Fortune Cookie

Seven Faces of Dr. Lao. Over the rim of a hill near Abalone, Ariz., rides a bearded Chinese thaumaturge, 7,321 years old. He sits astride a small yellow mule, a goldfish bowl mounted on his saddle. To light his pipe, he conjures up a flame on the end of his thumb. Strangest of all, beneath the wrinkled makeup gleams the familiar sardonic smile of Tony Randall, an actor usually involved in fantasies that psychiatry can cure.

In this movie version of Charles G. Finney's unearthly 1935 novel The Circus of Dr. Lao, Randall solves other people's "plobrems." The film is a veritable fortune cookie: a frothy dab of nothing and inside a message about the frailty of man's illusions. To deliver it, Randall also impersonates: Merlin the magician; a seer; the Abominable Snowman; a talking snake; a syrinx-playing satyr who pipes away inhibitions; and a Medusa who turns a small town shrew to stone.

Dr. Lao is chiefly a showcase for the ingenuity of M-G-M Makeup Artist Bill Tuttle. His marvelous disguises often do more for Randall than Randall does for them. And Producer-Director George Pal embellishes the fantasy with a dragged-in plot about a villainous prairie tycoon who schemes to buy up the whole town before folks find out there is a railroad coming through. And that's when the cookie crumbles.

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