The success of Robert Wise‘s The Sound of Music (1965) caused Hollywood to over-estimate the public’s appetite for big budget musicals, leading to a string of over-inflated, all-singing, all-dancing flops – films like Joshua Logan’s Camelot (1967), Wise’s follow-up Star! (1968) and Gene Kelly’s Hello Dolly! (1969). The latter two were produced by 20th Century-Fox who were also behind Richard Fleischer’s ill-fated Doctor Dolittle (which began its torturous production before The Sound of Music was released but didn’t make it to cinemas until late 1967) and the combined losses of their over-stuffed musicals almost drove them to bankruptcy.
There had been several attempts over the years to adapt Hugh Lofting’s series of children’s books for the screen, dating back to a pre-merger Fox and their first attempt to seduce him into parting with the rights in 1922. Disney circled the books for a while but were making a derisory offer that he flatly refused. Fox returned to the idea in 1960s when actress and writer Helen Winston managed to get the rights but it to came to nothing. Eventually, Arthur P. Jacobs got the project off the ground as early as 1963 but by the time it hit the screen, he was probably regretting it. It was a troubled production, and the box office returns were scant compensation for all the heartache and bitterness.
The film’s biggest problem is that the script by Leslie Bricusse (who took over from original screenwriter Alan Jay Lerner and who wrote the film’s songs) meanders all over the place in a desperate and ultimately failed search for an actual plot. In between a clutch of largely unmemorable songs (after the Oscar-winning Talk to the Animals and the un-nominated I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It and Doctor Dolittle it’s difficult to remember what most of them are mere minutes after hearing them) we’re introduced to the eccentric GP of small Victorian English town Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, Dr John Dolittle (Rex Harrison) who has learned to communicate with animals and now largely just treats them rather than humans. Dolittle is accused by General Bellowes (Peter Bull) of stealing a horse and ruining his fox hunt and his niece, Emma Fairfax (Samantha Eggar) talks an immediate dislike to him. Dolittle takes delivery of a rare Pushmi-pullyu, a double-headed species of llama, which he takes to a circus run by Albert Blossom (Richard Attenborough). Dolittle frees a performing seal named Sophie who is missing her husband and local fishermen mistake the seal for a woman and Dolittle is arrested and charged with murder.
He’s sentenced to imprisonment in a lunatic asylum but his friends Matthew (Anthony Newley) and young Tommy Stubbins (William Dix) help him escape and together they set off in search of the fabled the Great Pink Sea Snail with Emma stowing away on their journey. The party winds up on the floating island of Sea-Star where, after lots of nonsense involving the locals who are all named after authors, led by William Shakespeare X (Geoffrey Holder), the island is pushed back to the mainland by a whale and the Sea Snail turns up.
All of this inconsequential business takes a whopping two-and-half-hours (including the intro and outro music and an intermission) to relate and one can’t help but feel that there’s barely enough material for one of those hours. There’s no big climax, never much sense of jeopardy and far too many diversions into flashbacks and side-stories for its own good. One might feel like cutting it some slack for its unusual for the time pro-animal stance – but it rather blows that when Dolittle’s first instinct on receiving the Pushmi-Pullyu is to try to put in on display to paying customers in a circus and exploit its rarity.
Whimsy rarely makes for exhilarating viewing and Doctor Dolittle is a beautiful looking (thanks to Robert Surtees’s photography and Mario Chiari’s production design) but listless and enervating film. Almost everyone, from Harrison down, feels miscast and out of sorts, never elevating their characters above the level of simple stereotypes – Newley’s caricatured Irishman is one of the film’s most egregious missteps. Harrison doesn’t so much sing his songs as simply read the lyrics with the occasional vocal inflection while other cast members, especially Newley of course, are more comfortable and entertaining during the musical numbers.
Production was, as noted, fraught with difficulties. Poor weather conditions plagued the shoot in Castle Combe in Wiltshire; the majority of the trained animals that were supposed to be in the film had to quarantined on arriving in the UK, leaving the production scrambling for last-minute replacements; a parrot supposedly learned to mimic Fleischer shouting “cut” wreaking havoc in the process; future explorer and adventurer Ranulph Fiennes – then still a serving member of the British Army – was so incensed by the production damming a river that he plotted to blow up the offending structure and was arrested for his troubles; and Harrison alienated Newley with allegedly antisemitic comments while Holder was supposedly racially abused by members of the actor’s retinue. So when the film finally opened in December 1967, its budget having tripled from its original $6 million to $18 million, while Disney’s vastly better The Jungle Book was still doing the rounds, the disappointing box office take must have been particularly wounding.
But Fox were determined that they had a blockbuster on their hands and aggressively campaigned for the film to be nominated in the Oscars and it beggars belief that it was even considered for the Best Film nod, let alone actually nominated (In the Heat of the Night was the eventual winner and Doctor Dolittle, a bloated and dreary fantasy with very little going for it, was up against the likes of Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.)
It didn’t do much for the film’s box office sadly – Fox suggested that they needed to take $31 million just to break even but it eventually took little more than $16 million on its initial release. It lost the company $11 million. It has picked up a loyal following over the years – largely by people who recall it with some fondness from childhood but forget how extraordinarily long and boring it really is – and in 1998 it was remade with Eddie Murphy in the title role leading to a string of sequels, not all starring Murphy – Dr. Dolittle 2 (2001), Dr. Dolittle 3 (2006), Dr. Dolittle: Tail to the Chief (2008), and Dr. Dolittle: Million Dollar Mutts (2009). A stage musical adaptation of Fleischer’s film opened in London’s West End in the same year as the first Murphy film, running for over 400 performances with Phillips Schofield as Dolittle. Robert Downey Jr had a go at the role in Stephen Gaghan’s Dolittle 2020 which also proved to be a very expensive box office flop.
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