The Castro Theater renovations are stretching on, so when the SF Silent Film Festival announced that this year's edition, slated for November, will be at the Orinda Theater, I went to check it out.
Last year's substitute location, the Palace of Fine Arts, though lovely, was in a tricky location for most people, particularly non-drivers (I realized I couldn't go to the first or last movies of the day, as getting to & from the venue took so much time). There were also very few food options, though the Festival did bring in some food trucks. The Orinda Theater, it turns out, is a very brief & convenient walk from the Orinda BART station; you don't even have to cross a street! (I have to change trains to get there from where I live, & it's supposed to be a timed transfer but hahaha, I usually have to wait ten to fifteen minutes for the transfer train but it's still easier than the Palace) There's food available in the theater itself, & their popcorn is like what we used to get at the Castro, before the new owners wrecked the snack bar, & there are lots of different restaurants immediately around the theater, with the usual options (Indian, Japanese, Vietnamese, bistro, Greek, pizza, hamburgers). The main auditorium of the theater is quite large, & the whole building is period-appropriate Art Deco-ish. I think it's a good choice. My one concern is about the restrooms. I felt that at the Castro they should have stuck some port-a-potties outside, & they'll need to do the same here. That's one thing I'll give the Palace of Fine Arts – the interior of their theater is pretty non-descript, but they had generous restroom arrangements.
When I took my little field trip to scout the theater, I was only able to walk around outside & in the general vicinity. But I learned they have a Classic Movie Matinee the last Tuesday of every month. The selection for June was The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T, which I had never seen. I had a vague sense that Dr Seuss was connected to it. Indeed he was! He came up with the story, wrote the script, & wrote the lyrics (it's a musical). It was such a box-office bomb that he turned his back on Hollywood, & vice versa. But in the way of such things, what the movie-going public of 1953 couldn't stomach was very much to the taste of a smaller but vociferous group of fans who came across it on TV, & a cult was born.
The movie was produced by Stanley Kramer, & the combination of Stanley Kramer & Dr Seuss is not even the most improbable thing about this movie. It concerns a boy, Bartholomew Collins, who takes piano lessons from the acerbic Dr Terwilliger, who berates him for not practicing enough. There's also the boy's widowed mother, & a friendly plumber. The boy falls asleep & most of the movie is an Oz-like (referring to the 1939 film, not the books) dream that reflects the boy's life & worries back in distorted (but maybe basically accurate) form.
Before we saw the movie, though, we were treated to selected short subjects, old-school-movie-going-style. There was a newsreel from the 1960s (President Johnson was calling for a national day of prayers & recollection over America's racial strife – the never-ending story). There were some astutely chosen cartoons: a Warner Brothers Merrie Melodies adaptation of Seuss's Horton Hatches the Egg, a Puppetoons short of Seuss's The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, &, to tie in with the piano theme, a short of a very young Liberace (billed as "Walter Liberace") playing the Tiger Rag while the camera occasionally cut to two young women standing around the piano, grinning at us vacantly & bopping uneasily. Then film critic & program curator Matías Bombal came out, wearing a dazzling robe that turned out to be one of the original costumes for Dr Terwilliger, to introduce the film. His comments were pleasantly chatty but to the point, giving us a brief history of the film & its troubles & eventual emergence into the select company of cult classics. He also told us that we were about to see a new restoration, with the Technicolor at its most resplendent.
The movie is indeed fantastic to look at, & utterly bizarre. Hollywood gets slated a lot for its lack of originality, but sometimes it produces something so strange you have to wonder what they were thinking (well, what the money people were thinking; the creative people were just being creative). Dr Terwilliger hates all musical instruments that aren't pianos, & has a dungeon in which he keeps them & their players, leading to an extended & wonderful musical number, with many Seussian-style instruments played by greenish, mostly shirtless male dancers, that seems like a collaboration between Busby Berkeley & Bosch. The Doctor has invented a gigantic piano that will be played simultaneously by Bartholomew & 499 other boys (500 boys, ten fingers each, hence Dr T's 5,000 fingers). This musical triumph will somehow ensure the success of Dr Terwilliger's "happy fingers" institute as well as the continued devotion to the doctor of Bart's widowed mother. I'll stop the plot summary there, because while the plot is entertaining enough, the look of the film is what really grabs the attention.
The colors are saturated & glowing. I recollect lots of dark purples, golden shades of orange, teetering skyscrapers, curved scarlet ladders that go nowhere, pickle juice that sparkles in its pale green. The musical numbers are quite delightful; it's too bad that after the initial previews the studio cut several of them (if you're making a crazy musical, there's no point in trimming it back to half crazy). Seuss's lyrics are, as you might expect, clever & witty, & the music by Frederick Hollander & Morris Stoloff is catchy & charming (despite its financial failure, the movie was remembered at Oscar time with a nomination for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture; it lost to Alfred Newman for Call Me Madam).
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The movie is also very well cast. Tommy Rettig as Bartholomew manages the tricky task of representing what is supposed to be a "typical American boy" while not being repulsive (usually that type, particularly from the mid-century – think of any Disney live-action show from the 1950s or 1960s – just creeps me out, but Rettig is very appealing). Hans Conried is menacing but amusing, even a bit endearing, as Dr Terwilliger. Peter Lind Hayes is both dry & warm as the plumber, Mr Zabladowski, & Mary Healy is winsome as the widowed mother. But it's the whole look of the film, the wildness of its conceptions, the wit of its performance, that really carry the day.
A friend of mine who had seen the movie many years ago & was less entertained than I was texted to me, "Aren't you supposed to be able to read all sorts of Freudian & Cold War subtext into it?" Yes indeed, I can certainly see that. There's a lot of mid-century-movie-Freudianism about the boy & his mother (who is pretty much the only woman in the entire film) & his search for a father figure (the plumber rather than Dr Terwilliger). I have to say, for 1950s Hollywood Freud the handling is fairly light, certainly when compared to some of Hitchcock's films. And for the Cold War, there is the fight against a somewhat ludicrous but genuinely threatening authoritarian, one who stifles dissent & insists on having his rules obeyed endlessly & automatically, as well as a device that switches the balance of power & which gets referred to as "atomic". But I would be surprised if there weren't also theories about a queer (male) subtext: the dreams of our all-American lad seem to involve more partly dressed men than you usually see in a 1950s musical, he seems very determined to have his mother marry the plumber, mostly so he & his new Dad can have a homosocial relationship (fishing together, like something out of The Wind in the Willows), &, as mentioned, the only female around is the boy's mother. And of course the whole impetus of the film is about expressing your individuality in the face of a repressive, conformist, & unaccepting authority.
I'm not thrilled that the rebellion takes the form of refusing to practice the piano. The value of music is too obvious to need my insistence, & you get there by practicing. The suggestion that "normal" children, particularly boys, don't like practicing piano is a toxic cliché. But I can look past that annoyance, which is sort of the key that unlocks the wildness of the film. I'm ready to join the cult.
Next up, on 29 July, is The Asphalt Jungle, which I also have never seen.
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