Almost 50 years before Jim Carrey took a hairy fit in The Grinch, the bizarre imagination of children's writer Dr. Seuss came to the big screen, in live action format, in this strange children's movie.
Like most boys, Bart (Rettig) hates his piano lessons and would rather be playing outside. One day, he dreams he has been captured along with 499 other boys (hence the number of fingers in the title) and will be forced by the evil Dr. Terwilliker (Conried) to play a noisy concerto on a surreal keyboard that will unleash an atomic bomb.
Young audiences will appreciate the teacher fears and the stage sets, but there's far more going on here. Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss himself) helped on the script which, with its slave-drone world, surely has an anti-Communist agenda.