The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T

Screening on Film

Directed by Roy Rowland.
With Hans Conried, Tommy Rettig, Peter Lind Hayes.
US, 1953, 35mm, color, 88 min.

Dr. Seuss wrote and Stanley Kramer produced what can only be referred to as the most surreal children’s fantasy film ever conceived. Bart Collins’s overbearing, prissy, and vaguely foreign piano teacher forces his 500 pupils to play his dreary piano exercises on a continuous keyboard located in his monstrous palace, while Bart’s mother is hypnotized and locked in a gilded cage. Dreamlike and imaginative, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T can be read as both an aesthetic form of delirium and as a fascinating expression of cold-war hysteria in America.