begin to have doubts about being won over.
I suppose at this point I should spend a few words about the movie itself although I feel like plot in a musical is more of a bonus than anything. Doctor Dolittle has three distinct acts that appear to map fairly neatly onto the three separate novels on which it is based, tied together by a framing story about the Doctor’s quest for the elusive Great Pink Sea Snail, a kaiju-sized mollusk that frankly doesn’t strike me as something that would be that hard to find, but never mind. The first third serves as an origin story of sorts. We’re introduced to the Doctor, his young friend, pet food salesman Matthew Mugg (Anthony Newley), Mathew’s younger friend, Timothy Stubbins (William Dix), and Polynesia, a cheeky polyglot blue-and-yellow macaw (voiced by Ginny Tyler, a prolific 1960s voice actress), who gave the Doctor his early education in animal languages and is the only member of the his menagerie the audience can understand. We learn that Dolittle used to be a human doctor but found his human patients to be petulant and boorish and that he related to animals better instead, thus changing his career to veterinarian. We also briefly meet Emma Fairfax (Eggar) and her bombastic uncle General Bellowes (Peter Bull), the local magistrate who will prove to be something of the Doctor’s arch-nemesis.
The second third deals with the Doctor receiving a specimen of the elusive pushmi-pullyu (sound it out…) a two-headed llama-like creature with the heads at either end (sort of like Nickelodeon’s CatDog) and the doctor’s efforts to raise money for his snail search by exhibiting it in the circus. It turns out the pushmi-pullyu likes to dance (which must have been a real pain for the dual performers inside what looked like an extremely awkward costume ) and that, plus the Doctor’s unique abilities, make him make him extremely popular among the circus’s performers (both human and animal) as well as the ringleader, Albert Blossom (Richard Attenborough, aka John Hammond from Jurassic Park, not to be confused with his brother David Attenborough, the nature documentary guy). Unfortunately, this is also where the Doctor meets the aforementioned homesick seal, and his efforts to set her free not only make him persona-non-grata with the circus, but, due to a disguise-related mishap, also get him charged with murder.
In part three, Dolittle beats the charges but has to take it on the lam anyway when Bellowes, who was acting as the judge, tries to have him committed instead. This leads to a sea voyage with Mugg and Stubbins in tow and Emma, who has apparently had it up to here with her uncle’s arrogance, as a stowaway. Eventually they land on Sea Star Island, purported home of the fabled snail as well an extremely literate tribe of locals who take their educations and names from (copious) books that wash up on shore from shipwrecks (feels like a bit of an over-correction from the dodgy content of the books, but better safe than sorry, I guess). After a few more adventures, including a novel solution to some issues that their chief, William Shakespeare X (Geoffrey Holder. And that’s “the tenth”, by the way) is having with the livestock, they, at long last, encounter the enigmatic and mysterious snail.
Despite the almost comical degree of production difficulties (believe me, I barely scratched the surface) Doctor Dolittle is not the complete trainwreck you might, understandably, expect. For one thing, it looks pretty good, with lots of vibrant and colorful shots. Director Richard Fleischer (son of animation pioneer Max Fleischer) was a veteran of large budget, effects-heavy films like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Fantastic Voyage (1966) and definitely knew a thing or two about controlling chaos. In other words, he was the right man for this job. The screenplay (credited to Lesile Bricusse, though it passed through a lot of hands in pre-production) recognizes the significant comic potential of the material (though the books themselves were apparently not specifically written as comedies) and there are plenty of genuinely funny gags, from a horse wearing an over sized pair of prescription spectacles, to General Bellowes’s dog revealing, via the Doctor’s interpreting, embarrassing details of his master’s personal life in open court. Even the whole business with the seal is a charmingly silly series of events when the Doctor isn’t singing to it.
But the movie also sags a lot. Even taking the songs out of the equation, I can’t remember the last time I watched a movie that simultaneously had so much going on and nothing happening. The two-and-a-half-hour runtime, a real endurance test for a movie aimed at children, probably didn’t help with this. There’s very little cohesion between the distinct movements of the story, the relationships between the characters are terminally undercooked and there is almost no chemistry between any of the characters. In fact, after the Doctor himself, the most developed character in the film is Polynesia which makes the purported romance between Dolittle and Emma feel all the more perfunctory. Frankly, the Doctor had more sexual tension with the seal.
Contemporary reviews were, if anything, even less kind (normally I wouldn’t reference other people’s reviews in mine, but it is germane to the story, here). In the face of massive budget and scheduling overruns, it probably would’ve taken divine intervention to get the film out of the red under the best of circumstances, but extremely poor word of mouth really drove the final nails into its fortunes. It was the last leading role Rex Harrison would have on screen (though he’d continue to have success on stage) and it begun a downward spiral at 20th Century Fox so severe that it would not only claim the jobs of several executives, but it nearly tanked the entire studio.
But Fox had apparently sunk in a little too much cost to just throw in the towel, electing to mount a full-blown Oscar campaign come awards season. This manifested, in part, in over two weeks of complimentary screenings of the film for industry insiders, complete with dinner and drinks. Amazingly (or perhaps not) the strategy proved effective. Doctor Dolittle was nominated for nine Academy Awards including best picture (shockingly, none for acting), winning two: Visual Effects (fair) and Best Original Song (complete BS, as it beat out The Bare Necessities from Disney’s The Jungle Book). It is considered one of the most blatant and shameless examples of film award chicanery this side of Pia Zadora’s Golden Globe.
Fox was also far from the only one who took Dolittle’s failure directly on the chin. In a campaign that began more than a year prior the film’s premier, and in anticipation of it becoming a generational success among family audiences, dozens of retailers were lined up to sell all manner of tie in products, from the usual fare of soundtracks and books to lunchboxes, toys, clothes and other assorted trinkets – the first modern cross-promotional blitz in the history of film. All that sweet, sweet lucre would go up in smoke when the film landed with a dull thud at release.
And it was this facet of Doctor Dolittle’s near categorical failure that would prove to be its most enduring legacy. See, ten years after the Dolittle debacle, some dork by the name of George Lucas wandered into the 20th Century Fox offices to discuss compensation for the B-slate Flash Gordon knockoff he was working on and made the audacious proposal of trading a substantial portion of his directing salary in exchange full merchandising rights, to which the studio readily agreed. Many people know this part of the story, but fewer know why. Reasoning that Dolittle had proven movie merchandising to be a financial dead end, the studio had no qualms about letting them go as a virtual afterthought, and probably had a good laugh about Lucas’s naivete until a few months later when they watched ravenous Star Wars fans pay millions of dollars for cardboard IOUs and, one hopes, finally, belatedly realized that quality might have something to do with merch sales.
So, raise a glass to the memory of Doctor Dolittle’s spectacular failure. Without it we might have never had modern action figures… or that hideous Jar Jar Binks candy tongue thing. Huzzah!
Final Grade: C
Maybe C+ if you really like the songs. Honestly, I might be giving it more of the benefit than it deserves since I suspect that if I’d watched more musicals, it would suffer all the greater for being placed in a more accurate context. I’m not likely to do that, though, so just call it mediocre, but not awful. It’s definitely more style than substance, but if its particular style if to your taste it could be worth a watch.
Trailer