"Come come, Matron. Surely you've seen a temperature taken like this before?"
Added 8/28/2007
The next time you're in your hospital bed and two nurses walk in with a long-stemmed daffodil, do not under any circumstance roll over on your stomach.
Carry On Nurse was the second in the Carry On stream of British comedies that began with Carry On Sergeant and lasted for nearly 20 years. You'll either love 'em or you'll hate 'em. You'll love Carry On Nurse, or at least feel a warm, gentle glow of nostalgia break out over you like a rash, if naughty humor based on bedpans, buxom nurses, buttock massages and bunions make you smile. We're in a hospital ward where the male patients are ruled by Matron and where almost every nurse is a knock-out. Naturally, they innocently cause acute adjustment problems for the men who are away from wives and girlfriends. The Carry On gang is represented here by Kenneth Connor as an anxious but well-meaning boxer; Kenneth Williams, all intellectual condescension; Terence Longdon, the good-looking observer; Charles Hawtrey, who made mincing about an art form; Hattie Jacques as the iron-willed Matron; and a number of others, including a solo appearance by Wilfred Hyde-White as a demanding patient who winds up in the best joke of the movie. It involves that daffodil. Among the nurses is Shirley Eaton, guaranteed to disturb any man's dreams.
The story, such as it is, is even slighter than Carry On Sergeant. Carry On Nurse is really a series of episodic vignettes and jokes, leading up to Hawtrey swishing about in a nurse's uniform, Williams brandishing knives and preparing to remove a bunion while reading how to do it, Connor administering the anesthetic which turns out to be laughing gas, and poor Lesley Phillips, who just wanted his bunion fixed so he could get on with a bit of snogging he'd arranged for the next day. The whole thing's a funny set up.
By the gross-out standards of today's movie humor, Carry On Nurse is about as raunchy as Pollyanna. It's vulgar, silly and a lot of fun. Just like the use that daffodil is put to.
Carry On Nurse and Carry On Sergeant were huge hits in their time. Nurse made more money in 1959 than any other British film and was a great success in the United States. The Region 2 DVD I have, from the Optimum/StudioCanal Carry On Collection, is in good shape. It includes a pleasant and nostalgic film commentary by the two more-or-less romantic leads in the film, Shirley Eaton and Terence Longdon. They're elderly now, and it was nice to hear what they had to say.
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Enjoyable Second Carry On Film
Added 5/10/2006
Carry On Nurse saw the series hit the jackpot with this proving an enormous box office suucess in the U.S.A where it ran in some cinemas for an astounding 2 and a half years! Whilst some firmly regard this as one of the best of the entire series, it has to be said that this film has nothing on some of the later medical entries such as Doctor (1967) (even though that was a virtually an updated remake of Nurse), Again Doctor (1969) and Matron (71). The film develops at a leisurley pace and has no real back bone of a plot. Hattie Jaques plays the no-nonsense Matron which would become something of her trademark in the series, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Connor and Leslie Phillips are amongst the patients and Joan Sims makes her debut apperance in a Carry On film (who would stay with the series through to Carry On Emmanuelle in 1978) as a clumsy, accident-prone nurse. A gentle comedy that doesn't quite hit the delights of some of the series future entries but with the vast majority of the regulars being involved its defintley worth a look!
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