As of January 18, 2020, a staggering 563 films have been honored with a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Among this esteemed list, 1967’s Doctor Dolittle stands out, unfortunately, for all the wrong reasons, arguably claiming the title of the worst nominee in the award’s long history. It’s crucial to clarify immediately that this isn’t a case of a merely mediocre film benefiting from cultural zeitgeist or pandering to a niche voting group. In 1967, Doctor Dolittle was universally disliked. Critics eviscerated it, and audiences largely avoided it, resulting in a colossal financial failure that nearly plunged 20th Century Fox into bankruptcy. This near-collapse came just two years after The Sound of Music had miraculously rescued the studio from a similar financial precipice caused by Cleopatra. An ambitious, unprecedented merchandising campaign tied to Doctor Dolittle, intended to capitalize on its presumed success, spectacularly backfired, leaving warehouses overflowing with unsold Dolittle paraphernalia. Even those involved in the film’s creation harbored no affection for it. The set became notorious for its toxic atmosphere, rife with conflict, complaints, and widespread discontent – a tumultuous production vividly detailed in Mark Harris’s insightful 2008 book, Pictures at a Revolution, which posits the making of Doctor Dolittle as the most compelling drama within the film industry of 1966 and 1967. The film’s multiple Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, were less a recognition of merit and more a result of 20th Century Fox’s aggressive lobbying, essentially strong-arming the Academy into submission.
Doctor Dolittle emerged as one of the last of the large-scale musical extravaganzas of the 1960s, and in many respects, it encapsulates the shortcomings of the genre’s late-stage excesses. It feels like an awkward amalgamation of successful predecessors: borrowing elements from 1964’s Mary Poppins (a fantasy film based on British children’s literature with significant special effects), My Fair Lady (featuring Rex Harrison as a curmudgeonly protagonist who softens as the story progresses, and whose musical numbers bear striking resemblances to the superior songs of Lady), and 1965’s The Sound of Music (produced by 20th Century Fox, who desperately sought to replicate its blockbuster success). The released version of Doctor Dolittle, clocking in at a lengthy 152 minutes, was already the third iteration, trimmed down from even longer cuts that had failed to impress test audiences. Given the struggle to fill even this extended runtime, one can only imagine the nature of the excised material, though it was undoubtedly visually lavish. “Expensive-looking” becomes the film’s primary, and almost sole, offering.
Set predominantly in the quaint English village of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh in 1845, Doctor Dolittle invested heavily in creating visually detailed settings. Great pains were taken to ensure both location shoots and studio-built sets evoked a storybook charm, replete with meticulously cluttered interiors. This pursuit of visual richness was juxtaposed with a cinematic approach that avoided the overt theatricality common in some 1960s musicals. While “realism” might be too strong a term, Doctor Dolittle achieves a certain tactility, a palpable sense of place. When Rex Harrison strides through a field, it genuinely feels like a real field bathed in natural sunlight; Samantha Eggar’s accidental fall into a creek appears genuinely wet and awkward. This tangible depth in the settings stands out as perhaps the only genuinely successful aesthetic element of the film. Thus, while 20th Century Fox’s financial investment in the film proved disastrous, the money is undeniably visible on screen. However, this visual richness is often rendered in a palette of muted browns by cinematographer Robert Surtees (who also shot The Graduate, another 1967 Best Picture nominee, ironically making the film about suburban alienation visually more vibrant than this children’s fantasy). This somber color scheme paradoxically adds to the film’s sense of grounded realism, albeit in a rather unengaging way.
The narrative unfolding within these meticulously crafted settings is, unfortunately, a tedious ordeal. Constructing a coherent story from the source material proved to be a monumental challenge. Leslie Bricusse was ultimately tasked with synthesizing the first three books of Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle series, resulting in a misshapen narrative that feels perpetually stalled. Dr. John Dolittle (Harrison), portrayed as a reclusive misanthrope with the extraordinary ability to converse in hundreds of animal languages, dedicates himself to veterinary practice. His central, somewhat flimsy, motivation is to locate the mythical Great Pink Sea Snail. To finance this expedition, he inexplicably decides to operate a circus, consuming a significant portion of the film’s runtime. The film’s first act serves merely as an extended introduction to the characters and premise. The third act finally sees Dolittle embark on his sea voyage. The disjointed nature of these three segments is almost impossible to exaggerate. While Mary Poppins also faced the challenge of adapting episodic source material, it managed to create a mosaic-like narrative where individual segments contribute to a cohesive whole. Doctor Dolittle, in contrast, feels like a trilogy of unrelated, subpar movies awkwardly stitched together, with each segment arguably worse than the last.
The film’s failings are numerous and multifaceted, making it difficult to pinpoint a starting point for criticism. The casting, for instance, is fundamentally flawed. While Rex Harrison was attached to the project early on, his portrayal of Doctor Dolittle is profoundly misjudged. The character, as conceived in the books, is an eccentric but fundamentally warm and engaging figure. Harrison, predictably, interprets Dolittle as a smug, condescending know-it-all, who tolerates the company of others primarily to flaunt his superior intellect. He presents a thoroughly unlikable, self-absorbed doctor, someone most people would actively avoid. Yet, the audience is forced to endure his presence for the entire film. Anthony Newley, cast as Matthew Mugg, Dolittle’s supposed best human friend and a stereotypical Irish meat vendor, visibly struggles to conceal his disdain for Harrison (whose on-set behavior reportedly included subjecting Newley to anti-Semitic insults). While Newley’s animosity towards his co-star might be palpable, his performance offers little else of value: his exaggerated Irish accent is grating, his clumsy physical comedy falls flat, and his attempts at romantic interest in Eggar’s character veer into inappropriate lechery. Samantha Eggar, playing a barely-there female lead, seems equally disengaged, struggling to feign anything but distaste for Harrison.
The film’s musical numbers, penned by Leslie Bricusse in his first solo songwriting venture (following collaborations with Newley on stage musicals like Stop the World – I Want to Get Off and The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd, and with Cyril Ornadel on Pickwick), are equally problematic. Bricusse’s strengths leaned more towards lyricism than composition, a fact painfully evident in almost every song in Doctor Dolittle. The songs are characterized by cluttered, verbose lyrics and simplistic, march-like melodies, perfectly suited for the flat, spoken-singing style Harrison employed in My Fair Lady. Perhaps aware of this limitation, Bricusse often abandons singing altogether, veering into spoken word. The film’s signature tune, “Talk to the Animals,” is essentially Harrison reciting doggerel poetry over bland, meandering music. And the poetry itself is remarkably irritating. Bricusse displays a persistent tic throughout Doctor Dolittle, most prominently in “Talk to the Animals,” of burying strained, overly clever rhymes within lines, resulting in awkward constructions like:
“Imagine talking to a tiger/ Chatting with a cheetah/ What a neat a-/ -chievement that would be”.
At times, the wordplay descends into sheer awkwardness:
“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 either a misunderstanding of American English idioms or, more likely, Bricusse prioritizing forced rhymes over coherent meaning. The latter certainly seems to be a recurring issue throughout the film. Despite these shortcomings, Bricusse inexplicably won the Academy Award for Best Original Song that year, in a category that included the infinitely superior “The Bare Necessities” from The Jungle Book and “The Look of Love” from Casino Royale.
While Bricusse undoubtedly invested considerable effort in crafting these intricate, fussy rhymes, the sheer laboriousness of the songwriting is precisely the problem. No one has ever praised rhyming as “effortful” as a genuine compliment. The songs in Doctor Dolittle are simply exhausting to listen to, so desperately eager to showcase their supposed cleverness that they force the listener into a state of heightened alertness completely disproportionate to the meager rewards offered.
The staging of these musical numbers is no better than the songs themselves. Director Richard Fleischer, known for his heavy-handed and unsubtle direction in most of his films, proves to be a particularly poor fit for a musical, especially one as inherently ponderous as Doctor Dolittle. Many musical sequences simply involve characters standing and singing directly at each other, most notably the interminable “Fabulous Places,” where the four leads (including the forgettable child actor Tommy Stubbins, played by William Dix) take turns reciting Bricusse’s clunky rhymes about their desired travel destinations. Other numbers involve aimless wandering through the elaborate sets, such as the opening “My Friend the Doctor,” which is arguably the film’s least offensive moment, largely because Anthony Newley performs with some semblance of energy, the camera exhibits a modicum of movement, and the melody vaguely resembles “Maria” from The Sound of Music, almost achieving listenability through plagiarism. Worst of all are sequences like “If I Could Talk to the Animals,” which devolve into a series of static shots of Harrison striking poses, devoid of any narrative or emotional coherence. The nadir is reached with the sprawling mess that is “I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It,” featuring arguably the film’s most cringe-worthy lyrics:
“I’m not a fool/ I went to school/ I’ve been from Liverpool to Istanbul/ Istanbul/ I’m no fool”
Coupled with Richard Attenborough’s bizarre choreography – a grotesque march-skip reminiscent of a Nazi rally staged by the Rockettes – and Attenborough’s strained bellowing of the titular phrase as if expelling a lung, the number becomes an endurance test.
Ultimately, the songs represent the joyless low points of a film utterly devoid of highlights. Its fantasy elements are flimsy (the Great Pink Sea Snail looks like it could collapse in a gentle breeze), its humor is consistently unfunny, its characters are thoroughly unlikable, and its thematic underpinnings are incoherent. The film’s bloated two-and-a-half-hour runtime unfolds without any sense of momentum or narrative progression, leading to an utterly anticlimactic and shrug-worthy conclusion. Doctor Dolittle‘s only apparent asset is a superficial veneer of prestige, achieved through exorbitant cost and scandalous behind-the-scenes anecdotes. It stands as a cinematic dirge, a low point in 1960s big-budget filmmaking. Perhaps its multiple Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, serve a perverse purpose: highlighting the most unappealing extremes of Oscar-bait cinema, a cautionary tale that the industry and the Academy would do well to remember.
