Nurse on Wheels *** (1963, Juliet Mills, Ronald Lewis, Joan Sims, Noel Purcell, Esma Cannon, Athene Seyler) – Classic Movie Review 8119

Director Gerald Thomas’s 1963 black and white comedy Nurse on Wheels stars Juliet Mills as a young nurse called Joanna Jones, who gets on her bike and cycles around a rural England community full of fairly amusing comic stereotypes, who moan a lot, mostly about how her elderly retired predecessor was such a treasure and how they won’t take their clothes off for medical examinations.

Mills seems entirely happy playing a nice, brisk nurse again in a mildly amusing comic follow-up to the previous year’s comedy Twice Round the Daffodils (1962) for the same company, Peter Rogers Productions, with the same writer, producer and director.

Norman Hudis’s screenplay is very soft and old-fashioned, but Mills shows a lot of simple, straightforward charm, and the British comedy stalwarts are adorable. You want to burst out into little rounds of applause at the end of each of their turns. Esma Cannon is an especial delight as Joanna’s scatterbrain meddlesome mother Mrs Jones.

It is the great comic actress Athene Seyler’s last film, playing Miss Farthingale, though she lived on till 1990, to be 101. She appeared on BBC’s Terry Wogan Show to celebrate her 100th birthday on 31 May 1989.

She appeared on stage at the Royal National Theatre at 101. She made 70 films running back as far as 1921, and is known for Satan Never Sleeps (1962), A French Mistress (1960), Make Mine Mink (1960), Night of the Demon [Curse of the Demon] (1957), The Franchise Affair (1951) and Blossom Time [April Blossoms] (1934).

Also in the cast are Raymond Huntley, Joan Sims, Esma Cannon, Ronald Lewis, George Woodbridge, Renée Houston, Jim Dale, Barbara Everest, Deryck Guyler, Joan Hickson, David Horne, Ronald Howard, Noel Purcell, Brian Rawlinson, Amanda Reiss, Norman Rossington and Virginia Vernon.

It formed a double bill with Twice Round the Daffodils (1962) on DVD.

Joan Sims was cast as Joanna but put on weight and producer Peter Rogers cast Juliet Mills instead, but offered Sims any other role for the same billing and salary, and she agreed to play the vicar’s daughter Deborah Walcott.

Noel Purcell plays store owner Abel Worthy, whose general store is a fake frontage built on a driveway between two houses, one of which was used as Abel’s home.

It is partly filmed in Little Missenden, Buckinghamshire. Hudis’s screenplay is based on the story Nurse is My Neighbour by Joanna Jones, the name of the main character but a pseudonym of writer John Burke. It is shot in black and white by Alan Hume.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8119

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