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.
