Doctor Dolittle (1967)

Directed by Richard Fleischer. Starring Rex Harrison, Anthony Newley, Samantha Eggar, Peter Bull, Richard Attenborough, William Dix, Geoffrey Holder, Muriel Landers, Norma Varden, (voice) Ginny Tyler. [G]

Bloated movie musical from Hugh Lofting’s children’s books where Rex Harrison’s titular doc talks to the animals and the audience snores. Hardly any plot; more a string of shapeless episodes that take Dolittle to a circus and a floating island…basically anywhere but my heart. Harrison goes through the motions (barely) and fails to make the doctor either charming or witty, and there’s a forced romance (not in the original story) which exists only because studios demand all musicals have at least a little romance. The critters can be cute, and Leslie Bricusse’s Oscar-winning “Talk to the Animals” is an okay tune, but not a single song elsewhere lands remotely close to spitting distance of cleverness or hummability. And, of course, it is unbelievably boring from start to finish, all but guaranteed to put the target audience (children) to sleep; still, sleeping through it is preferable to a waking experience. A box office bomb that nearly crippled 20th Century Fox and got slammed by just about every major critic in the country…yet it landed nine Oscar nominations, including Best Picture! That’s what happens when you give free dinner and champagne to Academy members who show up for one of the many free screenings Fox set up for them. I did not get food and booze to soften my pain, so I have no trouble being honest: it’s a pile of zoological scat.

26/100