Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

earlytalkie THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T is a movie that simply has to be experienced to be appreciated. Tommy Rettig is Bart, a normal little boy who emphatically does not want to be tied down to his piano lessons. His teacher is a grueling taskmaster whom the boy loathes. He drifts off into a nightmare prison world where he is being commanded to play. His Mother has been hypnotized into assisting Dr. T, and Bart tries to enlist the help of the friendly plumber, August, to free her. Heloise, the Mother and August are winningly played by real life husband and wife team Mary Healy and Peter Lind Hayes. Bart is played by Tommy Rettig, and Dr. T is played with flamboyant relish by marvelous Hans Conried, and he steals the show. This film was conceived by Dr. Seuss, and I must say there is nothing else ever filmed to compare it to. A huge flop when first released in 1953, the film today has a well-deserved cult following. The beautiful Technicolor pops off the screen in the blu ray version that I saw this on.

flapdoodle64 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.

dougdoepke 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.

eltsr-1 I haven't seen it since but here is what I remember. I knew all the Dr. Seuss books by heart (I could read). I was taking piano lessons from our Protestant minister's wife who resembled Hans Conreid. My mom and I went on the bus to a large, metropolitan movie palace and we were well dressed. We watched the entire movie and then went home on the bus. Hans Conreid was always one of my favorites and even more recognizable as a voice. Lassie was a fixture later on our home TV. I don't think the movie had any real effect on me except that the books and my dreams were a lot better. I listened to radio every night as a child. I sometimes dreamed in black and white like most of the movies I saw as a child. I remember many of the scenes described in the written reviews and trailers. I'll see it again sometime. I'll let you know.