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Snakes in Movies   7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This is a western fantasy that offers some serious messages about life, greed, corruption, perception, and human nature, with the most depressing fortune teller I've ever seen. (He is cursed to tell only the truth, not what people want to hear. The future he predicts for a middle aged woman is all about the meaninglessness and futility of her existence and her inability to find success and happiness.) There's also a giant talking snake who rattles his tail (which he says is the most treasured gift of his ancestors) and is pretty serious himself. He mocks humans as imperfect creatures who have to hang rags on their fragile skin and glasses over their eyes to see while he was graced with good vision, stamina and patience. The snake is in a cage inside the circus of Dr. Lao, an old Chinese man with a long gray beard and Fu Manchu moustache, who does real magic, like lighting his pipe with fire from his thumb, talks with various accents, and says he is 7321 years old. When we see the giant snake, it has a head with a human nose and moustache and looks just like the man he is talking to, Mr. Stark, who is trying to buy the whole town and cheat the townspeople, but who essentially has a good heart. He tells Stark that he has his own cage, just like the snake does, and they're both always testing the bars of the cage. (The snake is done with special effects, possibly claymation or some other stop motion technique.) The circus also includes a Medusa, with writhing blue snakes instead of hair, who the crowd can only look at through a mirror, or they'll turn to stone, as we see one of them do. Both the snake and the Medusa are played by Tony Randall as is Dr. Lao and several other characters, including a cameo as himself.