George Pal's 1964 Fantasy Epic the Seven Faces of Dr. Lao is Full of Surprises And Shockingly Non-Racist
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I’m excited and more than a little trepidatious about writing up Blake Edwards’ 1968 show-business slapstick comedy The Party for The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about movies about the film industry.
I’m psyched because The Party is a virtuoso exercise in physical comedy from two masters of the form as well as a fascinating glimpse at Hollywood at the height of the swinging sixties. I’m anxious because The Party regrettably casts star Peter Sellers as an Indian gentleman.
Usually when a white actor plays a person of color the results are unforgivable and indefensible creatively as well as morally and politically but Sellers’ performance in The Party ranks among his very best. The Party is the closest Sellers would come to Jaques Tati.
The Party was a big hit in India and legendary Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray wanted to cast Sellers as an Indian character in The Alien, a never-to-be-made science fiction movie its writer claims E.T ripped off.
Sellers was perhaps unsurprisingly director George Pal’s first choice for the lead roles of 1964’s The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao but the production ended up with Tony Randall because he was apparently slightly cheaper.
Randall was supposed to play all seven faces of Dr. Lao but the director’s bodybuilder son Peter ended up playing the Abominable Snowman. The production pretended Randall played the snowbound yeti all the same because playing all seven faces of a mysterious showman is neater and more satisfying than a master thespian playing six out of Dr. Lao’s seven manifestations.
The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao is circus-themed so a certain amount of chicanery and deception is not only accepted and expected but demanded.
I was morbidly fascinated by The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao because it looked incredibly racist. That suspicion was strengthened by Randall’s introduction as the title character, a mysterious Chinese wizard realized through so many layers of make-up that he looks like he’s wearing a giant puppet head and a cartoonishly exaggerated accent.
Dr. Lao is not at all what he appears to be, however. Throughout the film, Lao drops the accent completely and speaks in the educated, effete, plummy cadences of a typical Tony Randall character.
The accent is an affectation that Lao can turn on and turn off whenever he likes. He delights in playing the clown because it amuses him but also because he is a canny student of psychology who understands that the hicks in the audience for his traveling circus don’t just expect him to behave like a crude stereotype: they demand it.
In that respect Lao’s accent is just another put-on for the benefit of the rubes in the stands, a bit of hokum to really put over the whole “mysterious stranger from the East” routine.
Lao sweeps into the backwards small town of Abalone, Arizona with a traveling circus with the power to entertain, astound and impart moral lessons by showing gawkers their inner ugliness and cruelty.
This echoes the Dark Carnival mythology of Insane Clown Posse, which similarly revolves around a series of ghoulish, phantasmagorical circus creatures who teach acolytes about morality and the eternal punishment for sin.
When a little boy wants to run away and join Dr. Lao’s traveling circus and he delivers a lovely monologue about how the circus isn’t a physical place or a place of employment but rather the embodiment of all that is good and magical and pure in this ugly and degraded but also wonderful and magical world it sounds almost suspiciously like the notorious Insane Clown Posse anthem “Miracles.”
Only instead of inviting his young protege to enjoy the wonders and horrors of the Dark Carnival, Dr. Lao is admonishing the boy to experience the magic and mystery of a magical circus that’s anything and everything he needs it to be. Nothing more, nothing less.
It’s not hard to imagine a young Violent J catching The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao on UHF one Sunday afternoon and being mesmerized and inspired by both its mind-boggling spectacle and underlying message.
There are sequences throughout that wouldn’t feel out of place in an Insane Clown Posse song, like one where rich villain Clint Stark (Arthur O’Connell), a ruthless businessman intent on buying the town where the film takes place so that he can make a fortune off it when railroad folks take an interest in it, is confronted by a snake with his face who delivers the unmistakably heavy-handed message that, actually, he’s the real snake, on account of all his lying and duplicity, even thought technically, he’s not actually a reptile.
As Apollonius of Tyana, blind fortune-teller of antiquity, Randall drops another mega-watt truth bomb on a circus attendee when she girlishly asks about her love life and he coldly informs her that she has only loneliness and despair to look forward to during her grim, solitary march to the grave.
The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao was created to showcase the complementary gifts of two extraordinary talents: seven-time Academy Award nominee Pal, an animation legend who segued into special-effects-heavy big screen extravaganzas like The War of the Worlds, Tom Thumb and The Time Machine, and star Tony Randall.
The movie won a special Academy Award for its make-up but its special effects and make-up wouldn’t be anywhere near as dazzling or effective without Randall’s masterful turn as a plethora of larger-than-life characters, including Merlin the Magician, Pan, the God of Love and the aforementioned Apollonius of Tyana and The Serpent.
Randall is a true chameleon, disappearing inside the elaborate get-ups and wild costumes of his six very different characters.
The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao resembles Insane Clown Posse’s Dark Carnival mythology finally by appealing very directly to the kid in all of us who is fascinated by monsters and wizards and magic.
Like Lao himself, The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao is sly and full of welcome surprises, like being a subversive meditation on racism and stereotypes rather than explicitly racist.
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