The next of the movies that's sitting on my DVR and is coming up on TCM is 7 Faces of Dr. Lao. You can see it overnight tonight, or early tomorrow (July 27) at 2:30 AM. Note of course that if you're in the Pacific time zone that still means it will be this evening (July 26), as that will only be 11:30 PM.
Tony Randall stars as Dr. Lao. As the movie opens, he approaches a sign pointing to the town of Abalone, Arizona Territory, circa 1900, riding on a donkey and carrying on the donkey a fishbowl with a goldfish. This seems like it would be a major plot hole, except that it turns out Lao is a sort of conjurer (I'm not giving much away, to be honest) so conjuring up a new goldfish might not be a big deal. At any rate, Lao is an itinerant conjurer, looking to set up a circus in town for a couple of days where his magic will earn him enough to keep going until he reaches the next town.
In Abalone, he stops at the office of the local newspaper publisher, Ed Cunningham (John Ericson). Since back in the old days of printing, it was also the job of the newspaperman to do print shop stuff, Lao wants Cunningham to print up a bunch of handbills promoting the circus. Not that he should need so many since this is a small town. It also seems to be a town in a parlous state, as Clint Stark (Arthur O'Connell) is trying to buy everyone out. He claims that the town's water supply pipe is going to go bust and the town won't be able to afford a new one, which is why buying up an entire town that and the land around it might just make sense economically. Except of course that the real purpose is because a railroad is going to be built and just this land is going to be worth a fortune.
In addition to the land-grabber and the publisher who wants to bring civilization to the west, there's another trope of movie westerns: the widow with a young child. That widow is Angela the librarian (Barbara Eden), and her son Mike is captivated by Lao, wanting to learn how to do tricks and the like. Instead, Lao imparts wisdom to Mike, telling him to treat the entire world as a circus.
In fact, Lao is going to impart wisdom on the entire town once the circus starts, and it's that circus which is really the point of seeing 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, not the story around the townsfolk. Lao has a series of disguises, each of them giving Lao the opportunity to have an individual a lesson in life. There's Pan, the god of joy; a blind ancient Greek fortune teller; and for the finale, the famous magician Merlin. There are also a couple that are stop-motion creatures rather than Randall in a different sort of make-up.
Now, the one thing that audiences of 2025 are immediately going to comment on is Tony Randall as Dr. Lao. Lao is, of course, Chinese, and, well, Tony Randall isn't. However, Lao himself is race-fluid since he plays Anglo-Saxon Merlin as well as ancient Greek. Lao is also gender-bending as Medusa and even species-defying as a serpent, although this one is clearly just George Pal's stop motion compared to makeup jobs on some other things. Obviously, nobody can credibly be all these things, but audiences of 2025 are trained to complain when the white guy masquerades as non-white and ignore cultural appropriation when it's the other way around. I suppose if it weren't for the fact that this was based on a book they could have just given the "Lao" character a name and backgound that don't imply any ethnicity.
The plot, or the framing device about the town's future, is more or less beside the point as that's just a frame on which to hang the stock characters and George Pal's special effects. Some of the set pieces work well; others, not so much. To me there just wasn't enough of a story to sustain a full-length film. But younger audiences may well enjoy that to them will probably seem like old-fashioned special effects.
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