Watch The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. For Free

One of my all time favorites.

hyped garbage

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Thank goodness half the musical numbers were cut and thank goodness for FF on the TV remote. However too bad the many long rehearsed bearded roller skating twin scenes were left out. It would have been better if they could have gotten Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby as planned but then it is understandable that they turned down the opportunity to appear.It is interesting how this does have the Dr Zuess look as well as the fifties time period making this film in corour and I liked the Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka analogies. Just the same I would rather take piano lessons than watch this again.

A film for adults that's by children, you see: A romp and a rile that'll fill you with glee! A film of a dream running wild on the loose, All from the mind of the great Dr. Seuss.A tale of a boy and his frights and his fears, And they may be many, despite his few years: Concerns for his mother, he wishes no ill of her, He trembles and quakes at his Dr. Terwilliker.The good Dr. T plays piano, you see, And teaches young boys to play "just like me," He detest violins and honking trombones, Bassoons, tambourines, and loud saxophones.To his pupil, Bart Collins, he seems quite a villain, He has cast a spell on Bart's mom, Mrs. Collins. He worries she loves him, but turning now sees Emerge from the kitchen Mr. Zabladowski.The handsome young plumber! A gentleman, he! And Bart wouldn't mind being a Zabladowski. And now with this thought, Bart began to doze off, And drifted to dreamland, with this in his thoughts.He was whisked away to a far-away place - A magic, musical, Seuss-ical space. He fell to a place of ill repute, Trapped in Terwilliker's dread Institute.Dr. T had constructed a massive piano, Made to be played by his 500 pupils. 10 fingers per pupil, and so you can see, The 5,000 fingers of Dr. T.Mr. Zabladowski works as a plumber, Installing 500 sinks is quite a bummer. Young Bart persuades him to check on Ms. Collins, Stating that she's been hypnotized by the villain.The plumber's distracted by a Dr. T song, And told to go back and finish his job. Afterwards Dr. T orders his killing, And Bart had been there and heard the whole thing.The two of them both try and fail to flee; They're thrown in the dungeon of old Dr. T. They make a bizarre noise-sucking machine, And to play the piano, Bart is retrieved.When 500 pupils sit down to play, Bart's machine sucks all the music away. Dismayed, old Terwilliker has quite a fit, But soon sees the problem, and seeks to correct it.Bart and the doctor meet face-to-face, And Bart puts Terwilliker right in his place. He threatens the Dr. with his contraption, (Because it's atomic), Bart now has traction.Dr. Terwilliker pleads for life, And agrees to give up his institute and wife. The kids all cheer and mash the piano, But suddenly, the noise-sucker starts to explode!Bart Collins wakes up, home once again, But things as they were seem to have changed. Bart suggests Mother and Zabladowski go out, They leave together and Bart jumps about.All in all, can't you see that this film is not made For those little children to be entertained? This movie's for grown-ups, to make them all see How tough the life of a young kid can be.From the one who understood, that old Dr. Seuss, He spun a tall tale of a kid on the loose, And taken as-is, the film is real good. Why not go and watch it when you're in the Seuss mood?

Here in the 21st Century, I'm not sure who this film's proper audience is, besides cinephiles. The protagonist is a kid, a fact which will turn off many adult viewers. At the same time, there are some amazingly elaborate and artistically choreographed dance and acrobatic sequences, prefiguring Cirque du Soleil...the complexity and wonder of which might be lost on kids. (I also wonder if kids' attention might wander during these sequences...)I am, of course, a cinephile now, but was I at age 10, when my brothers and I watched this back in the 1970's, broadcast by a UHF TV station out of Youngstown, Ohio? Because we liked this film then. Would today's kids, fed a steady diet of video games, MTV and R-rated movies like this film? I doubt it, but you never know.My 21st Century cinephile self recently re-watched this film, after 40 years, finding it to be beautiful and frightening. It is a clever mix of Suessian imagery and the anxieties of childhood (which adults remember better than we admit) contained within the forms and conventions of the 1950's Hollywood musical. The cast is excellent, particularly the dancers, but credit should be distributed all around. Mary Healy is very sexy as Bart's mother, and her real-life husband, Peter Lind Hayes, portrays the kind of adult every kid wishes he knew. Hans Conried, at what turned out to the pinnacle of his career, is perfect. Even Bart, played by Tommy Rettig is good (child actors are often very hard to stomach). Almost the entire film is an extended dream sequence, showing life for a young boy inside a surreal fortress of mandatory piano lessons, and where strict, autocratic order is enforced by a legion of uniformed, thuggish soldiers. Very obvious to my adult self, it is a commentary on authoritarianism and totalitarianism, in the world of an American child. It is interesting to consider that the year of this film's release, 1953, was the peak of the Senator Joe McCarthy witch-hunts. The following year, theocratic authoritarians successfully pressured the US Congress into mandating the phrase 'one nation under God' into the Pledge of Allegiance, which was itself an oath forced upon millions of schoolchildren 5 days a week. Among many memorable moments is a solo titled 'Because We're Kids,' containing this verse: 'Now just because your throat has got a deeper voice, And lots of wind to blow it out, At little kids who dare not shout, You have no right, you have no right, To boss and beat us little kids about...'So, as I said before, this film will not be 'accessible' to everyone. But to those of us for whom it is, there are rewards.

Oddball fantasy about a boy escaping into dreams to avoid his tyrannical piano teacher. Trouble is his dreams are also terrorized by the same teacher and his minions.The movie's definitely not for everyone. There's little dialog and in a cast of hundreds, there's exactly one woman! Most of the time is taken up by either dance routines or little Collins (Rettig) running hither and thither to get away from his tormentors. Frankly, I fast-forwarded through some of the routines. Unlike some other reviewers, the sets and art direction impressed me as imaginative and well-done. The candy box colors also hold the eye, and I wouldn't be surprised the exotic project was intended to compete with new-fangled TV.Also looks to me like the woodenly conventional Zablodowski (Hayes) is intended as reassurance amid all the unconventional settings. Taking a child to the movie would be a risk, I think, since the material could easily come across as nightmarish, whatever the original intentions. Little Rettig does well as the average boy, while the eccentric Conreid is at his most archly sinister. And what about that chaotic scene of hundreds of little boys escaping that piano from heck. I'll bet that was a year's worth of headache trying to keep a mob of ten- year olds in line.In years of viewing, I've seen nothing quite like this production. Frankly, I'm not sure I liked the overall result. Definitely, this oddity should be approached with caution, unless you like seeing bands of men dance to no particular purpose or little boys run and run and run.