Samantha Eggar – Movie Musings

The biggest crimes of this musical disaster is that is both hugely dull and thuddingly charmless.

Director: Richard Fleischer

Cast: Rex Harrison (Dr John Dolittle), Samantha Eggar (Emma Fairfax), Anthony Newley (Matthew Mugg), Richard Attenborough (Albert Blossom) Peter Bull (General Bellowes), Muriel Landers (Mrs Edie Blossom), William Dix (Tommy Stubbins), Geoffrey Holder (Willaim Shakespeare X)

Sometimes you think a film can’t possibly be as wretched as its reputation says. And then you watch Doctor Dolittle. This musical monstrosity, charmlessly adapted from a series of children’s novels, nearly sunk 20^th Century Fox, losing millions (but still gaining nine Oscar nominations due to relentless lobbying by the studio). It’s not aged well: syrupy, over-long, lacking in any magic and, most damningly of all, crashingly dull over its bum-numbing runtime. Nearly everything either went wrong or is wrong with this.

Its plot is both tediously straightforward and frustratingly vague. In 1845, in the postcard-village setting of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, eccentric Doctor John Dolittle (Rex Harrison) has become fluent in every animal tongue there is. Some think he’s a crazy misanthrope – after all his house is packed with every type of animal you can name and he spends the day chatting to them and being rude to humans – but others think he’s charming. (Sadly, you may find yourself siding with the former.) He dreams of finding the legendary Great Pink Sea Snail (for reasons that are never quite clear) and eventually heads on a whimsical journey with some new-made friends.

Doctor Dolittle’s principal crime, perhaps the reason why it has so few defenders, is that it’s at heart a very boring film. It takes nearly fifty minutes for even a trace of the plot to kick-in, then it meanders around a side quest of returning a seal to the sea before rushing the final act about the Great Pink Sea Snail. Really nothing much happens, and the stakes feel tiny: there is the vague danger that the unflappable Dolittle might get banged up in an asylum and (I suppose) the outside chance the native tribe of the floating island they encounter might sacrifice them, but that’s about it. Essentially, the film assumes that to entertain the family market, a bit of whimsy, a lot of Harrison nodding and “I see”-ing to animals and a few tunes (some of which are hummable) was enough to keep the kids happy. It’s not.

Any poor child strapped down to watch this light-weight confection, puffed up with an epic run-time and large-scale sets, will find themselves wading through as much animal shit as the film’s stars did on set. There is, at a push, one memorable sequence in Doctor Dolittle: Richard Attenborough’s circus master launching into a high-tempo musical number as he marvels at the pushmi-pullyu Dolittle is trying to flog him (the animal itself is so painfully obviously the front of two panto horses stitched together, I can only assume Attenborough was stunned by Dolittle’s cheek). Attenborough sells the heck out of this (to be honest) bland ditty, committing no end to its high-kicking energy (I like to think Fleischer immediately thought “that’s the guy I need to play John Christie”).

Attenborough can’t really sing or dance but at least he can give a good impression of someone who can. Harrison doesn’t bother. Of course, Harrison was arriving on this fresh from the glory of My Fair Lady where he had worked out it was possible to become a rich musicals star by talking with a bit of rhythm. Doctor Dolittle is set up for him to do the same, talking through his numbers – the problem being none of them are as good as anything by Alan Jay Lerner (who was supposed to write this, before he pulled out). Harrison murders a series of songs that might just have passed muster with an actual song-and-dance man. The low-point is early on as “Talk to the Animals” degenerates to Harrison literally bellowing at point blank range to a field of sheep and cows.

Dolittle has been further set up for Harrison to coast by essentially retrofitting his character into Henry Higgins #2. Dolittle shares all of Higgins’ misanthropic, obsessive tendencies only this time without someone like Audrey Hepburn to make us like him. His character is infuriatingly inconsistent, not least in his attitude to animals. The guy respects animals so much, he won’t eat meat but is perfectly happy to sell the pushmi-pullyu to a circus but then rescues a trapped female seal from the same circus? (I really hope this isn’t due to any feelings he has for said seal. Harrison whispers what sounds suspiciously like a love song to the seal while it’s dressed as a lady, even kissing the poor animal. This is probably the only kids film you’ll see to softly imply bestiality is a way to live your life).

There isn’t really a single interesting or particularly likeable character in Doctor Dolittle. Presumably thinking every kids’ film needs a kid, Dolittle (and we) are saddled with William Dix’s Tommy Stubbins, the sort of vomit-inducing stage-school brat most kids actually watching the film would love to pinch lunch money from. Anthony Newley can at least sing and dance, even if he is stuck with a bland Orisih accent (not helped by Harrison’s envy on-set leading to several of Newley’s scenes being cut). Samantha Eggar is utterly hamstrung by playing a character whom no one involved in the film can decide is Newley’s love interest (age-appropriate) or Harrison’s (because he’s the star) so sort of makes her the partner of both of them (so Dolittle can also claim to be the first kids’ film that promotes polyamory, making it quite advanced).

Oddly the animals themselves feel like rather minor characters. I assume this is because the production wanted to use real animals (since the times it uses puppets, they are breathtakingly unconvincing) but real animals have the unfortunate problem of not being actors. The most prominent animal, an irritating macaw called Polynesia, talks fluent English anyway so the others hardly need Dolittle’s skills. This even caused a slight kerfuffle on launch: the promotion had led with pictures of Dolittle riding a giraffe, a scene first cut then hurriedly shoved back in as part of a pointless montage on the island, after complaints.

Most of all, Doctor Dolittle feels like a charmless chore to watch. Nothing is sweet, nothing is charming, the hero is frequently a stand-offish jerk and you get no sense anyone really wants to be there. Which is, apparently, the case as during its hideously long production, the animals caused nightmares (everyone got shat on multiple times, which at least prepared them for the film’s critical reception), the Wiltshire village used for the location collectively lost its rag as over-running shooting meant no trace of the modern world was allowed in for months on end, and Harrison (allegedly) behaved like a total tit (at one point Christopher Plummer was signed up to replace him, then paid his full agreed salary after Harrison agreed to continue).

Doctor Dolittle trudges, inevitably, towards its chocolate-box finale – but anyone still watching will surely long-since ceased to care about anyone or anything involved in this mess. A later stage adaptation did salvage some of Leslie Briscusse’s songs, but nothing else was saved from this disaster that killed stone-dead nearly everyone’s careers. It really is as bad as they say.

Samantha Eggar is held captive by Terence Stamp in the unsettling The Collector

Director: William Wyler

Cast: Terence Stamp (Freddie Clegg), Samantha Eggar (Miranda Grey), Mona Washbourne (Aunt Annie), Maurice Dallimore (Colonel Whitman)

A lonely butterfly collector wins the pools. He’s rich, he can have everything he wants – but he’s still an outsider who can’t get a girl. Surely if a woman would just get to know him he’d find love. So the easiest way of doing that is probably kidnapping the woman you had a crush on at school, locking her in a carefully furnished basement in your Tudor mansion house and just wait for her to fall in love with you. Sounds like a perfect plan right?

William Wyler’s adaptation of John Fowles’ best-selling literary first novel sees Terence Stamp as the maladjusted loner and Samantha Eggar as his victim. It’s fascinating reading about the film today and the attitudes and perceptions towards it. Today the film is chilling in the obsessive, dangerous, self-pitying self-justifications of Freddie Clegg. But in the mid-60s a number of reviewers commented on the pity they felt for the kidnapper, and even expressed that in many ways he was acting on fantasies every healthy man has had (they haven’t). Quite rightly the film comes across differently today, a far more unsettling and disturbing portrait than it did at the time.

Wyler’s direction is intimate and a fine mixture of the theatrical – with its often single locations and two-actor scenes – and cinematic, particularly in the way he subtly builds up a Hitchcockian level of tension around the possibility of discovery and escape for Miranda. Sure visually he is a little too much in love with the crash zoom on key items (chloroform for example in Freddie’s car), and devices that seem a little too obvious (like the use of black and white for the film’s only significant flashback) but he mounts the entire film with an unsettling claustrophobia that works very well.

Further he draws out two fantastic performances from the leads. Terence Stamp was not a natural choice for the shy, timid outsider turned abductor – he’s obviously way too handsome and physically assured for the role – but he marshals very well the blinded arrogance of a man who believes the whole world would march to his tune if it only stopped and listened. His Freddie Clegg is softly-spoken, polite and controlled – so much so you almost forget how insane he is. Stamp also does a remarkable physical performance, making himself seem shorter and less dynamic than he really is, his body language having more than the hint of the schoolboy about it. Domineering, controlling, bullying and totally incapable of internal analysis of his actions.

You realise watching the films events unfold – and Freddie’s inability to analyse the emotional truth behind them – that he is alone because he fundamentally doesn’t understand human relationships. While many of the (male) film reviewers at the time found this strangely tragic, today it’s hard to feel anything but contempt for his cruel self-pity.

The more difficult role falls to Samantha Eggar as Miranda. Wyler’s attempt to get the best performance from here seems pretty kin to the abduction the character goes through in the film – she was kept in isolation on the film set, Stamp was instructed to not talk to her outside of shooting while Wyler constantly held the threat of dismissal over her. More than a few echoes of Hitchcock in that – and Wyler’s praise on the film’s completion for Eggar’s (Oscar nominated and Cannes Award winning) performance as more than a whiff of self-praise to it. But Eggar herself is superb as a woman who oscillates between panic, desperation, ingratiating kindness, anger, contempt and fear. Miranda is a woman who tries everything she can to get out of this situation, only to constantly butt heads against the twin devils of her countryside isolation and Freddie’s own lack of emotional and intellectual intelligence.

Because the film interestingly makes clear what a tedious and not-very-bright monomaniacal man Freddie is, compared with the educated and quick-witted Miranda. When she tries to engage him on a discussion about modern art, he is utterly incapable of beginning to appreciate artists such as Picasso (‘It doesn’t look real’), completely fails to grasp any of the ideas in The Catcher in the Rye (the book she suggests he reads) or their relation to him, and is drawn only towards the blandest, most traditional drawings that she creates while whiling away the time in captivity. He fanatically collects butterflies, rooms lined with framed specimens that he can discuss in detail but with no concept of their beauty. Every time Miranda tries to scratch the surface of Freddie to connect with him she constantly discovers he has no depths at all, he’s a little boy lost in the world who can’t understand why he can’t collect people with the ease he catches and kills butterflies.

Whether the film has some sympathy for Freddie is less clear. Maurice Jarre’s luscious score certainly seems to suggest we should feel something for this misguided guy, but today it’s almost impossible to do so. The film works just as well without those feelings of implied sympathy though, which is a tribute to Wyler’s even-handed and controlled direction. Certainly Miranda’s fear and oppression are easy to connect with.

Is this a Stockholm syndrome film? Miranda – an intelligent and cunning woman – quickly realises that while she is the victim, Freddie’s desire to be seen as sort of chivalric gentleman does give her some power over his treatment of her – he wants her to fall in love for real with him. How much does she start to feel sympathy for this misguided loner? Is there any hint of real feeling at any point in her eventual attempt to seduce him (I doubt it heavily watching the film, but I may be adding a modern perspective, as I suspect Wyler wants to leave a hint there – again the score supports this feeling a bit)? I’m not sure – but the film’s eventual ending does leave little doubt that Freddie is a dangerous man, and the world is a less save place with him in it.

The Collector isn’t perfect – and perhaps its attitudes have dated – but it still has a real skill to it, some wonderful scenes – and two terrific performances from its lead actors, who I think have never been better than they are here. Wyler’s last success – and you can see his debt to the later work of Michael Powell and Alfred Hitchcock in each frame, even while he fails to match either of them – it still makes for an unsettling, troubling and fascinating watch.