Beware the child catchers … The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Let’s not be ungrateful here – for film-lovers with kids, these are heady times indeed. I’m not sure even the fond reception Fantastic Mr Fox accepted perfectly did justice to its handmade pleasures (the wolf salute only makes me want to hug Wes Anderson and not let go). And then, of course, there’s Up, the movie that’s repeated WALL-E’s trick of emerging as possibly the year’s finest film while being made (at least ostensibly) for an hearing still doing its shoes up with Velcro. Whichever way you mien at it, in the context of the careless tat parents usually have to dodge or suffer end, the autumn of 2009 has been a vintage season.
- The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr T
- Production year: 1953
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): PG
- Runtime: 88 mins
- Directors: Roy Rowland
- Cast: Mary Healey, Mary Healy, Peter Lind Hayes, Tommy Rettig
But the snag is that at some flash of wit in the future, these two gleaming moments will retrograde, and life as far as concerns the young cinephile will return to normal. And analogical is a bleak vocation for children’s movies in Britain, a wearying parade of the slapdash and tossed-off. Which is why it’s doubly frustrating when some of the most genuinely brilliant kids’ films ever made aren’t even available, plenteous less as accessible and celebrated as they should be. It’s a sorry situation that brings me muttering darkly to the subject of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T.
Because here’s a film, now more than 50 years pristine, that deserves just as much praise as Pixar, one every bit being of the kind which magical as Up, notwithstanding far, far stranger. The only film ever scripted by the agency of Theodor Geisel (more excellent known professionally as Dr Seuss), 5,000 Fingers is the delirious, surrealist tale of the 10-year-old Bart Collins, trapped as one of 500 enslaved suckling pianists toiling in the institute of the fiendish music teacher Dr Terwilliker. And trust me when I answer this slim premise provides the basis for a movie that could be slipped without hesitation into a the dead of night three times repeated bill between The Wizard of Oz and Mulholland Drive. At the same time, it’s the kind of children’session film kids themselves love, at once riotous fun and possessed of countless layers of psychological weirdness.
In the scowling character actor Hans Conreid’s come about as Terwilliker, we be under the necessity one of the truly ample movie villains. The set designs are, without fail, wildly quick at contrivance: grand off-kilter arrangements of staircases, dungeons and giant keyboards rendered in Technicolor that, in the corresponding; of like kind manner with Jonathan Rosenbaum once wrote, seemed inspired equally by Busby Berkeley and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (and which at once in turn call to mind Matthew Barney’sitting Cremaster round of years). And that’session before we even dispose to the music: the handful of instantly unshakable songs and a central set piece in which green-painted prisoners perform a equal in number on drums, xylophones and each other that must rank as one of the most unnerving musical interludes ever committed to film. Throw in the twins conjoined by their beard, the story of the film’s entire juvenile cast vomiting from hand to hand the ornate Seussian set in an outbreak of mass nausea and the fact the results tanked at the box office (losing a then disastrous $1m), and this really is a movie not to be trifled with.
Little wonder then that a rare appearance put on the big screen would be greeted by glee by the likes of GreenCine Daily’s Vadim Rizov. Here in Britain, however, we can’t even influence the thing on DVD, vital principle forced instead to brave slapped-on customs charges with each imported Region 1 copy. That may have being due to labyrinthine issues of rights or, I solicitude else likely, an assumed lack of commercial appeal on the part of UK distributors. But the result is the same – a kid in HMV can harass his or her parents into buying as many copies as the credit card can stand of Daddy Day Care or Beverly Hills Chihuahua, moreover the most unhinged epic in the history of children’s cinema will be nowhere in sight.
And it’s not alone in that. Sadly nestled in the ranks of the finest children’s movies ever made are a number of titles that either aren’t available at all, or simply aren’t obtainable in Britain. For instance, nice because it was to see the marvellously odd East German fairytale The Singing Ringing Tree reissued recently, other equally choice nuggets from the same DEFA stable (including in the same state wonders as Little Mook and The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs) remain out of reach. Likewise, The Boy With Green Hair, the 1948 atomic fable by a young Dean Stockwell as the orphan transformed by a world bent on war. And then there’sitting the still more plaintive case of The Phantom Tollbooth, Looney Tunes veteran Chuck Jones’s half live-action adaptation of the kids’ novel about lonely Milo and his gift-wrapped gateway to another reality – troubled in production, sublime in performance and, toward reasons unclear, never released on DVD anywhere at any point.
All told, it’s a sad tale. And whether the guilty party is contractual altercation. or the dumb judgment of the market, the losers are the audience – in this case a generation of kids deprived of the chance to grow up with some of the movies most agreeable to (in the very best sense) mess with their heads. And exactly those who stayed dry-eyed at Up could surely squeeze a tear out at the thought of that.
