Picturegoer – April 3rd 1954
Just What The Doctor Ordered
Doctor In The House ★★★★
Muriel Pavlow Dirk Bogarde
What a peach of a picture. It bubbles and babbles with the sheer joy of living, like a spring brook in sunshme. It is carefree, it is gay; it is as lighthearted as a breeze. It has a quite delicious atmosphere of effervescent youthfulness.
The secret of its success – and if this one isn’t even more popular than Genevieve, then I’ll be amazed – is that it’s based on life, but blown up a hundred times larger, like a child’s balloon.
But it does have some touch of reality; you feel that the delightful gaggle of medical students really could have lived and had their being in London.
Well, this is a hotch-potch in the life of that bunch of medical students. They are rowdy and thoughtless, they dislike work, they like fancy waistcoats, they like nurses and fun. The last things they like are exams.
And a pleasant gang of lads they are. One dreams of football and dodging the column; another preens himself on his private income, and has an eye for a well turned calf. Another takes himself a bit more seriously , has a flirtation with a young woman of fashion, and falls in love with a really nice staff nurse in one of the wards.
Then there are the girls – a fancy mixture of lecherous landlady’s daughter, sweet little miss who looks as though a thermometer wouldn’t melt in her mouth, the usual hard-faced sisters, and the like.
Lastly, there are the majestic surgeon, the tight-lipped dean of the faculty, who is prepared to expel anybody for anything, and the musical comedy patients who know more about their ailments than the medical students themselves.
Top marks to the writer, Richard Gordon. The production has some really nice little touches, and an occasional huge guffaw known in show business as a “belly laugh.”
The players? They all do well. Everyone will like Kenneth More, who gives a first-class performance as the only medical student in the faculty who actually has some money in his pocket; and they will like Dirk Bogarde as a more serious and slightly sentimental young fellow.
Donald Sinden is a rather hearty type; Muriel Pavlow a girl who is as nicely ironed as her own apron; there is a too-brief flash of Kay Kendall; and James Robertson Justice plays a bravura surgeon. And there are a whole lot more.
This picture is like the last bus home: you simply can’t afford not to catch it. Having seen it once you might like it enough to see it twice. C.C.
