DOCTOR DOLITTLE

"As Geothe said, 'You must dance and I must rest'--or is it the other way around?"--Smiley's People

"Lovely man, but he's very rude"--Doctor Dolittle

Saw Richard Fleischer's pedestrian musical Doctor Dolittle at the Yonge & Dundas tonight.  Again there was a big crowd for Black Phantom, and when I left the place was really noisy.  I wanted to see it largely because when I was little the parents were about to take us to see it, but changed their mind at the last minute because it had cannibals. (I thought it was "cannonballs" they objected to!)

Rex Harrison signed to play the title role on the assumption that he'd be working again with Alan Jay Lerner (My Fair Lady). But Lerner suffered creative block and got replaced by Leslie Bricusse, whose non-songs are actually a fitting match for Harrison's non-singing!  I must say that Dolittle's line "I'm no good with people," also fits that pill Harrison well. (Bricusse's other tuneless musicals include Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Scrooge, in which "Thank you very, very, very much" was actually the best song!) Hard to believe that this was one of the five 1967 movies nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, along with Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, In the Heat of the Night, The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde!

In the end Doctor Dolittle would do little at the box office. (When did I become a punster?) Indeed, it was one of the big-budget flops that killed off the musical genre around 1970, along with calamities like Star!, Hello, Dolly and Paint Your Wagon. The Hollywood Hall of Shame, the Medved Brothers' book about financially disastrous films like Cleopatra and Heaven's Gate, devotes a whole chapter to this one.  

It seems that they chose "England's prettiest village," Castle Combe, for location filming, then turned it upside down, building a dam to block the local river.  (Say, maybe they should have chosen England's second-prettiest village!)  Ranulph Fiennes, a young army officer who later became an intrepid polar explorer (someone who worked with him says he's so fearless because he has no imagination, a particularly British form of courage), was so offended by what they were doing to the village that he tried to blow the dam up with explosives left over from training exercises!

Query:  Even assuming that there's such a thing as an island that floats around the oceans of the world, could it really have a smoking volcano?