Doktor Ahoi!

Although Dirk Bogarde at this stage of his career was looking for meatier dramatic roles, like Sean Connery for a time he was cast as the likable if sometimes ineffectual Dr. Simon Sparrow for a series of films of which this is the second one. They were moneymakers for the Rank Organisation to be sure and Bogarde got a lot of popularity from them.

After that first film in which he completes his residency, Dr. Sparrow sets up his practice. But when he's both called on to do the work of his older colleague and resist the amorous advances of his less than tempting daughter, Bogarde decides to get away from it all. What better than to take a birth as a ship's doctor on a cargo freighter that does have some passenger accommodations.

Of course when he gets on the HMS Lotus he finds that it's like he never left the United Kingdom when he discovers that the captain is none other than James Robertson Justice. JRJ played the head of the hospital in the first Dr. Sparrow film and was the bane of Bogarde's existence. He's playing the same kind of tyrannical character in this film as the captain from the Bligh School of Command. Or better yet JRJ is like Captain Morton from Mister Roberts.

The compensation is that on the return voyage Brigitte Bardot is a passenger. But on the voyage going and coming back is the daughter of the ship's owner Brenda DaBanzie and she's setting a romantic cap for for the Captain the kind that Bogarde ran to sea to get away from.

Bogarde is shy and sweet and sometimes ineffectual, but he does come through in several of the crises aboard ship. The film holds up well still for today's audience.

Fresh from his training and having gotten into women trouble in his dogsbody job as a junior doctor in a surgery, Dr Simon Sparrow runs away to sea, joining a cargo ship as the medical officer. Immediately finding that he is prone to seasickness, Sparrow has to content with all manner of colourful characters – the crew of a cargo ship not being the most stable of places for people to spend their time. Things are rough enough but when they stop in a port for some shore leave, the ship picks up a couple of female passengers – making live on the ship before look calm and peaceful by way of comparison.

Still containing the light farce and japes that the Carry On series still had in the early 1950's, the Doctor series continues with its second entry and just some predictable jokes and plots. Shoehorned out to sea, the narrative mixes some medical joking and a fairly plodding plot about nautical flirting (although never approaching what you could call innuendo). It is good-natured enough but never feels like it gets out of second gear – crawling along without any risk of doing anything that well or ever picking up a bit of speed. Without any laughs or enjoyable sequences the film does just come off as rather bland but I suppose it may still have enough about it to appeal to those just looking for an old film to watch on a wet weekend afternoon.

Bogarde doesn't really help things in my opinion; he is bland himself and he doesn't add anything to the comedy or romantic sides of the material. His support cast aren't much better although Bardot's singsong accent and pretty shape is easy on the eye, meanwhile Justice and Sims are really the only easily well-known faces involved. Overall then a fairly uninteresting film that treads a gentle comic path and rarely does anything that good or that bad – it is all pretty bland and average. Might do for those that like this sort of stuff while having a cup of tea during a wet Sunday afternoon but probably that's about it.

'Doctor at sea' is your average English fifties-comedy, as were turned out by the dozen at the time. Television was hardly around, so on Saturday nights the public crowded into their many local cinema-theaters to watch films like these.

Although overall acting in 'Doctor at sea' is pretty competent, it's clear that this film only escaped a thick layer of dust for one single reason: Brigitte Bardot's participation.

Even stronger than that: Brigitte's picturing in this film surely ranks among the very best in her entire career. More than half a century after its production, one can safely conclude that the British did a great job on her.

That's nearly all there is to say about this light comedy. Apart from Brigitte Bardot, the performance of young Dirk Bogarde as the ship's doctor deserves a mentioning, too.

An average, very English fifties comedy, set on a freight ship.

Nevertheless this movie offers two outstanding dimensions: the first is leading man Dirk Bogarde, who plays with his usual excellence.

The second is Brigitte Bardot, adding much charm by her English-with-a-French-accent.

By the way, the English film crew did a magnificent job on Brigitte: out of the many thousand of shots spanning her entire career, those from 'Doctor at Sea' are among the very best. For this reason alone it is really worth watching this movie.

A fairly faithful rendition of Richard Gordon's semi-biographical novel of the same name. The characters are "right", the episodic nature of the story follows, even if loosely, the basic form of the novel. The "south American Port" is an amalgam of Santos and Buenos Aires, and is pretty accurate for those places in the 1950's. The relationships between the officers, crew, and the general milieu is also very accurate. There are some superb scenes, my absolute favourite being the logging (the Merchant Navy version of a disciplinary hearing) which is both accurate and very funny. As many reviewers have already pointed out, it is a cargo ship, not a cruise ship, and the passengers are actually guests of the company. Finally, it is SS Lotus, a merchant vessel, not HMS.