Three stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.17.20
Hollywood had a distressing habit, in the 1960s and early ’70s, of turning classic children’s books into musicals.
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| Having joined the unlikely crew of a ship heading for an island that never has been found, young Tommy Stubbins (Harry Collett) is befriended by a frigophobic polar bear (named Yoshi) and an uncharacteristically meek mountain gorilla (Chee-Chee). |
This lamentable trend started with 1964’s Mary Poppins, which — by becoming that year’s third most popular film — lit the fuse on what followed. Subsequent entries, most with positively dire songs, included 1968’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (as 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) and — I positively shudder — 1973’s Tom Sawyer.
Not to be left out, animated examples included 1966’s Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, 1970’s The Phantom Tollbooth and 1973’s Charlotte’s Web.
Every one of which, without exception, destroyed the gentle tone so carefully wrought by the authors of the respective books. A few of these films may have been popular — most were just this side of awful — but many loyal young readers felt utterly betrayed, with ample justification. Hollywood didn’t “get” children’s literature any better than it understood the decade’s counter-culture revolution.
All of which brings us to 1967’s Doctor Dolittle, arguably one of the worst offenders. Rex Harrison may have been suitably refined and British in the title role — albeit much too old — but the film is a bloated, over-produced train wreck that pleased nobody, but nonetheless pulled nine Academy Award nominations (including, the mind doth boggle, Best Picture) … only because 20th Century Fox bought votes by serving fancy buffet dinners, cocktails and bottomless champagne at all pre-nomination screenings.
(The ploy succeeded, if only partially. The film won two Oscars — Special Effects and Song — the latter robbing Bacharach/David’s vastly superior “The Look of Love” from its rightful statuette.)
Harrison turned British author Hugh Lofting’s quiet bachelor veterinarian, who operates a clinic in the small village of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, into a creaky song-and-dance man. Eddie Murphy made him a wise-cracking animal rights advocate in a 1998 comedy that borrowed little but the title and premise of Lofting’s books.
Robert Downey Jr., in turn, has turned Dolittle into a superhero.
