Doctor in Love ** (1960, Michael Craig, Leslie Phillips, James Robertson Justice, Joan Sims, Joan Hickson, Virginia Maskell, Liz Fraser, Irene Handl, Fenella Fielding, Nicholas Parsons) – Classic Movie Review 3141

‘TAKE A DEEP BREATH…then laugh your head off at the comedy where the girls are medically chaste’

The rather less charismatic or popular Michael Craig takes over in 1960 from the much-missed series star Dirk Bogarde as comical medical hero, Dr Richard Hare, in this fairly worthy, though surprisingly smutty, fourth addition to the incredibly popular and long-running Doctor series that eventually made seven films. It again triumphed as Britain’s top moneymaker of the year.

This time Nicholas Phipps’s screenplay from the Richard Gordon novel concentrates on the doctors’ amorous exploits, as Dr Hare (Craig) and Dr Tony Burke (Leslie Phillips) take on a country practice. Burke and Hare, get it? The invaluable James Robertson Justice (Sir Lancelot Spratt), Joan Sims (Dawn) and Joan Hickson (Nurse) are back from the 1954 original Doctor in the House, and it is of course worth seeing just for that adorable vintage cast.

It is the first film of Sheila Hancock, then aged 27, playing the librarian. Also in the cast are Virginia Maskell as Dr Nicola Barrington, Nicholas Phipps as Dr Clive Cardew, Reginald Beckwith as Wildewinde, Liz Fraser as Leonora, Irene Handl as Professor MacRitchie, Fenella Fielding as Mrs Tadwich, Nicholas Parsons as Dr Hinxman, Carole Lesley as Kitten Strudwick, Ambrosine Phillpotts as Lady Spratt, Moira Redmond, Ronnie Stevens, John le Mesurier, Bill Fraser, Patrick Cargill, Robin Ray, Esma Cannon, Michael Ward, Meredith Edwards, John Moulder-Brown, Marianne Stone and Peter Sallis.

Bogarde returned for Doctor in Distress in 1963, his fourth and final appearance in director Ralph Thomas’s eventual series of seven. Phillips returned to the series as Dr Gaston Grimsdyke in Doctor in Clover (1966).

The Burke and Hare murders were a series of 16 killings committed over about ten months in 1828 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

A very happy 95th birthday to Nicholas Parsons CBE (born 10 October 1923).

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3141

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