Un thermomètre pour le colonel

The next time you're in your hospital bed and two nurses walk in with a long-stemmed daffodil, do not under any circumstance roll over on your stomach.

Carry On Nurse was the second in the Carry On stream of British comedies that began with Carry On Sergeant and lasted for nearly 20 years. You'll either love 'em or you'll hate 'em. You'll love Carry On Nurse, or at least feel a warm, gentle glow of nostalgia break out over you like a rash, if naughty humor based on bedpans, buxom nurses, buttock massages and bunions make you smile. We're in a hospital ward where the male patients are ruled by Matron and where almost every nurse is a knock-out. Naturally, they innocently cause acute adjustment problems for the men who are away from wives and girlfriends. The Carry On gang is represented here by Kenneth Connor as an anxious but well-meaning boxer; Kenneth Williams, all intellectual condescension; Terence Longdon, the good-looking observer; Charles Hawtrey, who made mincing about an art form; Hattie Jacques as the iron-willed Matron; and a number of others, including a solo appearance by Wilfred Hyde-White as a demanding patient who winds up in the best joke of the movie. It involves that daffodil. Among the nurses is Shirley Eaton, guaranteed to disturb any man's dreams.

The story, such as it is, is even slighter than Carry On Sergeant. Carry On Nurse is really a series of episodic vignettes and jokes, leading up to Hawtrey swishing about in a nurse's uniform, Williams brandishing knives and preparing to remove a bunion while reading how to do it, Connor administering the anesthetic which turns out to be laughing gas, and poor Lesley Phillips, who just wanted his bunion fixed so he could get on with a bit of snogging he'd arranged for the next day. The whole thing's a funny set up.

By the gross-out standards of today's movie humor, Carry On Nurse is about as raunchy as Pollyanna. It's vulgar, silly and a lot of fun. Just like the use that daffodil is put to.

Well, it was interesting. I laughed more at "Carry On Sergeant".

Fun seeing Wilfred Hyde White, an early Jill Ireland (but as a love interest for old Nasal Nose?) and June Whitfield, no doubt best known in America as Edina's mother on "Absolutely Fabulous."

The strongest point seemed to be waiting for Matron (what little I have seen of this woman, she is steadily emerging as the fave) to show up for inspection, but nothing really coming of it. I suppose the daffodil scene was bold for its time, must remember that. Certainly more daring than anything on American cinema.

I did enjoy Nurse Nightingale tho, keeping an eye on the patient.

There was just a bit of a hint of what is to come with Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jacques, as the two argued here over why he couldn't wear his robe while lying in bed.

And the laughing gas operation was highly original. I would wager that scene had something to do with why it got noticed in America.

Truthfully, I have never heard of any of these movies until a vacation to the UK back in '97.

It is an utterly fascinating idea to use the same actors over and over again in different settings tho.

Carry On Nurse was the second of the Carry On movies and also the first of the medical ones.

This one is about life in a ward in Haven Hospital. The patients include a boxer, nuclear scientist and a Major. We get to see one of them snogging a nurse, the Major always calling for help and, best of all, the patients trying to do a bunion operation while breathing in laughing gas! There is also an accident prone nurse to add to the chaos.

I find this to be one of the funnier Carry Ons and is shot well in black and white.

Now to the cast, which includes plenty of well known stars joining the regulars: Kenneth Williams, Hattie Jaques, Kenneth Conner, Charles Hawtrey, Leslie Phillips and the Carry On debuts of Joan Sims and June Whitfield. With Bond girl Shirley Eaton (before she was painted gold in Goldfinger), Bill Owen (Compo from Last Of the Sumer Wine), Norman Rossington, Joan Hickson (Miss Marple), Susan Shaw, Jill Ireland (Charles Bronson's wife) and Wilfred Hyde-White as the Major.

Have a good laugh with Carry On Nurse. Great fun.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5.

While not a laugh riot, this film about nurses and patients at a ward at Haven Hospital holds your interest because of the endearing characters. Kenneth Williams is his usual fun self, aided by an interest in a young (and fairly beautiful, of course) Jill Ireland. Joan Sims plays a bumbling student nurse perfectly, while Hattie Jacques is near perfect as the unamused matron. The beautiful Shirley Eaton is also in this, any film I've seen her in she has been naturally good. The jokes are not hilarious or anything like that, but the film puts a smile on your face often enough (Charles Haughtry is funny in this). There have been (much) worse Carry On Films and some better, but this is a watchable one I think you'll enjoy but not love.

The Carry On formula was a straightforward one: take any familiar stuffy Brit institution with its blustering authority figures and inflexible bureaucracy and reduce it to chaos with a little strategically applied low class maliciousness. The resulting mayhem and farcical runnings about inevitably turn pompous prigs into quivering jellies, to the roaring amusement of Brit audiences who lived their lives under the heel of such petty authorities and loved to watch them taken down.

Carry on Nurse, with its casual snipes at the Public Health, zany ward carryings on after hours by bored neglected patients fed up with their authoritarian Matron (Hattie Jacques, in her first of more than a dozen appearances as this familiar type) and fighting back in a series of anarchic stunts, shows the Carry On formula in ready-made form and is an excellent starting point for new viewers.