7 Faces of Dr. Lao

This is loosely based on The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney, which itself loosely resembles a novel. I read the book in high school, and was fascinated and baffled by it, as I think a great many other people were. It’s a series of episodes around the mysterious Dr Lao and his menagerie of mythical animals and people arriving in the small town of Abalone.

MGM and screenwriter Charles Beaumont took this framework and grafted it onto a story about a conniving rancher trying to buy up the town because of his inside knowledge of the railroad coming to town—and lord, how many times have we seen that story? There is also a romance between grieving widow Barbara Eden and newspaper editor John Ericson, determined to win her over. But that’s all window dressing for the real show, which is about the talents of three people: George Pal and his team of stop-motion animators, Tony Randall playing seven parts and being hardly recognizable in any of them, and make-up artist William Tuttle, who was responsible for Randall being unrecognizable.

Tony Randall camps it up wonderfully as Dr. Lao, the first of his seven roles (he also appears as himself in the circus audience for a brief moment). He dresses and talks like a comic stage Chinaman, but when he wants to he can speak perfect English, or adopt any accent he likes. He is also Pan, Medusa, the Abominable Snowman, Merlin the senile wizard, a giant serpent, and Apollonius of Tyana, a blind fortune teller condemned to tell the absolute truth about the future. He also has a sea serpent (or the Loch Ness monster, I wasn’t clear on that) that he carries in a goldfish bowl as a tiny little fish. The thing is, if it gets out of the water it doubles in size every ten seconds … and it does this to bagpipe music. It’s all very good SFX for its time, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.