Carry On Doctor (1972)

A bit hit-and-miss but generally good fun.The life and times of the doctors, nurses and patients at an English hospital. Some weird and wacky characters and funny scenarios make this a reasonable comedy. Story line is fairly interesting and there are some great laugh-out-loud moments. However, in between all this there are some pretty silly scenes. Some attempted jokes fall very flat.Overall it is reasonably good fun. Hardly a must-see but worth watching if you want some mindless entertainment and have 1 1/2 hours to kill.

Big screen and small screen medical dramas get their dose of satire from the Carry On troupe in Carry On Doctor. Usually those are solemn and serious when performed but none when this crowd does it.Young Dr. Kilmore played by Jim Dale is an earnest well meaning sort of doctor even if he is a bit of a klutz. The patients in the ward like him even if the higher ups in the hospital don't. They include the head doctor Kenneth Williams and the head nurse Hattie Jacques. When a series of colossal and hysterically funny accidents put Dale on the hospital roof looking like he's enjoying a little slap and tickle with a patient, that's enough to get him fired.Those patients though consisting of folks like Sid James, Frankie Howerd, and Charles Hawtrey aren't about to lose their favorite doctor. He's valuable to them like Captain Parmenter was to Sergeant O'Rourke on F Troop. Things get righted in their universe with a lot of laughs along the way and many jokes about bodily secretions.Howerd's got some good moments as a motivational speaker who believes that doctors are superfluous until a big fall on his derrière lands him in hospital. Even funnier is Hawtrey as a man going through sympathetic labor pains with his wife on the birth of their first child.You'll never watch St. Elsewhere with quite the same view again after seeing Carry On Doctor.

The patient is Francis Bigger, played by Frankie Howerd, and the line is a sly reference to the funniest scene in Carry On Nurse. It's probably the cleverest line in Carry On Doctor. Like Carry On Nurse, Carry On Doctor takes place in hospital and, as the movie says, is a bedpanorama of hospital life. The long-running Carry On movies were bawdy, low-comedy, good-natured madhouses that featured a repertory company of comics we came to recognize instantly. Here, the company is made up of Kenneth Williams, Jim Dale, Hattie Jacques, Sid James, Joan Sims, Charles Hawtrey, Barbara Windsor and Bernard Bresslaw, among others. They play the patients, the doctors and the nurses at Finisham Hospital. If you relish jokes about bedpans and hernias, where any possible activity below the waist will wind up as corny, corny jokes or wheezing double entendres, Finisham is the place to be. Says Dr. Kilmore (Jim Dale) to Francis Bigger, "Just as I thought. You fell on your coccyx." "I did not," says Bigger, "I fell on my back." "Your coccyx is at the base of the spine," points out Dr. Kilmore. Says Bigger, "Well I've never heard it called that before." A Carry On hospital movie always has lots of nubile nurses assisting the longing denizens of the male ward. "Nurse, I dreamt about you last night," says a hobbled Ken Biddle (Bernard Bresslaw) to the stacked Nurse Clarke (Anita Harris). "Did you?" she asks? "No," Biddle says, "you wouldn't let me." And of course we have to deal with the Matron, a large woman more indomitable than a battleship, who knows how to keep any male quivering at the thought of one of her enemas or her ice baths. Has a matron ever been played as perfectly as Hattie Jacques? Her matrons always know what they want, and in this movie, Matron wants Dr. Kenneth Tinkle (Kenneth Williams), the hospital's chief physician. "Matron," Dr. Tinkle says, "you may not realize it but I was once a weak man!" "Doctor," says Matron, "once a week is enough for any man!" Who cares what the plot is when we have lines like these? We even have Charles Hawtrey who, in film as well as in life, raised mincing about to an art form, playing a father-to-be suffering from false pregnancy symptoms. It's a small, unlikely and vivid bit. The whole movie is a funny, gently off-color and totally innocent experience...such as the small boy who swallowed half a crown and was taken to hospital. Two days later the boy's mum asks the doctor, "How's he doing?" "Sorry, missus," the doctor says, "there's still no change."

This is the first of Frankie Howard's two appearances with the Carry On team (the second is Carry On up the Jungle) and this is without doubt one of the greatest laugh-o-matic films the Carry on crew have ever produced. This film tells of a handsome hospital doctor (Jim Dale) unjustly fired by a villainous registrar (Kenneth Williams) and his matron (Hattie Jaques, obviously) for unwittingly appearing on top of the Nurses home, Things heat up when the paitents take matters into their own hands! It is testament to its enduring popularity that it was soon followed with a sequel. Who could forget Bernard Bresslaw in that nurses outfit? Or Sid James' almost successful attempts to break all the hospital rules? And Frankie Howard's pain in the back? This is quintessential carry on and one of the best.