Dentist in the Chair

What is worse,having a tooth pulled or watching this film? Probably the later.The film has a reasonable cast.However Bob Monkhouse is not to everybody's taste,certainly not mine.What's worse it is clear from the writing credits that he bore part of the blame for this mess.Rather surprisingly Val Guest wrote the screenplay but did not direct..Ronnie Stevens has a large part and he is really not up to it.Kenneth Connor gives his usual reliable performance but even he cannot make this film seem funny.Peggy Cummins,near the end of her career is the female lead.This film tries and fails to latch onto the coat tails of the successful Doctor series.

This was to be the first of a series of comedies cued to the enormous success of, and utilizing many of the same players from, England's "Carry On" comedies. Only two were made, and this one demonstrates the principal shortcoming leading to the series' end. Despite the presence of an attractive cast, and the same frantic pace which commanded audience approval for the "Carry On" films, "Dentist in the Chair" is betrayed by an extraordinarily inane script.

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.

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.

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?