Famous doctor meets famous surgeon. Renowned surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt (James Robertson Justice) arranges a cruise for his patient, the television soap star doctor Basil Beauchamp (Simon Dee). The captain of the ship is Lancelot Spratt’s brother George Spratt (Robert Morley). Doctor Burke (Leslie Phillips) stows away by mistake when chasing his model girlfriend Ophelia (Angela Scoular) onto the ship to propose to her so he can get a job in the United States at a famous hospital. She is one of a group of models doing a fashion shoot with camp photographer Roddy (Graham Chapman). Other passengers aboard ship include self-proclaimed football pools winner Llewellyn Wendover (Harry Secombe) and Mrs. Dailey (Irene Handl), a socially ambitious lady hoping to find a wealthy match for her daughter Dawn (Janet Mahoney) who sets her sights on him. Burke is pursued by Master-at-Arms (Freddie Jones) who correctly suspects that he does not have a ticket. Burke tries various ruses to try to escape him, including dressing up as a doctor. Eventually he is caught and exposed as a stowaway. Captain Spratt orders him to serve as an orderly, scrubbing the ship. When the ship’s doctor (Jimmy Thompson) falls ill from a tropical disease, Burke takes over his duties … I would have thought even the meanest intelligence would recognise that as a porthole. The seventh and final entry in the Doctor series, this is coarse but blandly funny with an extraordinary array of gender-bending jokes that might on the one hand offend all friends of Dorothy but also produce giggles at just how on the money some of the au courant references to the spectrum of sexuality actually are. It’s not what he says that makes me lose my cool, it’s those terrible shirts he wears. Phillips’ is one of the three principal intersecting storylines with this being of even more significance as it involves him with Scoular, his lady love and eventual wife in real life (with a really tragic conclusion, sadly). That magic man of media Dee also features significantly, before his extraordinary streak of lightning eventually abated. And then there’s dumpy Secombe, not our favourite person, who purveys his fake pools win into a sexually satisfying position with several dreadful social faux pas punctuating the way. There are crushing reminders of other, better cruise movies – such as a man clearly cast to resemble Charles Coburn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as the father of one of hapless Secombe’s lust objects and the series’ own entry Doctor at Sea starring Dirk Bogarde with a brunette Bardot – yet there are genuinely amusing moments amid the strain. This is really a Carry On movie with much of the charm of the early Doctor films in abeyance. We could say it’s all at sea but in reality it was all at the dry dock of Pinewood and no amount of Phillips’ charisma can compensate for the impoverishment of the low-budget vision despite several speeded-up sequences to ape silent slapstick comedies. You take care of the patients, I take care of the doctor. Jaws may drop at the sight of Chapman playing a straight (well… ) role and Graham Stark playing Indian steward Satterjee; while the appearance of Joan Sims in the concluding sequence confirms this film’s genre bending ambition. The producers felt the project was doomed after Robertson Justice became ill and couldn’t as planned play his own twin brother on the ship with Morley’s appearance reducing the laugh rate. The rights were sold to TV with Chapman helping script Doctor in the House (LWT, 1969-1970) and appearing as Roddie. Watch out for Marianne Stone, credited here as ‘Spinster.’ Adapted by Jack Davies from Richard Gordon’s Doctor on Toast, this was, as ever in the series, directed by Ralph Thomas, who had done some uncredited directing work on his brother Gerald’s rival series Carry On Crusing episode! You do get extraordinary people on cruises these days
mondomovies 