Cinema
Dr Dolittle (PG, selected cinemas)
Animal crackers
Mark Steyn
There was a book out in America recently by Peter Biskind called Easy Rid- ers, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and- Rock'n'Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. According to Biskind, at the 1967 Oscars, the Best Picture nominees represented a show-down between New and Old Holly- wood: Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate versus In The Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, with Dr Dolittle making up the numbers as that year's megaflop musical. Maybe it seemed that way at the time. But, 30 years on, those duelling doubles seem to have far more in common with each other than with Twister or Godzilla, and the best comment on Biskind's thesis is this: which one of the five did Hollywood choose to remake? The old animal conversationalist himself. Com- puter technology has finally caught up with the Pushmipullyu.
Even so, I wouldn't mind betting the old floppo '67 Doc still does better business on video than the other four nominees. A four-year-old friend of mine watches it all the time, to the despair of her parents. It is not, by any stretch, a good film: Rex Harri- son wanders around doing a warmed-up Henry Higgins, with Chi-Chi the chimp subbing for Eliza; Samantha Eggar, Richard Attenborough, Anthony NewleY and pretty well everyone except the guys in the Great Pink Sea Snail suit give flat per- formances; and the score, by Britain's Leslie Bricusse, is rather too tailored to Harrison's limitations — with the notable exception of 'Talk To The Animals'.
Sammy Davis. Jnr sang the song at the Academy Awards — though only once they'd agreed to postpone the ceremony until after Martin Luther King's funeral. 'I find it morally incongruous,' he said, `to sing "Talk To The Animals" while the man who could make a better world for my chil- dren is lying in state.' Two days later, Sam performed the song in his customary Nehru jacket and love-beads, punctuating Bricusse's droll laundry list about 'parlaying with pachyderms' and its fun rhymes (`Speak in hippopotamus/I'd say whynota- mus?') with 'Sock it to me, baby!' Handing over the Best Song Oscar, Barbra Streisand, for one, looked as if she still thought it 'morally incongruous': given the movie's desperate commercialism and its abysmal failure, everyone seemed to find its pres- ence at the Oscars an embarrassment.
Well, I wonder what Barbra and co. make of Dolittle '98. Owing little to Bricusse's version and less to the original stories by Hugh Lofting, the new Do aims its sights no higher than its own ass, its tenor pretty well summed up by the talking dog during the rectal examination scene: 'Why would a guy go into a line of work like that?' Quite. In America, the film had a 'PG-13' certificate. Why would Holly- wood make a family film families can't go and see? Or are the baby-boomers just can- nibalising the past for their own amuse- ment?
This time round, Dolittle is a San Fran- cisco doctor played with unprecedented restraint by Eddie Murphy, presumably in an attempt to reposition his image after last year's curious incident in which police pulled over his car and found him with a pre-operative transsexual hooker he claimed merely to be giving a lift home. At any rate, Murphy has opted to play Dean Martin to the critters' collective Jerry Lewis. The slight plot lifts off from the same point as Kieslowski's Three Colours: Red: driving home late one night, Dolittle accidentally hits a dog. This being not Kies- lowski but Betty Thomas (director of Howard Stern's Private Parts and The Brady Bunch Movie), the pooch responds with a terse 'Bonehead!' — which the Doctor, to his amazement, comprehends. As they leap and fly across the screen, the computer-generated sheep, ducks and Penguins are technically extraordinary. But every time they open their mouths or beaks they're leadenly earthbound. In the origi- nal, Dolittle was taught 498 animal lan- guages by Polynesia the parakeet. Here, the opposite seems to have occurred: the 498 species have mastered only the primi- tive grunts of Hollywood. Conversation tends either to the coprocentric — 'Watch Your head, I'm flyin' here!' — or the ego- centric — the endless pop-cultural refer- ences, which Hollywood assumes are all a modern audience can understand: 'I am Keyser Soze!' says some mutt at the dog pound, in an allusion to The Usual Suspects. The minor celebrities recruited to voice the animals — TV lesbian Ellen DeGeneres; disgraced kidvid host Paul Reubens — only emphasise that these computerised crea- tures are effectively just fronts for humans.
Needless to say, the new Dolittle is not a musical: the only songs heard on the soundtrack are the kind of generic pop- radio fodder that could decorate any film. Nor does it have an all-British cast: kids today can't relate to guys who talk funny, unless they're the baddies. As Rex Harri- son's Dolittle discovered, with the best will in the world, you can't make charm and magic happen. But, to their credit, Harri- son, Bricusse and co. tried. Three decades on, Do 2 is little more than a testament to the death of childhood — at least as far as mainstream entertainment's concerned. Poor old Rex Harrison was wasting his time. There's no need to talk to the ani- mals: they're in charge of the movies, and grunting at us.
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