The New Pictures

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (Stanley Kramer; Columbia) is a freshly told, more than slightly screwball little film fantasy which is likely to divide moviegoers into violently opposing camps.Small boys (and even girls) of all ages should find it exciting and rattling good fun. Mothers of small boys, piano teachers and grownups who prefer their movies to follow familiar grooves may be repelled or bored by it.

The story is basically as simple--and as wildly and lavishly dressed--as a small boy's own imagination. The boy of the story hates piano lessons but is kept at his practicing by his well-meaning mother and his music teacher, an evil, oily character named Dr. Terwilliker. Falling asleep at the keyboard, the boy is transported in a Technicolored dream to a fantastic castle in which Dr. Terwilliker keeps a mile-long two-decker piano. At this preposterous musical instrument the teacher plots and schemes to trap 500 boys ("Think of it! Five thousand fingers!") who have been dragged from their ballplaying. Happily, a likable plumber named Zabladowski comes to the rescue of the boy and his pretty mother (who was only under the unspeakable Terwilliker's hypnotic spell), and Dr. T., of course, gets his comeuppance.

Fantasy without coyness is rare, and fantasy about childhood without overdoses of syrup is even rarer. The 5,000 Fingers, even at its most fantastic, contrives to keep its brisk sense of humor and its matter-of-fact, child's-eye view. The villains employed by Dr. T. are a carefree mixture of pirates, heavies out of The Arabian Nights, dabblers in atomic science, and cheerleaders for a rival junior high football team (one of the best of the picture's ten songs is a close-harmony, walls-of-poison-ivy number, softly sung by a group of "us stinkers"--Dr. T.'s plug-ugly hirelings).

Derived from a story by oldtime Cartoonist Dr. Seuss ("Quick, Henry! The Flit!"), the movie wanders through mammoth sets that seem as boundless as a boy's dreams, recording, without undue surprise, the most surprising details. Dr. T.'s castle is equipped with topless sky ladders, sliding doors, subterranean passages, split staircases that lead nowhere, an outsize shovel for putting the doctor's ill-gotten greenbacks in the safe, and a pair of Siamese-twin flunkies, joined by one long white beard, who go about their chores on roller skates. Best of many good sequences: a bizarre ballet, staged by Choreographer Eugene (Billy the Kid) Loring, in which a dungeonful of non-piano-playing musicians writhe in expressionistic torment as they are punished by fanatical Pianoman Terwilliker.

Hans Conried makes a thoroughly mean Terwilliker. Peter Lind Hayes as the plumber and Mary Healy as the mother are ingratiating new screen personalities. As the boy, ten-year-old Tommy Rettig moves appealingly through all the excitement in striped polo shirt, blue jeans, and a blue beanie with a hand ("Happy Fingers") fixed on top.

Dr. Seuss (real name: Theodor Seuss Geisel) admits he had an ax to grind in 5,000 Fingers: as a child, he took piano lessons "from a man who rapped my knuckles with a pencil whenever I made a mistake ... I made up my mind I would finally get even with that man. It took me 43 years to catch up with him. He became the Terwilliker of the movie."

When Geisel, now 49, left college (Dartmouth '25), he planned to be a professor of English literature. While waiting to land a teacher's job, he began sending his weird animal drawings to the humor magazines--signing them "Dr. Seuss." A cartoon printed in Judge finally nudged him into his new career. The picture showed a gigantic dragon nuzzling a knight in bed. The caption: "What! Another Dragon! And just after I sprayed the joint with ..." The advertising people for Standard Oil Co. (NJ.) saw the cartoon and decided that this was the man to help push their insecticide. Soon Seuss was going full-blast with his famous "Quick, Henry" panels. Since then he has plugged Flit, produced U.S. Army indoctrination films, scripted movie cartoons (Gerald McBoing Boing) and written and illustrated children's books (The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Thidwick: the Big-Hearted, Moose, H orton Hatches the Egg).

Getting 5,000 Fingers on film posed one momentous problem. That was the rainy day when Stanley Kramer & Co. tried to film the scene where all the small boys play Chopsticks on the double-decker piano monstrosity. By the time the big scene was ready to shoot, the "500" boys (there were actually only about 400) had managed to scatter outside into the rain and gorge themselves at a nearby hot-dog stand. Says Seuss: "Have you ever tried to get 400 sick, wet boys to play a piano?"

Genghis Khan (Manuel Conde; United Artists) is a Philippine-made movie that bears a striking resemblance to a rudimentary Hollywood western. A pseudo-biography of Genghis Khan (1162-1227), the savage Mongol conqueror, the action contains all sorts of riding, shooting (bow & arrow) and fighting. Notably bloodthirsty items: a contest among Mongol warriors featuring strangulation and eye-gouging; Genghis Khan, with an arrow protruding from his torso, demolishing four of the enemy by transfixing them simultaneously with one shot from a crossbow; the heroine (Elvira Reyes) about to be torn apart by wild horses; almost every variety of plunder and pillage, goring and evisceration, burning and looting, stabbing and beheading, putting to torch and torture.

Philippine Producer-Director Manuel Conde plays the part of Genghis Khan as a rather handsome, ferocious, cunning but likable fellow, a sort of medieval Shane roaming the Gobi Desert. The picture traces his career from his youthful nomad days to his campaign of world conquest. Although the movie may offer nothing much of historical significance, it is undoubtedly an excellent outlet for the pent-up aggressions of well-behaved moviegoers. Filmed on a large scale, it has both barbaric splendor and fighting frenzy. Even the royal heroine gets into the spirit of things by flailing about her, at one point, with an outsize sword.

Below the Sahara (RKO Radio), shot by Cameraman-Explorer Armand (Savage Splendor) Denis, is a deluxe Technicolored safari through British East Africa, Rhodesia, South Africa, Angola and the Belgian Congo. The result is intermittently zoological and anthropological, always strikingly pictorial.

Some of the shots, in the words of Baedeker, need not detain the movie tourist: such standard screen-travel stuff as gamboling hippopotamuses, lolling lions, native dances, Pygmies. But the picture also has more than its share of unusual sequences: a couple of male elephants in a ponderous tusk-to-tusk battle over a female; a 600-lb. sea lion being roped in a net; a beautiful pelican water ballet along the southwest African coast; French Equatorial Africa tribal warriors, armed with ancient muskets, on a gorilla hunt; a hilarious ostrich rodeo at the Carr Hartley animal farm in Kenya; a muzzled cheetah trained to run down the fleet young Thompson's gazelle.

Most dramatic shot: a blood-freezing sequence, accidentally photographed from behind a camera blind, of a leopard silently stalking and clawing a native boy before being driven off.

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