Film Review
The surprising success of
Carry On
Sergeant (1958) motivated producer Peter Rogers and director Gerald
Thomas to immediately begin work on another ensemble comedy in the same
irreverent mould. Having mercilessly lampooned the army and
national service, Rogers and Thomas decided to send up another great
British institution, the health service.
Carry On Nurse was the second in
what was to become one of the most popular and longest-running film
series ever made. It was here that the
Carry On format began to take
shape, with its trademark bawdy humour and recurring cast of popular
regulars. And it was a format that was an instant hit with the
cinema-going public.
Carry On
Nurse was the most commercially successful of all the
Carry On films (it was in fact the
biggest grossing British film of 1959) and its producer and director
were not slow in realising what they had created, nothing less than a
British cinema phenomenon. The series would run for 29 films over
a 20 year period.
Like
Carry On Sergeant before
it,
Carry On Nurse was
adapted from a stage play,
Ring For Catty
by Patrick Cargill and Jack Beale. The script was written by
Norman Hudis, one of the best of the series' contributors, who worked
on several of the early
Carry On
films. Although the film is lacking in plot and structure,
essentially consisting of a series of vignettes of varying degrees of
hilarity, it does have some memorable moments. Hattie Jacques is
the archetypal battle-axe matron, ruling the wards like a Stalinist dictator, able
to crush dissent with the merest inflection of her eyebrow. A
manic Kenneth Williams looks like he is about to carve the Sunday joint
as he sharpens the knives for an improvised bunion operation.
This is where Leslie Phillips gets to say "Ding, dong..." for the first
time. And then there's the fun with an inappropriately placed daffodil... To see
how this innocent little flower caused a national sensation you have to
watch the film. The
Carry On
team had arrived, and, like a bunged up interior, it must have seemed
that nothing would shift them...
© James Travers 2009
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Gerald Thomas film:
Carry on Teacher (1959)
Film Synopsis
Ted York and Bernie Bishop are the latest admissions to a men's ward in
a busy London hospital, the former a reporter with appendicitis, the
latter a boxer with a fractured hand. Their ward brothers
include Oliver Reckitt, an aspiring nuclear physicist, Percy Hickson,
who fell off a scaffold, and Jack Bell, a man whose bunion is playing havoc with
his love life. Patients and nurses alike live in mortal
dread of the daily visit from Matron, which makes life especially hard
for the accident prone student nurse Dawson. Whilst Ted
falls hopelessly in love with his nurse, Jack becomes increasingly
anxious to get his operation over and done with. One evening,
having got himself and his fellow patients completely drunk on champagne, Jack
persuades Oliver to remove his bunion...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.