The Academy Awards for Best Picture have honored 563 films as of January 18, 2020. Among this illustrious list, the 1967 musical Doctor Dolittle often stands out, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. Far from being a beloved classic unjustly criticized, or a misunderstood film that resonated with a niche audience, Doctor Dolittle was largely disliked upon release. Critics panned it, and audiences mostly avoided it, resulting in a significant financial failure for 20th Century Fox. This bomb nearly repeated the studio’s Cleopatra-induced bankruptcy of just a few years prior, despite the earlier success of The Sound of Music. Even an extensive merchandising campaign tied to Doctor Dolittle failed, leaving stores overflowing with unsold toys and trinkets. The production itself was notoriously troubled, marked by on-set conflicts and widespread discontent, a saga vividly detailed in Mark Harris’s book Pictures at a Revolution, which argues the film’s making was more compelling than the film itself. The Oscar nominations it received, a surprising nine in total, are often attributed to studio pressure rather than genuine merit.
Doctor Dolittle arrived as one of the last of the large-scale Hollywood musicals of the 1960s, and in many ways, it embodies the weaknesses of the genre as it began to decline. It attempts to blend elements of earlier successes: the fantasy-driven nature of 1964’s Mary Poppins, also adapted from British children’s literature; the grumpy-man-softens narrative arc and song structure echoes of 1964’s My Fair Lady (particularly in Rex Harrison’s casting); and the sheer scale and studio ambition of 1965’s The Sound of Music, all produced by 20th Century Fox, hungry for another blockbuster. The final theatrical cut of Doctor Dolittle ran for a lengthy 152 minutes, already trimmed from even longer versions that test audiences rejected. Considering the struggle to fill even this runtime, one can only imagine what was removed, though undoubtedly, it was expensively produced. “Expensive-looking” becomes a key descriptor for Doctor Dolittle, as visual spectacle appears to be its primary, and perhaps only, real offering.
Set in the quaint English village of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh in 1845, considerable resources were invested in creating detailed sets and locations. Efforts were made to evoke a storybook atmosphere, filling interiors with elaborate props while aiming for a less stagey visual style than some earlier musicals. While not strictly “realism,” Doctor Dolittle possesses a certain tactile quality and sense of place. When Rex Harrison walks through a field, it does appear to be a genuine field under real sunlight; when Samantha Eggar falls into a creek, her struggle to get out looks convincingly real. This tangible depth in the settings is arguably the film’s strongest cinematic achievement. Thus, while 20th Century Fox’s investment may have been a managerial misstep, the lavish production values are undeniably visible on screen. However, this visual richness is often presented in a palette of muted browns, thanks to cinematographer Robert Surtees (who also shot The Graduate in 1967, ironically a film about suburban alienation that feels visually more vibrant than this children’s fantasy). This color choice, strangely, further enhances the film’s sense of weighty realism, despite its fantastical subject matter.
Within these meticulously crafted settings unfolds a narrative that feels like a torturous ordeal. Constructing a coherent story from Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle books proved challenging. Leslie Bricusse ultimately synthesized elements from the first three books into a disjointed narrative that constantly feels like it’s delaying any real plot progression. Dr. John Dolittle (Harrison), a misanthropic veterinarian fluent in numerous animal languages, embarks on a quest to find the mythical Great Pink Sea Snail, driven by vaguely defined motivations. To finance this expedition, the film dedicates its entire second act to Dolittle running a circus to raise funds. The first act serves as mere exposition, and the third act finally sees him set sail. The three acts feel remarkably disconnected. While Mary Poppins also struggled to create a unified narrative from its source material, it achieved a more episodic, mosaic-like structure where individual segments contributed to a cohesive whole. Doctor Dolittle, in contrast, feels like three unrelated movie segments haphazardly stitched together, and each segment manages to be worse than the last.
The film suffers from a multitude of failures, starting with its questionable casting. Rex Harrison was attached to the project early on, but his portrayal of Doctor Dolittle is widely considered misjudged. The character in the books is an eccentric but warm figure, while Harrison, unsurprisingly, plays him as a condescending and smug intellectual, seemingly tolerating human company only to flaunt his superior knowledge. He presents a Doctor Dolittle who is unlikeable and arrogant, someone few would willingly spend any time with, yet the audience is forced to endure his presence for the entire film. Anthony Newley, as Matthew Mugg, Dolittle’s Irish meat-salesman companion, visibly struggles to mask his animosity towards Harrison (whose on-set behavior included anti-Semitic remarks directed at Newley). Newley’s performance is broadly caricatured: his Irish accent is exaggerated and unconvincing, his physical comedy feels forced, and his attempts at romantic interest in Eggar’s character come across as inappropriate. Samantha Eggar is given a thinly written role and, unlike Newley, makes no attempt to conceal her apparent disdain for Harrison.
Further compounding the film’s woes are its universally criticized songs, also penned by Leslie Bricusse, marking his first solo songwriting effort after collaborations on stage musicals with Newley and Cyril Ornadel. Bricusse’s strength leaned towards lyrics rather than composition, evident in almost every Doctor Dolittle song. They are characterized by cluttered, verbose lyrics paired with simplistic, march-like melodies, lending themselves to the flat, speak-singing style Harrison employed in My Fair Lady. At times, the film abandons even the pretense of singing, devolving into spoken word set to music, as exemplified by the supposed signature song, “Talk to the Animals,” where Harrison essentially recites rhyming verse over bland musical accompaniment. The lyrics themselves are frequently awkward and strained, exemplified by lines like:
“Imagine talking to a tiger/ Chatting with a cheetah/ What a neat a-/ -chievement that would be.”
Or, demonstrating a forced rhyme and questionable grasp of American English idioms:
“If friends say, ‘can he talk in crab or pelican?’/ You’ll say, ‘like hell ‘e can’/ And you’ll be right”
This relentless pursuit of complex rhymes often sacrifices meaning and natural flow, a tendency prevalent throughout the film’s songs. Despite these shortcomings, Bricusse inexplicably won the Academy Award for Best Original Song that year, beating out “The Bare Necessities” from The Jungle Book and “The Look of Love” from Casino Royale.
While the intricate, fussy rhymes in Doctor Dolittle‘s songs undoubtedly required considerable effort, the result is far from প্রশংসনীয়. The songs are exhausting to listen to, so aggressively insistent on showcasing their cleverness that they induce a state of mental alertness wholly disproportionate to their meager artistic reward.
The musical numbers themselves offer little improvement. Director Richard Fleischer’s penchant for heavy-handed staging, evident throughout his filmography, proves particularly detrimental to a musical, especially one already as ponderous as Doctor Dolittle. Many numbers consist of static shots of characters singing directly at each other, such as the interminable “Fabulous Places,” where the four leads (including child actor William Dix as Tommy Stubbins) take turns reciting Bricusse’s labored rhymes about desired travel destinations. Other numbers involve aimless wandering through the elaborate sets, like the introductory “My Friend the Doctor,” which is only marginally better due to Anthony Newley’s energetic performance and camera movement, and its near-plagiarism of “Maria” from The Sound of Music, which ironically makes it almost palatable. Some sequences, like “If I Could Talk to the Animals,” devolve into a series of disconnected shots of Harrison striking poses, devoid of any narrative or emotional meaning. The nadir is reached with “I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It,” featuring arguably the worst lyrics in the film:
“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 involving high leg kicks and a martial-skipping gait, resembling a British music hall routine crossed with a Nazi rally as staged by the Rockettes, and Attenborough’s strained bellowing of the title phrase, the number becomes an excruciating spectacle.
Ultimately, the songs are the absolute low points of a film devoid of any highlights. Its fantasy elements are unconvincing (the Great Pink Sea Snail appears fragile and flimsy), its attempts at humor fall flat, its characters are unlikeable, and its thematic aims are incoherent. The film’s lengthy runtime drags on without momentum or any sense of purpose, culminating in a shrug of an ending that confirms this aimlessness. Doctor Dolittle’s only claim to prestige rests on its inflated budget and the scandalous behind-the-scenes stories. It stands as a joyless cinematic dirge, the low point of 1960s big-budget filmmaking. Perhaps its Oscar nominations, in a perverse way, are valuable, highlighting the extreme form that uninspired “Oscar bait” can take, and serving as a reminder that the film industry and the Academy are not immune to such missteps.
