"If one place is as good as any other, it's high time we decided. Otherwise when we get there, we won't know we've arrived."
Doctor Dolittle (Rex Harrison)
For most people living today, I suppose, the mention of "Doctor Dolittle" brings to mind images of Eddie Murphy in the 1998 movie that went by that title and was often labeled a remake of the movie that made its debut 50 years ago today.
In fact, though, the movie that was released in 1998 was merely inspired by the books by Hugh Lofting; very little of the material from the original books was used in either of Murphy's "Doctor Dolittle" movies.
The movie that marks the 50th anniversary of its American premiere today (it premiered in England a week earlier), however, was a more faithful telling of Lofting's stories — well, three of them, anyway. Lofting wrote nearly two dozen Doctor Dolittle books.
In the 1967 version Doctor Dolittle was played by Rex Harrison. He was a physician in Victorian England who had treated humans but shifted to treating animals — and lived with a veritable menagerie. His sister once served as his housekeeper, but as the animal population in the house grew, she delivered an ultimatum: Either he got rid of the animals, or she would leave. He chose the animals.
Doctor Dolittle claimed he could talk to the animals — and he did. Movie audiences saw him carrying on conversations with the parrot. (The parrot's voice was supplied by talented voice actress Ginny Tyler.)
Ostensibly Lofting's books were written for children, but there was a decidedly adult angle to the movie's dialogue. For example:
"I speak over 2,000 languages," the parrot told Doctor Dolittle, "including Dodo and Unicorn."
"Unicorn?" Doctor Dolittle asked.
"I had a classical education," the parrot replied.
Movie audiences in 1967 first saw Doctor Dolittle when Anthony Newley's character and his young friend brought a sick duck to see the doctor.
Then, when he was treating a horse, Doctor Dolittle offended the horse's owner, and he was scolded for it by the owner's niece (Samantha Eggar).
A friend of Doctor Dolittle's sent him a rare pushme–pullyou — a creature that looked like a llama with heads at both ends of its body — and the doctor took it to a circus (Richard Attenborough played the ringmaster), where it became the main attraction. At the circus the doctor made friends with a seal that longed to be reunited with her husband at the North Pole, and he tried to help her escape, dressing her in a woman's clothes. Fishermen observed the doctor tossing the clothed seal into the water and believed he had murdered a woman.
They had him arrested; the judge in the trial was the horse's owner.
Although the doctor was acquitted, the judge insisted on sentencing him to a lunatic asylum. His animal friends saved him, and they set sail in search of the Great Pink Sea Snail.
It turned out that Eggar had stowed away on board, and in making her case to be permitted to stay, Eggar's character proclaimed, "I promise to ask for no special privileges."
"I promise to grant none," Doctor Dolittle replied.
They decided their destination would be Sea Star Island, a floating island that was determined to be in the Atlantic Ocean at that time.
Well, that led to other adventures for the travelers — and probably contributed to the verdict of sneak preview audiences that it was too long. Trying to compress three children's books into a single movie was a bit ambitious. Cuts were subsequently made, but even at its final 2½–hour running time, it was probably still too long.
The movie ran into production problems that, in hindsight, probably were predictable — and many may have been nothing more than legends. For example, there were stories that a goat ate a script and a parrot learned how to yell "Cut!"
But there was no disputing the evidence of the bottom line. The movie made about $9 million at the box office; it cost $17 million to make.
There could be many reasons for that. Personally, I have always wondered if the fact that musicals' popularity was on the wane in the late 1960s could explain why "Doctor Dolittle" fared so poorly.
Nevertheless the studio launched an unprecedented campaign for Oscar recognition and was rewarded with nine nominations, including Best Picture. It even won two — for Best Song ("Talk to the Animals") and Best Special Visual Effects.
