Un dottore in altomare

Dirk Bogarde reprises his role of Dr. Simon Sparrow in "Doctor at Sea," a 1955 film that is the second in the "Doctor" series. James Robertson Justice is on hand in a different role, that if a ship's captain.

Simon, on the run from a friend's daughter who is mad for him, takes a job on a ship where there are no women. He's kept pretty busy with the irascible captain, a member of the crew with the DTs, and other assorted difficulties.

While stopped at a port, the ship acquires the owner's daughter (Brenda de Banzie) and a cabaret singer (Brigitte Bardot) - and the ship no longer has no women!

This is very light entertainment, with Bardot is as gorgeous as she is adorable with short brown hair, an infectious personality and that stunning figure. Justice gives his usual bombastic, fun performance, and the young Bogarde is very handsome and, while never known for his comedy, handles the fare here well.

These Doctor films made him a superstar and the biggest money-maker at Rank for quite a while. He loved working with Bardot.

For some background on Bogarde and how the Doctor films came about, I recommend the John Coldstream bio of Bogarde and/or Dirk Bogarde: Rank Outsider by Sheridan Morley, which makes for very lively, fun reading.

Fresh from his training and having gotten into women trouble in his dogsbody job as a junior doctor in a surgery, Dr Simon Sparrow runs away to sea, joining a cargo ship as the medical officer. Immediately finding that he is prone to seasickness, Sparrow has to content with all manner of colourful characters – the crew of a cargo ship not being the most stable of places for people to spend their time. Things are rough enough but when they stop in a port for some shore leave, the ship picks up a couple of female passengers – making live on the ship before look calm and peaceful by way of comparison.

Still containing the light farce and japes that the Carry On series still had in the early 1950's, the Doctor series continues with its second entry and just some predictable jokes and plots. Shoehorned out to sea, the narrative mixes some medical joking and a fairly plodding plot about nautical flirting (although never approaching what you could call innuendo). It is good-natured enough but never feels like it gets out of second gear – crawling along without any risk of doing anything that well or ever picking up a bit of speed. Without any laughs or enjoyable sequences the film does just come off as rather bland but I suppose it may still have enough about it to appeal to those just looking for an old film to watch on a wet weekend afternoon.

Bogarde doesn't really help things in my opinion; he is bland himself and he doesn't add anything to the comedy or romantic sides of the material. His support cast aren't much better although Bardot's singsong accent and pretty shape is easy on the eye, meanwhile Justice and Sims are really the only easily well-known faces involved. Overall then a fairly uninteresting film that treads a gentle comic path and rarely does anything that good or that bad – it is all pretty bland and average. Might do for those that like this sort of stuff while having a cup of tea during a wet Sunday afternoon but probably that's about it.

Although Dirk Bogarde at this stage of his career was looking for meatier dramatic roles, like Sean Connery for a time he was cast as the likable if sometimes ineffectual Dr. Simon Sparrow for a series of films of which this is the second one. They were moneymakers for the Rank Organisation to be sure and Bogarde got a lot of popularity from them.

After that first film in which he completes his residency, Dr. Sparrow sets up his practice. But when he's both called on to do the work of his older colleague and resist the amorous advances of his less than tempting daughter, Bogarde decides to get away from it all. What better than to take a birth as a ship's doctor on a cargo freighter that does have some passenger accommodations.

Of course when he gets on the HMS Lotus he finds that it's like he never left the United Kingdom when he discovers that the captain is none other than James Robertson Justice. JRJ played the head of the hospital in the first Dr. Sparrow film and was the bane of Bogarde's existence. He's playing the same kind of tyrannical character in this film as the captain from the Bligh School of Command. Or better yet JRJ is like Captain Morton from Mister Roberts.

The compensation is that on the return voyage Brigitte Bardot is a passenger. But on the voyage going and coming back is the daughter of the ship's owner Brenda DaBanzie and she's setting a romantic cap for for the Captain the kind that Bogarde ran to sea to get away from.

Bogarde is shy and sweet and sometimes ineffectual, but he does come through in several of the crises aboard ship. The film holds up well still for today's audience.

The late Richard Gordon was one of those authors who outlived his fame. In the fifties, sixties and seventies his "Doctor" books, comic novels set in the world of medicine, were immensely popular and the subject of many cinema and television adaptations, but by the time he died in 2017 he was a largely forgotten figure. "Doctor at Sea", based on one of those novels, follows the fortunes of a young doctor, Simon Sparrow who, to avoid the amorous attentions of a young woman he has no interest in marrying, signs on as ship's doctor on board a cargo ship plying between Britain and South America.

There were a total of seven films in the "Doctor" series, of which this was the second. The first film, "Doctor in the House", had introduced James Robertson Justice as the overbearing, autocratic surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt. Because of the nautical setting Spratt could not be used as a character in this film, but someone obviously though that Justice was too good to waste, so he returns as the overbearing, autocratic ship's captain, Wentworth Hogg. Brigitte Bardot makes her first appearance in an English-language film as Sparrow's love-interest Helene, an attractive young French passenger. Someone thought that the film should be a double romance, because a love-interest is also provided for Hogg in the shape of Helene's travelling companion Muriel.

Dirk Bogarde as Dr Sparrow was supposedly playing the lead character, but he seemed more like a straight man to Justice's monstrous captain, and Justice, when in his overbearing/autocratic mode, can be very much an acquired taste. (The Hogg/Muriel romance never seems convincing, given Hogg's misogynistic attitudes and fiery temper). Bardot came up against the same problem which would confront her in her future English-language movies like "Viva Maria!" or "Shalako". A fine actress in her native language, she never learned to speak English with any fluency and could never act in it with any conviction. It is a long time since I last read any of Gordon's "Doctor" books, but from what I can remember they were sharp and funny. That is not, however, a description I could use of this film, which struck me as rather dull, and, at best, only fitfully amusing. 5/10

The second in the popular British comedy series already shows signs of flagging from the class evident in the original film. For one thing, the change of setting proves a bit of a quandary: it both opens up and cramps the jokes (while generally ship-bound, we do get a stretch on dry land – which sees the hero first involved with a drunken blonde and falling foul of her father and then put to jail for being 'under the influence' himself!).

Incidentally, while Dirk Bogarde reprises his role of Simon Sparrow, both James Robertson Justice and George Coulouris (who were also in DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE [1954]) play new characters here – the former's gruffness, while amusing at first, borders on caricature eventually; similarly, Brenda de Banzie's middle-aged passenger (pampered daughter of the seafaring company's President) is somewhat over bearing, evoking memories of Kay Walsh in an episode from the portmanteau film TRIO (1950). Bogarde's love interest, then, is rather incongruously filled by Brigitte Bardot – who's undeniably attractive but not yet the sex symbol of subsequent repute (although she does get to be seen taking a shower at one point).

Gags and innuendo sometimes approach the broad humor one normally associates with the rival "Carry On" series (which was actually still three years away from its inception) and CARRY ON CRUISING (1962) in particular (both films, in fact, culminated in a party on deck which ends in disaster).