The Dentist

THE DENTIST (Paramount, 1932), directed by Leslie Pearce, stars the legendary comic WC Fields in his first of four 20 minute comedy shorts produced by Mack Sennett, which ranks one of his best reproduced vaudeville comedy supplements ever put on film. Raunchy and very naughty, this comedy short pulls no punches, which is why this one has stood up well among Fields' other short subjects. As in the best of Fields' domestic comedies, he has a disfunctional family, but in this case he the disfunctional one, an absent-minded father (possibly a widower since there is no wife present)with a grown daughter (Marjorie "Babe" Kane) in love with Arthur, the ice man (Harry Bowen).

THE DENTIST begins at home where the Dentist (WC Fields) is reading his newspaper at the breakfast table while his daughter tries to put in a big chunk of ice into the ice box. He gets a telephone call from Charlie Frobisher (Bud Jamison) to come out for a game of golf. The first half of the comedy short focuses on Fields' trials and tribulations in trying to win his hand of golf, ending in frustration as he throws his caddy (Bobby Dunn) into the pond, along with his golf clubs and bags. The second half fades into the dental office where the dentist, with the assistance of his nurse (Zedna Farley), must encounter his scheduled appointments with numerous character patients, including a screaming woman with a tooth ache who had been bitten in the ankle by a dog, "It's fortunate it wasn't a Newfoundland dog that bit you," quips Fields as he views her while she bends down to show him her scar; followed by a male patient in the waiting room who quietly walks out after hearing some screams; and highlighted by another woman patient (Elsie Cavanna) who must submit to the drill followed by the dentist trying to yank the bad tooth out of her mouth as she is being dragged about with her bad tooth still attached to the Dentist's pliers. At the same time, his daughter, who is locked in her bedroom upstairs by her father so not to run away and marry the ice man, stubbornly stumps her feet repeatedly on the floor, causing the plaster from the ceiling to fall into the patient's open mouth. In spite of his unsympathetic nature, this dentist continues to acquire more patients as well as patience.

A crude comedy in every sense of the word, but one that has become famous over the years and worth reviewing because of it. Even Fields' spoken dialogue, which he had written, includes lines such as, "Oh, the hell with her," which he tells his nurse after listening to a lady patient groaning in pain with her tooth ache. Even during the golf game earlier in the story, Fields nearly tells his caddy what he can do with the rule book. One of the most famous lines, however, has Fields asking his patient, "Have you ever had this tooth pulled before?" Dialogue and scenes like these must have caused a furor with the censors at the time of its release, especially the use of that motory sounding drill, which gets the biggest laughs from its viewers.

Also in the cast are: Billy Bletcher as the Russian patient; Dorothy Granger as Miss Peppitone; and Emma Tansey as the old lady at the golf course, among others.

For many years, THE DENTIST had become a public domain title, and distributed on video cassette through various distributors, often featured with two other WC Fields shorts as THE GOLF SPECIALIST (RKO, 1930) and THE FATAL GLASS OF BEER (1933). These have also been a favorite on commercial and cable television as fillers between feature films during the late night hours. Recently, all of Fields' sound comedy shorts have been restored to better picture and sound quality, and these clearer prints were packaged through Public Media Home Vision Video in the late 1990s. While it's great to see these comedy gems in sharp focus, along with other ad ons such as Fields' ten minute silent short, POOL SHARKS (1915), THE PHARMACIST (1933) and THE BARBER SHOP (1933), the only disappointment in turn happens to be THE DENTIST. The reason being that although restored, THE DENTIST not only includes new background music, which is nowhere to be heard during the storyline in its original print, except for during the opening and closing credits, but the movie itself has been slightly shortened with the raunchy dialogue substituted by different lines or covered up by intrusive underscoring, which takes away from the film's original intent. At present, the censored and cleaned up print, possibly from a reissue after the production code had taken effect, is the one used when shown on American Movie Classics in 2000, and on Turner Classic Movies in June 2001 when the station honored WC Fields as its "star of the month." To see THE DENTIST, uncensored and in its full glory, it would be best to locate an older video copy dating back to the 1980s. Nonetheless, with the exception of it weak ending, the uncensored version to THE DENTIST ranks the best of the four Fields/Sennett comedy shorts for Paramount, and should be seen to be believed.

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.

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.

Both on and off screen. I don't consider this particular short one of his best, but it is good. It seems a little slower than many of his other works in that his comebacks, etc. aren't fired off as quickly as I'm used to when it comes to his style of wit. But it has its moments, and there are enough of those to make it entertaining. One of those moments is due to the wonderful slapstick comic ability of Elise Cavanna. As a rather clingy dental patient, given her manner, looks and talent as an "acrobat", the only person I can think of to compare her with is Carrol Burnett. And she compares right well. Other cast members also help make this flick as good as it is. Such as Bud Jamison who, with his very familiar face, adds good comic backup. Of course there is that terrific line when, after Fields has been punched, and the iceman steps in to say, "I'd like to see you do that again!", Fields interjects ... Well, you watch it. Its worth the effort.

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.