Carry on Doctor (1967) - film review

Immediately after giving a lecture in which he argues that medical treatment would be unnecessary if everyone thought positively, Francis Bigger falls off the stage and breaks his coccyx.  He is rushed to hospital and finds himself in a ward that is occupied by some of the strangest characters he has ever met.  The sensitive Mr Barron is afflicted with all the traumas of his wife’s pregnancy; Charlie Roper is a malingerer who prolongs his stay in hospital to evade his nagging wife; Ken Biddle was admitted for appendicitis but is now recovering from a fractured leg after falling off the operating table.  Patrolling the wards and corridors of the hospital (like a squad of S.S. guards), Matron is a formidable figure who divides her time between taunting the patients and haranguing the accident-prone Dr Kilmore.  Yet beneath the rough, unsympathetic and generally terrifying exterior there beats a tender heart, for Matron is in love, madly in love – with the eminent registrar, Dr Tinkle.  Unaware that he is the object of such ardent affection, Dr Tinkle discovers he has another admirer, in the shape of busty Sandra, a former patient of his who has just started working as a student nurse at the hospital.  Convinced that Tinkle saved her life, Sandra is determined to repay him in the only way she knows.  Fearful of a scandal, Tinkle rejects her advances.  When he sees the young nurse climb onto the roof of the hospital, Kilmore is convinced that she intends to kill herself and hurries after her.  The rescue attempt ends disastrously and Kilmore, his reputation in tatters, is dismissed, thanks to the conniving of Tinkle and Matron.   When they hear of this, the patients decide to rebel en masse in an attempt to get Dr Kilmore reinstated.  It is high time that the arrogant Dr Tinkle had a taste of his own medicine...

By the time Carry On Doctor went into production, there was a general feeling that the Carry On series had run its course.  The change of distributor, from Anglo-Amalgamated to Rank, had not proven successful, as the sudden drop in box office takings for the latest two films – Don’t Lose Your Head (1966) and Follow that Camel (1967) – had shown.  The reason for the sudden decline in the popularity of the films was attributed in part to the fact that the Carry On prefix could not be used in the titles of the films distributed by Rank.  (The mis-casting of Phil Silvers in the most recent film also did not help.)

Concerned that the fifteenth Carry On film might well be the last, producer Peter Rogers and director Gerald Thomas decided to draw on one of the series’ biggest successes, Carry On Nurse (1959).   Over the past decade, Gerald Thomas’s brother Ralph had been making a series of very popular film comedies based on Richard Gordon’s Doctor novels.  The wards of a busy NHS hospital seemed to be the natural setting for a Carry On film, particularly as the distance from the operating theatre to the lavatory is such a short one.  Having successfully renegotiated the use of the Carry On prefix in the film’s title, Peter Rogers and his team managed to give the series a new lease of life, ensuring that it would run for another decade. 

Carry On Doctor was a major box office hit and remains one of the most popular films in the series.  It marked a return to the format of the early Carry Ons, dispensing with the central storyline and offering instead a series of short vignettes hanging off a thin narrative thread.  The humour consists of the usual mix of slapstick, wordplay and innuendo, with popular comedian Frankie Howerd lending his support to an almost complete ensemble of the Carry On regulars. 

Barbara Windsor makes a welcome return, her second Carry On after her debut in Carry On Spying (1964) and Hattie Jacques once again reprises the role for which she is best remembered, the intimidating hospital matron.  There are also several cameo appearances from faces that would be familiar to television audiences in the UK – these include Dandy Nichols, the long-suffering wife of Alf Garnett in the long-running sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, Brian Wilde of Porridge and Last of the Summer Wine fame and Peter Gilmore, the star of the prestigious 1970s BBC drama The Onedin Line.

Carry On Doctor is pretty well a close re-run of Carry On Nurse, except that the jokes are somewhat more risqué and the slapstick sequences more elaborate (and a lot funnier).  Whilst far from being his best work, Talbot Rothwell turns in another gag-laden script that somehow keeps the laughs coming, even though a fair number of the jokes are puerile and predictable.  This is possibly the point at which the cheap lavatorial humour began to take over, to the detriment of the series.

The film is perhaps best remembered for the scene in which Kenneth Williams finds himself on the receiving end of Hattie Jacques’s amorous intentions.  "I was once a weak man", protests Williams as Matron moves in for the kill, to which a smouldering Jacques ripostes: "Once a week’s enough for any man."  Greatly encouraged by the success of this film, the Carry On team soon returned with another dose of medical mirth in Carry on Again Doctor (1969) and Carry on Matron (1972).  Just what the doctor ordered.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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