DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 798, 5 November 1954, Page 21

DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE

(Rank-Betty E. Box) ICHARD GORDON’S Doctor in the House is, I'm told, a very funny book. Is it because of sourness, then, or superiority that I’ve never split my sides over the passages that have been pointed outs te« amesste "prove «it? Neither, I hope. As Dr. Joad might have said, it dep®hds ‘on what*you mean by funny. The quite unremarkable fact is we don’t all laugh ourselves silly at the same things, and my failure to do so over the film version of Mr. Gordon’s book didn’t astonish me even when most of those about me-and the women especially-were tickled pink. It is, I assure you, an amusing film but not one that I can rave about. The story concerns the progress, in and out of school, of a quartet of medical students. Among ~ them are Simon (Dirk . Bogarde), a shy, earnest- young man who is taken in hand by a trio of seniors led by Grimsdyke (Kenneth More). As an engaging good-timer who can’t bring himself to cut off an ample allowance by graduating, Mr. More has the same sort of part he played so well in Genevieve. Don’t let the advertisements kid you, however, that he is again partnered with Kay Kendall. She is one of several women in the film, but her appearance is as~ Simon’s pick-up-a brief. appearance, too, but effective and amusing. Doctor in the House is very episodic, but it has plenty of pace, and since most of the episodes are not in any real sense part of a steadily developing story, it says something for a very good cast and the direction of Ralph Thomas that the film does warm up-it’s much more entertaining towards the end. One of the best of the later episodes, oddly enough, is an_ old-as-the-hills student rag-the kidnapping of a mascot after a football match-which I found surprisingly amusing. But not all the episodes are merely funny. There’s a touching quality, for instance, about Simon’s first maternity case. Much as I admired the playing of the younger fry, I must add that I liked best of all the scenes which were stolen with the greatest of ease by James Robertson Justice-every one that is, in which he appeared--as Sir Lancelot, the distinguished surgeon-instructor, gruff but

human (". . . and if you have to faint, fall backwards, not across the patient.’’) A bit more of the quality he brings to the film and I might have found myself writing about it with less restraint.