Dentist in the Chair

Being an expatriate Brit, I watch quite a lot of vintage British movies of any genre. I watched this movie mainly because I had never before seen a movie with Bob Monkhouse appearing in it. However. it didn't take long to see that the movie was headed towards being inane and pathetic. I don't know whether the director thought "the more the merrier" but ninety nine percent of the movie showed large numbers of people crammed into small halls or rooms within the dental hospital. It was all too frenetic and random to be amusing. And the silly old-fashioned elevator was hopelessly over-used. Of course, the story line was limp also - not even worth recounting, indeed just like all the "Carry On" movies but this one fell short of even those, as if that was at all possible! No wonder Monkhouse made relatively few movies. As a scriptwriter, TV show host and stand up comic he was a bit (but not much) better. As an actor (in this movie at any rate) he was remarkably wooden and dull. As I mentioned at the beginning, my curiosity was that I not seen a Bob Monkhouse movie before. After having viewed this painful offering, I will not let my curiosity about Monkhouse movies get the better of me again!

I'm confused by the quantity of negative reviews on this site for DENTIST IN THE CHAIR, a low budget British comedy released in 1960 and starring the comic double-act of Bob Monkhouse and Kenneth Connor. Monkhouse and his cronies are the youthful students of a dental school and Connor is a bumbling thief who through various machinations of the plot ends up masquerading as one of the students himself.

The laughs in DENTIST IN THE CHAIR come thick and fast and most of them take the form of character humour which in the hands of Monkhouse and Connor is very funny. Certainly this is no worse than the likes of CARRY ON CABBY from the same era so I'm not sure why all the hatred. At the same time I can understand that this sort of humour feels very genteel and dated by modern standards, but as I despise modern comedy that's fine by me.

The script was written by the ubiquitous Val Guest, although bizarrely he didn't direct in this instance; those duties were handled by Don Chaffey, who went onto helm one of the all-time classics, JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS. The supporting cast includes the illuminating Peggy Cummins, familiar from the horror classic NIGHT OF THE DEMON, with the likes of Eric Barker in more minor parts. I can't lie and say DENTIST IN THE CHAIR is a classic, but it's certainly a fun movie for fans of British comedy. A sequel, DENTIST ON THE JOB, was to follow.

Some student dentists, who look as if they are on the verge of being middle aged, receive some 'dodgy' dental equipment that's.been stolen. What follows is a painful and tedious narrative whereby Kenneth Connor and his student dental colleagues try to rid themselves of the loot. Bob Monkhouse, a popular TV comedian of the time, couldn't really act. Someone like Leslie Phillips would have been far better, hence from the word go, Monkhouse is out of his depth and thus looks distinctly uncomfortable in the starring role. Sadly, the second lead, Ronnie Stevens, doesn't really impress in a comedic role, but comes across as nothing more than a bland, stuffy and colourless figure. Only Kenneth Connor comes out with any credit, but even he can't save this awful film due to the puerile dialogue and the flimsy storyline. This sort of film was an effort to cash in on the 'Doctor in the House' films but spectacularly fails! The film wasn't funny when it was released and after 60 years, it's lost all traces of humour! After 30 minutes of watching this drivel, I needed a stiff drink.

Dentistry is hardly a barrel of laughs, and if this was to be the start of a rival to the Doctors series, all had their work cut out from the kick off. It does begin well with the students' antics and their diffidently exasperated tutor Reginald Beckwith. Kenneth Connor gives the funniest performance, Eric Barker is ideal as the bemused Dean and Peggy Cummins lovely and charming as his niece; Monkhouse a bit of a fish out of water. Half way through things are running out of steam, and the ending is a bit wet. All quite painless overall though for fans of British comedies of the period. Wasn't that the superb comedienne Avril Angers in the small role as the second tea lady Maggie, masquerading under the rhyming slang moniker Rosie Lee?

And here we have another byproduct of the sort of humorous movie that first flowered with DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE, as Bob Newhouse, Ronnie Stevens, and Peggy Cummins try to graduate dental school.

In the genre of "professional in training," not only have we seen doctors in the house, but nurses, veterinarians, lawyers and now dentists. I think these were popular, not just because the original starred Dirk Bogarde and James Robertson Justice, but because it made these types funny to the audience. Mack Sennett began the profess with his Keystone Kops, reducing authority figures feared by his lower-class audience into objects of ridicule. These movies didn't just rely on funny stuff, they humanized them.

Unfortunately, this one is a step back. Aside from the obligatory hazing of the students by the fearsome dean, Eric Barker, there's only one short sequence in which the students have to deal with patients, who come out of their clinic rather worse for the experience. That's not the way the public comes out of encounters with the young, unsure, but basically competent young professionals of the other movies of the genre. Instead, most of the movie is taken up with what would be, in other movies of the type, an irrelevance, caused by Kenneth Connor stealing dental instruments by accident, flogging them to the students, and then having to recover them by raising a hundred pounds to buy them back. An interesting, if rather worn-down genre of humor has been reduced to boiling oil and melted lead... and dental students pulling out perfectly good teeth.

Therefore, this movie needs to be approached as pure farce, and that's a matter of the excellence of the gags and the styles of the comic performers involved. Miss Cummins is cute in the rote role of the pretty young professional, but Monkhouse and Ronnie Stevens are neither particularly sympathetic, nor, to my taste, are they particularly funny. I'm going to chalk that up to Your Mileage May Vary; they certainly had their fans in their day. However, while Connor is adept in his role, there's little of novelty in all of this. Just another watchable movie for a rainy afternoon.