Being the only actual movie to ever be written by Theodore Seuss Geisel (more widely known as Dr. Seuss), one would hope this might be decent. Unfortunately it would only further drag his skills at writing screenplays into an eternal waste. I saw this movie a long time ago and never cared for it, and people back in the 50s apparently didn't care for it either. It is produced by Stanley Kramer of all people, who also directed Judgement at Nuremberg. To be fair, this movie isn't horrible. It's just not very entertaining for something that claims to be entertainment. The scenery in it is fitting of something Seuss would dream up, and there is a lot of weird architecture. The world also feels very barren and empty. The plot of the film is about a kid named Bart (Tommy Rettig) who lives with his mother and takes piano lessons. He hates these lessons because he is taught by the tyrannically oppressive and cruel Dr. Terwilliker (Hans Conried). After falling asleep one day, he enters a strange dream world of oddly shaped buildings and rooms that he can't escape from. Bart later finds a piano so enormous it requires 500 children (including him) to play it, hence the title of the movie. Throughout the movie, Bart is pursued by guards and other men employed by Dr. T so he can be forced to play the piano against his will. The movie also has a moderate amount of original songs written by Seuss, none of which are particularly good and they get on my nerves fast. Towards the end, Bart manages to escape the dream world by getting an adult to help him construct a machine that sucks noise out of the air which makes the huge piano useless. Once back in the normal dimension, Bart and his mother go outside. Believe it or not I actually never noticed Hans Coried is in this movie, let alone the main villain. I have seen the entire film before, but I just didn't really see him. Sadly, not even Conried can save the rest of this movie. You don't have to take my word for it. It seems to be a unanimous opinion that this movie is mostly abysmal, because there were originally 20 songs Seuss wrote for it, but in the finished movie, there's only 11. There has to be at least one good thing I can say about this movie though, and I think I know what it is. It is basically Conried's only major role he ever did, since he was mostly an actor that played characters who would only have 3 or 4 lines in the whole film. Suffice to say, he didn't get to talk very much, but this movie changes that. The strange dream world Bart goes into for the majority of the movie is probably the best thing about it, because otherwise, it's barely average. It is unlucky we are stuck with this as the only movie Seuss wrote the script for. He even seemed to write it off as a failure himself.
Review of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.
