The Dentist

The Dentist (1932)

*** (out of 4)

W.C. Fields gets to shine in this pre-code Paramount short where he plays the title role. The film starts off as the dentist learns that his daughter is wanting to date an ice delivery man, which of course he wants no part of. After a disastrous round of golf the dentist returns to his office where several strange characters wait. THE DENTIST is perhaps one of Fields' best known shorts for a number of reasons. Of course, one of the more notorious reasons is all the sexual innuendo that happens once the final portion of the film happens. I'm not going to spoil these scenes but they are quite funny and especially the dialogue where Fields pretty much just insults them right to their faces. The stuff dealing with the golf was also quite funny and especially the sequence where the actor just completely loses it and begins throwing everything into the water. There are several scenes in the film where people have their teeth damaged in a wide variety of ways so those scared of the men in white will certainly want to stay away from this thing even though it is a comedy. There's no question Fields is at the top of his game because everything from his line delivery to the way he walks is just perfect.

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.

W.C. Fields plays the title role in this short, and he's not a dentist I'd want to visit but he's extremely funny. There are all sorts of classic throw away gags in here, from melting a heavy 50 pound block of ice on the stove down to ice cube size to make it easier to carry, to a man with a huge beard, in which the dentist can't seem to find his mouth. Trying to pull a tooth from a society matron, he and the patient assume every possible position as he attempts to get the tooth out. At one point he's carrying her around while hanging onto the tooth with pliers. Ouch! While this is going on, he's also trying to stop his daughter from going out with the ice man, by locking her in her room. Very inventive and still very funny.

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.

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.