Doctor At Sea (DVD)

...Sparrow is now a qualified doctor and working as an apprentice in a practice in London. He finds that not only is he doing all the work while his boss heads off to play golf but his bosses daughter is dead set on getting her hands on him.
Deciding his only recourse it to run away he does the time honoured thing of escaping to sea. He manages to get a job on board a merchant navy ship... with no women on board!

A trip to a port ...
...on board?

Doctor At Sea (1955) was the second of the seven Doctor films made throughout the 50's and 60's and is, like the first in the series, very typical of British comedies of the era. This one loses Kenneth More from the cast but holds onto the other big name, Dirk Bogarde, the heartthrob of the era, reprising his role as Simon Sparrow, and finds a new role for the blustering James Robertson Justice. He has changed from being Lancelot ... more

Simon Sparrow is now a qualified doctor and working as an apprentice in a practice in London. He finds that not only is he doing all the work while his boss heads off to play golf but his bosses daughter is dead set on getting her hands on him.
Deciding his only recourse it to run away he does the time honoured thing of escaping to sea. He manages to get a job on board a merchant navy ship... with no women on board!

A trip to a port is something all the crew look forward to but on their first stop on this trip they pick up a couple of passengers, the Chairmans' daughter and her friend, a beautiful young singer. How will the arrival of two women affect all the lonely men on board?

Doctor At Sea (1955) was the second of the seven Doctor films made throughout the 50's and 60's and is, like the first in the series, very typical of British comedies of the era. This one loses Kenneth More from the cast but holds onto the other big name, Dirk Bogarde, the heartthrob of the era, reprising his role as Simon Sparrow, and finds a new role for the blustering James Robertson Justice. He has changed from being Lancelot Spratt in In The House to Captain Hogg, the ships commander in this one with very little difference to be seen between the two.

Doctor At Sea has a number of similar themes to its precursor, medical hilarities, women problems and love still haunt Sparrow's life to a large extent and all of these turn up again. The idea of setting the movie at sea must have seemed like a good one. It gives the writers a radical departure, location and set wise, from the school/hospital tied original and allows them to explore a doctors life from a different direction. Though the limitations of being ship bound for most of the time do mean that At Sea is not a patch on the bright, fresh feeling original.

There are some good moments in At Sea but they are very few and far between. Bogarde is ok and JRJ is the scene stealer he always is, even in his over the top brash acting style, but there is no real spark to the movie. It is all run of the mill predictable stuff.
This is the same as Doctor In The House, in a sense, but DITH had something that raised it above its limitations. The lack of a strong set of supporting characters for Sparrow and Hogg is, in my eyes, the big difference.
The original had a main cast of 4 plus JRJ that allowed much more characterisation and more dynamics between the four very differing leads. In DAS the one main character is the point around which pretty much everything revolves and the film is a lesser one because of it, even with a very young Brigitte Bardot appearing as the young singer. The crew of the ship do have some screen time but they are never fleshed out enough for you to really get to know them at all.

The only real saving grace, or reason for bothering to see this, is to watch JRJ as Captain Hogg. He is the prototype for Brian Blessed today. A large man with a large voice and an even larger than life character he always seems to play the same person in all his films, maybe he just plays himself all the time? Still he is always such fun to watch that at least the times he appears on screen everything really fires up and things start to improve. Sadly though that doesn't make it enough to recommend it to anyone except the stoutest of British comedy fans.

It's a shame that this doesn't reach the levels of amusement that the original did but it must have done well enough at the Box Office as there were still 5 more sequels to come. Maybe the next one will be a major improvement over this sequel? 

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