The Dentist

The Dentist was the first of four Mack Sennet shorts that W.C. Fields made in between his feature films with Paramount. In this one he extracts a bit of humor.

Actually before he gets to the office Fields gets in a round of golf where he beans a player still on the green ahead of him. Fields was never the most patient or polite of people and he neither asked if he could play through or yelled 'FORE'. Nothing changes I might add for professional people in 80 or so years, still golf before business.

When he gets to the office he has some real tussles with patients. I can see where Bob Hope got some of his ideas for his Painless Potter character from The Paleface. One scene was truly provocative as Fields with back to camera gets between a seated woman patient's legs in his efforts to extract a tooth. Elsie Cavenna the patient had some shapely legs and she did appear in a few more films with Fields.

No way in a few years that one would have gotten past the omnipresent Code. But now we can laugh and enjoy as the rest of Bill Fields's body of work.

This is a pretty good short comedy, with W.C. Fields in a role that works very well for him, as an irascible and absent-minded dentist, and several settings that offer the chance for some good comic material. The dentist has some difficulties with his daughter at home, then has some mishaps on the golf course, and finally heads to the office for more trouble. There is a good blend of sight gags and dialogue jokes. Some of the gags are quite clever, and Fields usually helps the more routine ones to come across pretty well, too. This should be worth a look for anyone who likes these 30's-style short comedies.

I am probably not the biggest fan of W.C Fields. I find his comedy a bit difficult to comprehend at times and his character in his films was usually far from affable. In most of his films, he usually had some rather devious ulterior motive up his sleeve and sought to deceive those around him. To be fair to the comedian though, he is on very good form in this comedy short, "The Dentist" from 1932. Like most comedy shorts, the story is kept fairly streamlined. Fields plays the dentist of the film who attempts to juggle his professional commitments with those of his personal ones. The results are very funny and the timing is very natural. The comedian is probably more comfortable with dialogue than with slapstick. I remember this comedy short when it came out on video back in the late 1980s, along with the other shorts W.C Fields made.

I know the movie is a comedy short, but it didn't strike me as being terribly funny. Yet that's what I've come to expect of Fields' work. True, the movie had a number of amusing lines and situations, but I find it more interesting as a peek into American life in 1932. First, the Dentist had his office in his home. Second, his all-black dental equipment, common for the time, looked like instruments of torture. Third, he had an ice box in his kitchen, not a refrigerator -- though in upper middle-class fashion of the time, it had a white enamel exterior, not wood. Though I haven't viewed the film in a number of years, I also recall the interesting wearing apparel in the golf course scenes, most notably the knickers; the clubs had wood shafts; but the course itself appeared very contemporary. Then again, the tee-fairway-green structure of golf courses is pretty much the same today as it was more than 70 years ago. True, the sound quality is very crude, but this movie was made just five years after the very first film "talkie" amazed its audiences.

Whether he's pulling teeth with all the subtlety of a man with a whirring motorized drill or playing golf with a losing streak that causes him to toss his caddy into a stream of water, W.C. FIELDS is as ornery and ill-tempered as ever in this short subject from '32.

By today's standards, it's a terribly old-fashioned and crude look at the profession of dentistry with Fields showing no regard at all for a polished technique of examining patients and/or pulling teeth. His nurse plays it straight while he tussles with a variety of patients, one of them a woman who literally wraps herself around him as he struggles to pull a tooth and another, a man with a beard so thick that Fields states: "I can't even find his mouth." None of it makes any sense and it's all played strictly for whatever laughs anyone can get out of the character that W.C. Fields invented for pre-code audiences.

Summing up: Not for the squeamish. Anyone preparing for their next dental appointment better avoid this one. The politically correct may be offended by some of the ethnic humor--particularly the "yellow jaundice" joke about a Jap.