General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao

The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao is a 1964 American fantasy film produced and directed by George Pal for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in which a mysterious elderly Chinese showman brings his magical circus to an Arizona frontier town and confronts its residents with their own fears and desires. Tony Randall plays Dr. Lao and the fantastic performers of his circus, under makeups created by William Tuttle, who received a special Honorary Academy Award for the work.¹^•² The screenplay by Charles Beaumont adapts Charles G. Finney's 1935 novel The Circus of Dr. Lao.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	March 18, 1964 (theatrical); distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer³
Director/producer	George Pal, for George Pal Productions and MGM³
Source	The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935) by Charles G. Finney; screenplay by Charles Beaumont, with uncredited work by Ben Hecht¹^•⁴
Randall's roles	Dr. Lao, Apollonius of Tyana, Pan, the Giant Serpent, Merlin the Magician, and Medusa⁵
Makeup award	William Tuttle received a special Honorary Academy Award for the makeup²
Runtime	1 hour 40 minutes (listed as 99 minutes by some sources, 100 by others)³^•⁶
Reception	88% Tomatometer from 8 critics; 78% Popcornmeter from 2,500+ audience ratings on Rotten Tomatoes³

Spoilers

Plot

Dr. Lao, a self-described 7,322-year-old Chinese man, rides into the small western town of Abalone, Arizona, on a donkey and places a full-page newspaper advertisement announcing a two-night appearance of his circus.⁵^•⁴ The town is in the middle of a land dispute: the rancher Clint Stark (Arthur O'Connell) is buying up property cheaply in the expectation that the railroad will come through, and the only obstacle is the newspaper editor Ed Cunningham (John Ericson).³^•⁴ Cunningham is attracted to Angela Benedict (Barbara Eden), a widowed librarian and mother of the boy Mike.³

The whole town attends the circus, where each of Dr. Lao's disguised characters delivers a moral lesson to particular visitors.⁷ As the blind seer Apollonius, he holds up a mirror and bluntly tells the hopeful widow Mrs. Cassan (Lee Patrick) that she faces no second husband and no children, only unhappiness; as Medusa he turns a quarrelsome woman to stone; as Pan, the god of joy, he makes it possible for Ed and Angela to become romantic; as Merlin, his magic is dismissed by the audience as parlor tricks; and as a giant sea serpent bearing his own face, he frightens Stark into recognizing the error of his ways.⁷ When Stark's drunken henchmen wreck the circus tent, Mike witnesses the damage and alerts Dr. Lao, who uses a rain-making machine to shrink the escaped monster.⁵ The circus departs the next day, the town having repented its unscrupulous citizen, and Dr. Lao rides off, leaving Mike with the closing message that "the whole world is a circus if you look at it the right way."²^•⁵

The seven faces

The seven title characters consist of Dr. Lao plus the six members of his circus: the Abominable Snowman; Apollonius of Tyana, a fortune-teller who cannot see; Pan, the goatlike god of mirth; the disembodied voice of an enormous serpent; Merlin the Magician; and Medusa, whose hair is made of snakes.⁵ Randall also appears briefly as an audience member at the second show, so Google Play's description counts eight characters in all.²

Who played the Snowman. Publicity claimed that Randall played all seven title characters, but in fact Pal's son Péter portrays the Abominable Snowman, a role with little screen time.⁴ The Science Fiction Encyclopedia calls Tuttle the film's real hero, judging his makeups for Randall in the leading role and the six shapes "astonishingly good for its pre-CGI time," and notes that the prosthetics were kept light enough to let Randall's characterizations show through.¹^•⁴

Production

The film was produced and directed by George Pal, the Hungarian-born animator and producer known for The Time Machine (1960) and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), and it was his final directorial effort.³^•⁸ Charles Beaumont wrote the screenplay while in the early stages of the illness that ended his career, and Ben Hecht worked on the script uncredited.⁴ Robert Bronner was the cinematographer, George Tomasini the editor, and Leigh Harline the composer; the special visual effects were credited to a team of five, including Wah Chang and Jim Danforth.⁷^•⁹ The giant serpent is mostly a hand puppet, augmented by a few seconds of stop-motion animation, the technique for which Pal was known.⁴^•⁸

Relationship to the novel

The film bears little resemblance to Finney's novel, which is a series of loosely connected vignettes about the circus's visit to Abalone and is darker and more cynical in tone.⁵ The entire Stark land-buying subplot and the clash with the newspapermen are inventions of the film.⁵ The Science Fiction Encyclopedia observes that the preachiness and sentimentality latent in the novel threaten to swamp the film, whose moralizing it calls trite.¹ Pal's warm-hearted approach was at odds with the novel's cynicism, which the Blu-ray reviewer Stuart Galbraith IV argues muddies Finney's themes.⁴

Reception and legacy

Critical response has been mixed but generally favorable. Rotten Tomatoes records an 88% Tomatometer from 8 reviews and a 78% Popcornmeter from more than 2,500 audience ratings.³ Reviewers have praised Randall's performance, Tuttle's makeup, and Harline's main-title theme, while criticizing the town subplots, the broad playing, and the sentimentality.³^•⁴ Dennis Schwartz gave the film a B, calling the production superb but the script verbose and the moralizing grating.⁷

Casting controversy. Randall, a white actor, plays the Chinese Dr. Lao, occasionally in pidgin English, and the performance has been widely discussed as a late example of yellowface; critics have noted that the film's commentary on code switching, in which Lao suddenly speaks perfect English after playing to expectations of broken English, is among its more sophisticated touches.¹⁰^•⁷ The Australian Centre for the Moving Image carries a content notification flagging that some cataloged works, including this one, reflect outdated and potentially offensive views.¹¹

A 2026 Warner Archive Blu-ray, scanned at 4K from the original camera negative, was reviewed as a marked improvement over all previous home video versions, with the reviewer upgrading his assessment of the film's lighting, cinematography, and Randall's performance.⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026