Movie Review: My Six Loves (1963)

A family drama and romantic comedy, My Six Loves is a fluffy career-versus-family story with attempts at humour but lacking any edge or substance.

Janice Courtney (Debbie Reynolds) is a Broadway star who has just wrapped up her first Hollywood role. Extremely popular but very single, Janice wonders if she has made the right choice dedicating her life to her career and never getting married. Driven to exhaustion by her agent Marty Bliss (David Janssen), Janice is ordered to rest and retreats to her Connecticut country home for a few weeks of recuperation in the company of her loyal assistant Ethel (Eileen Heckart).

In the nearby woods, Janice stumbles on six kids and a dog living on their own after being abandoned by their parents. She takes them in and starts to care for them. She also meets local Reverend Jim Larkin (Cliff Robertson), and they start to fall in love. Janice is attracted to the life of domesticity and considers adopting the children, but then she is offered an opportunity of a lifetime to star in the latest play by celebrated playwright Kinsley Kross (Hans Conried).

The first feature film to be directed by stage legend Gower Champion, My Six Loves is a lame affair suffering from an outdated societal message and a feeble script (despite the involvement of four writers). Every moment of conflict is immediately resolved, every emotion is obvious, and all the characters are superficial. The laughs are often juvenile, sometime descending to the let's-all-run-around-the-bus-after-the-dog variety, targeting eight year olds.

As a pure family film aiming to entertain pre-teens My Six Loves may be relatively harmless, but the film sells an infantile solution to the serious debate about finding balance between professional fulfilment and family life. The choice offered to Janice is to give up her career entirely to adopt and look after six children she barely knows. That the domestic option comes with the love of a man of the church makes the premise more troublesome. The film avoids any astute discussion: Janice is presented with a forceful, often guilt-laden binary decision, and the film disintegrates under the weight of seeking a simplistic solution to a profoundly complex dilemma.

Debbie Reynolds does her best to capture some semblance of an internal conflict. She looks great and even gets to sing one song. The scruffy dog is adorable and emerges as the only other thing worth watching. The rest of the supporting cast members, including a too-serious Cliff Robertson and a too-glib David Janssen, are wooden, predictable and overtly theatrical. The children are saddled with an overdose of doe-eyed cutesiness and no depth.

My Six Loves has little to say, and even that comes out all wrong.

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The Movies Of Hans Conried

All movies starring Hans Conried and reviewed on the Ace Black Blog are linked below:

Passage To Marseille (1944)

Mrs. Parkington (1944)

The Barkleys Of Broadway (1949)

On The Town (1949)

Summer Stock (1950)

Too Young To Kiss (1951)

The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T (1953)

Bus Stop (1956)

Jet Pilot (1957)

My Six Loves (1963)

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.
The Index of Movie Stars is here.

Movie Review: The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T (1953)

A children's musical fantasy with some creepy elements, The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T preys on every child's mistrust of the domineering piano teacher, but only partially succeeds as entertainment.

In a typical suburban home, Bart Collins (Tommy Rettig) is about 10 years old, and struggling to cope with the practice, practice, practice demands of his pompous piano teacher Dr. Terwilliker (Hans Conried). Bart believes that his widowed mother Heloise (Mary Healy) has fallen under Terwilliker's spell. The local neighbourhood plumber August Zabladowski (Peter Lind Hayes) appears to be a decent man, but unwilling to intervene and save Bart.

Bart dozes off at the piano and has a nightmare. He is held prisoner at the surreal Terwilliker Institute, where Dr. T intends to gather 500 children to play continuously on a massive piano. Heloise is Dr. T's main assistant, and kept under control by his hypnotic powers. Zabladowski is the institute's plumber, but is initially reluctant to help Bart and his mom escape. With an army of henchmen chasing after Bart at every turn, he has to find a way to end Dr. T's evil plot.

Conceived and written by Dr. Seuss, directed by Roy Rowland and produced by none other than Stanley Kramer, Dr. T was a seemingly ambitious project that floundered on the rocks of production difficulties, limited talent and less than impressive musical numbers. Seuss' first script apparently ran to 1,200 pages, and in a ruthless editing job, close to a dozen songs were cut to try and create a cohesive 90 minute narrative.

The main set design is an impressive achievement: colourful, curvy and instantly recognizable as a creation from Seuss' imagination, filled with sinewy staircases, ladders to nowhere, signs pointing to the obvious, secret dungeons and subterranean chambers. The costumes are equally bright and flashy. And while there are a few scary moments (the operator of the dungeon elevator can instigate nightmares for years among the young), the film mostly rides a vibe of candy-coloured adventure, as young Bart never displays fear, just a determination to break out of his imprisonment.

But the film suffers from a distinctive sparsity. Just the four main characters get meaningful speaking parts, with the rest of the cast made up of indistinct extras. The song and dance numbers are sometimes painfully bland, and with no stars to liven up the show, they tend to just wither in place. There is also a missed opportunity to make use of the mammoth piano, the centrepiece set never put to use as the film rushes to chaotic climax.

In addition to affirming children's animosity towards practicing the piano, there are some adult themes at play. The World War Two metaphor is the most obvious, with Terwilliker at Hitler, Heloise representing those under his spell, and Zabladowski as the US initially reluctant to get involved. The film also touches on 1950s paranoia of the atom bomb, as Bart ends up disrupting Dr. T's plans with a dangerously unstable scientific device.

More of a quirky curiosity than an outright success, The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T is packed with idea fragments, but can never quite assemble the right tune.

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