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When Geisel, now 49, left college (Dartmouth '25), he planned to be a professor of English literature. While waiting to land a teacher's job, he began sending his weird animal drawings to the humor magazines—signing them "Dr. Seuss." A cartoon printed in Judge finally nudged him into his new career. The picture showed a gigantic dragon nuzzling a knight in bed. The caption: "What! Another Dragon! And just after I sprayed the joint with ..." The advertising people for Standard Oil Co. (NJ.) saw the cartoon and decided that this was the man to help push their insecticide. Soon Seuss was going full-blast with his famous "Quick, Henry" panels. Since then he has plugged Flit, produced U.S. Army indoctrination films, scripted movie cartoons (Gerald McBoing Boing) and written and illustrated children's books (The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Thidwick: the Big-Hearted, Moose, H orton Hatches the Egg).
Getting 5,000 Fingers on film posed one momentous problem. That was the rainy day when Stanley Kramer & Co. tried to film the scene where all the small boys play Chopsticks on the double-decker piano monstrosity. By the time the big scene was ready to shoot, the "500" boys (there were actually only about 400) had managed to scatter outside into the rain and gorge themselves at a nearby hot-dog stand. Says Seuss: "Have you ever tried to get 400 sick, wet boys to play a piano?"
Genghis Khan (Manuel Conde; United Artists) is a Philippine-made movie that bears a striking resemblance to a rudimentary Hollywood western. A pseudo-biography of Genghis Khan (1162-1227), the savage Mongol conqueror, the action contains all sorts of riding, shooting (bow & arrow) and fighting. Notably bloodthirsty items: a contest among Mongol warriors featuring strangulation and eye-gouging; Genghis Khan, with an arrow protruding from his torso, demolishing four of the enemy by transfixing them simultaneously with one shot from a crossbow; the heroine (Elvira Reyes) about to be torn apart by wild horses; almost every variety of plunder and pillage, goring and evisceration, burning and looting, stabbing and beheading, putting to torch and torture.
Philippine Producer-Director Manuel Conde plays the part of Genghis Khan as a rather handsome, ferocious, cunning but likable fellow, a sort of medieval Shane roaming the Gobi Desert. The picture traces his career from his youthful nomad days to his campaign of world conquest. Although the movie may offer nothing much of historical significance, it is undoubtedly an excellent outlet for the pent-up aggressions of well-behaved moviegoers. Filmed on a large scale, it has both barbaric splendor and fighting frenzy. Even the royal heroine gets into the spirit of things by flailing about her, at one point, with an outsize sword.
Below the Sahara (RKO Radio), shot by Cameraman-Explorer Armand (Savage Splendor) Denis, is a deluxe Technicolored safari through British East Africa, Rhodesia, South Africa, Angola and the Belgian Congo. The result is intermittently zoological and anthropological, always strikingly pictorial.