The Academy Awards for Best Picture are supposed to represent the pinnacle of cinematic achievement. Yet, looking back through the list of nominees, some selections stand out for the wrong reasons. Among the 563 films nominated as of January 18, 2020, Doctor Dolittle from 1967 often tops lists of the worst. This isn’t a case of a merely mediocre film sneaking in due to zeitgeist appeal or a niche voting bloc. In 1967, almost nobody liked Doctor Dolittle. Critics savaged it, and audiences largely avoided it, resulting in a massive financial disaster that nearly sank 20th Century Fox. This came just two years after The Sound of Music had rescued the studio from a similar financial precipice caused by Cleopatra. Despite an ambitious merchandising campaign, Doctor Dolittle tie-in products languished on store shelves. Even those involved in making the film reportedly disliked it, with the set becoming notorious for conflict and misery – a saga vividly detailed in Mark Harris’s book, Pictures at a Revolution, which argues the making of Doctor Dolittle was more compelling than the film itself. The film’s nine Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, were widely seen as a result of studio pressure rather than genuine merit.
Doctor Dolittle represents the tail end of the large-scale Hollywood musical era of the 1960s, almost feeling like a culmination of the subgenre’s excesses. It attempts to blend elements from successful predecessors: the effects-driven fantasy of 1964’s Mary Poppins, also based on British children’s books; the grumpy-man-softens narrative and musical echoes of 1964’s My Fair Lady (starring Rex Harrison, who takes on a similar role in Doctor Dolittle); and the studio ambition of 1965’s The Sound of Music, another 20th Century Fox behemoth. The theatrical release, clocking in at a lengthy 152 minutes, was actually the third cut of the film, trimmed down from even longer versions rejected by test audiences. Considering the struggle to fill even this runtime, one can only imagine what was excised, though undoubtedly, it was expensively produced material. “Expensive-looking” is perhaps the most generous compliment one can pay Doctor Dolittle.
The setting is primarily the quaint English village of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh in 1845. Great pains were taken to create locations (and later, studio sets when UK filming proved too challenging) that exuded a fussy, storybook charm, mirroring the cluttered, detail-rich interior sets. This was all filmed with a conscious effort to avoid the overtly stagey feel common in some 1960s musicals. While “realism” might be too strong a word, Doctor Dolittle possesses a tangible quality, a sense of place. When Rex Harrison walks through a field, it appears to be a genuine field bathed in real sunlight. Samantha Eggar’s creek-falling scene feels genuinely physical. This commitment to detailed settings lends Doctor Dolittle a visual depth, arguably its strongest cinematic attribute. While 20th Century Fox’s investment was a management misstep, the money is undeniably visible on screen. Cinematographer Robert Surtees, who also shot the visually striking The Graduate (another 1967 Best Picture nominee, ironically far more visually dynamic than this children’s fantasy), bathed the film in predominantly muted browns, paradoxically enhancing its sense of weight and realism.
However, the narrative unfolding within this meticulously crafted world is where Doctor Dolittle truly falters. Forging a coherent story from Hugh Lofting’s source material proved a significant challenge. Leslie Bricusse ultimately synthesized elements from the first three Doctor Dolittle books into a disjointed narrative that feels perpetually delayed. Dr. John Dolittle (Harrison), a misanthropic veterinarian fluent in hundreds of animal languages, embarks on a quest to find the mythical Great Pink Sea Snail, his motivations remaining vague. To fund this expedition, he inexplicably spends a considerable portion of the film running a circus. The first act serves as mere introduction, the second is consumed by circus antics, and only in the third act does the sea voyage finally commence. The disjointed nature of these acts is jarring. While Mary Poppins also faced the challenge of adapting episodic source material, it managed to create a mosaic-like structure where individual segments contributed to a cohesive whole. Doctor Dolittle feels like a trilogy of unrelated stories crammed into a single film, with each segment arguably worse than the last.
The film’s failures are numerous and multifaceted, starting with the casting. Rex Harrison, involved from the project’s inception, is miscast as Dolittle. The character, meant to be an eccentric but endearing figure, is portrayed by Harrison as a smug, condescending know-it-all, who seems to tolerate others only to flaunt his superior knowledge. This depiction renders Doctor Dolittle utterly unlikeable, someone audiences would struggle to endure for the film’s extended runtime. Anthony Newley, as Matthew Mugg, Dolittle’s Irish friend, visibly struggles to mask his contempt for Harrison (who reportedly subjected Newley to anti-Semitic abuse during filming). Newley’s performance is broadly criticized: his Irish accent is cartoonish, his physical comedy is clumsy, and his attempts at romantic interest in Samantha Eggar’s character come across as inappropriate. Eggar herself is given a thinly written role and, unlike Newley, makes little effort to conceal her apparent disdain for Harrison.
The songs, also by Leslie Bricusse in his first solo songwriting venture after collaborations with Newley and Cyril Ornadel, are another significant weakness. Bricusse’s strength lay in lyrics rather than composition, evident in Doctor Dolittle‘s songs. Most feature cluttered, verbose lyrics paired with simplistic, march-like melodies, prompting the flat, spoken-singing style Harrison previously employed in My Fair Lady. In some instances, the film veers into spoken word entirely, as with the signature song, “Talk to the Animals,” where Harrison essentially recites lyrics over bland musical accompaniment. Bricusse’s lyrics are characterized by forced, overly clever rhymes, such as:
“Imagine talking to a tiger/ Chatting with a cheetah/ What a neat a-/ -chievement that would be”.
Or, in another example of strained wordplay:
“If friends say, ‘can he talk in crab or pelican?’/ You’ll say, ‘like hell ‘e can’/ And you’ll be right”
This lyric suggests a misunderstanding of American English idioms or a willingness to sacrifice meaning for the sake of rhyme, a tendency prevalent throughout the film’s songwriting. Ironically, Bricusse won an Academy Award for Best Original Song for this very score, in a year that included nominations for the far superior “The Bare Necessities” from The Jungle Book and “The Look of Love” from Casino Royale.
While Bricusse’s rhyming is undeniably elaborate, the effort feels misdirected. The songs in Doctor Dolittle are exhausting to listen to, constantly striving for cleverness to the point of demanding an alertness from the audience that the meager reward hardly justifies.
The staging of these musical numbers, under the direction of Richard Fleischer, known for his heavy-handed approach, further detracts from the film. Many numbers simply involve characters standing and singing directly at each other, particularly the drawn-out “Fabulous Places,” where the four leads (including child actor William Dix as Tommy Stubbins) take turns reciting Bricusse’s uninspired rhymes about desired travel destinations. Other numbers feature aimless wandering through sets, like the opening “My Friend the Doctor,” which benefits from Anthony Newley’s energetic performance and camera movement, and bears a striking resemblance to “Maria” from The Sound of Music. At its worst, the staging devolves into incoherent sequences of Harrison striking poses in disconnected shots, as in “If I Could Talk to the Animals.” The nadir is arguably “I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It,” featuring both the film’s worst lyrics:
“I’m not a fool/ I went to school/ I’ve been from Liverpool to Istanbul/ Istanbul/ I’m no fool”
and cringe-worthy choreography, including Richard Attenborough’s bizarre, high-kicking, skipping movements, likened to a Nazi rally performed by the Rockettes. Attenborough’s repeated bellowing of “I’ve never seen anything like it!” adds to the awkwardness.
Ultimately, the songs are the joyless low points of a film devoid of highlights. Its fantasy elements are flimsy, its humor falls flat, its characters are unappealing, and its themes are muddled. The film’s extensive runtime lacks momentum or a sense of progression, culminating in a shrug of an ending that confirms this aimlessness. Doctor Dolittle‘s only claim to prestige is its exorbitant budget and the notorious behind-the-scenes turmoil. It stands as a cinematic dirge, a low point in 1960s big-budget filmmaking. Its numerous Oscar nominations, in retrospect, serve as a stark reminder of how “Oscarbait” cinema can go wrong, and perhaps a valuable lesson for the industry and the Academy.
