The Drilling Fields

The '40s were a Golden Age of Bad Dentist movies. In 1941 came The Strawberry Blonde, a remake of One Sunday Afternoon, starring James Cagney as a mail-order dentist who eventually goes to jail for fraud. The story, told in flashback, gradually builds up to the climactic moment when Cagney gets to avenge himself on the man who stole the woman he loves and railroaded him into a two-year stretch in the hoosegow.

Needless to say, his vengeance is spectacularly incisive in nature. One question that this amusing, but badly flawed, motion picture does not answer is why any individual in his right mind would agree to have his teeth worked on by a man who got his dental credentials through the mail while serving a prison sentence for a crime that the patient himself had committed. Particularly after he has stolen the girl the dentist loved. Not until 1996's The Dentist, in which an IRS agent agrees not to prosecute Corbin Bernsen for tax fraud in exchange for free dental care, will the public again be exposed to a patient with such stupifyingly poor judgment.

The same year The Strawberry Blonde came out, Footsteps in the Dark, one of the strangest Errol Flynn movies ever made, was also released. Looking terribly out of character in a suit and tie, Flynn plays an investment banker who secretly writes mysteries under a pseudonym. Inadvertently embroiled in a murder case in which he is at one point the prime suspect, Flynn locks horns with Ralph Bellamy, a murderous dentist who has concocted a complex scam with a dithering showgirl he subsequently kills off. Notable for an unforgettable scene in which Bellamy and his patient Flynn exchange pleasantries while smoking cigarettes in the clinic, this film, like its predecessors, gives voice to the public's deepest fears about the profession: these guys all seem to suffer from low self-esteem, are always on the prowl for fresh talent, and will do anything for a fast buck. Worse yet, they smoke.

In 1944, the famous director Preston Sturges made his one truly bad movie, The Great Moment, which chronicles the life and times of Dr. W.T.G. Morton, the man who invented dental anesthesia. With Joel McCrea badly miscast as a studious dental pioneer, the movie is replete with a botched operation, terrified patients, highly unethical dental practices and unbearable slapstick. Looking about as comfortable perusing his massive medical textbook as Keanu Reeves would look with the concordance to Moliere, McCrea is a tragic figure who ends his career in disgrace. Once again, low self-esteem runs rampant. In one scene, McCrea's fiancee tearfully explains to her mother that her intended hopes to become a dentist. "Oh, and he seemed such a nice young man," says the mother.

In 1948, the third--and only musical--version of One Sunday Afternoon was released. Here, the flatulent Dennis Morgan reprises the Cooper-Cagney role, and the music is very bad, as befits a profession whose operating theater ambience will eventually come to be intimately identified with Kenny G, Chuck Mangione and the appalling John Tesh. Thus, in one fell swoop, this remake achieved the unlikely hat trick of being both years behind and decades ahead of its time, while also sucking in the present.

That very same year, Bob Hope appeared as a hapless dentist in the oater comedy_ The Paleface_. Early in the film Hope is seen using a hammer on his patient while reading dentistry technique from a manual. When his patient tries to explain that he is treating the wrong tooth, Hope snaps: "Please, no clues, you'll spoil all the fun." As with virtually every other movie in the genre, Hope's character, "Painless" Potter, is clearly a lecherous individual plagued by crippling self-revulsion, though the film is enlivened by a great scene where Jane Russell guns down a couple of ornery varmints with pistols strapped around her undies.

For whatever reason, the 1950s were a dental-deficient era in motion pictures, but as soon as 1960 arrived, there was Bells Are Ringing, in which Dean Martin plays an aspiring playwright who falls in love with the woman who runs his answering service, and becomes involved with a singing dentist who secretly dreams of writing musicals. As is only to be expected, Dr. Joe Kitchell, played by Bernie West, is an absolutely terrible dentist with horrendous taste in music. Once again, the same dominant themes take center stage: bad dentistry, low self-esteem, horrible music.

The 1960s continued lugubriously with Roger Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors, featuring a sadistic dentist and his masochistic patient, Jack Nicholson. Dentists fared no better in such offerings as Dentist in the Chair (wacky crime-fighting dental students), Get On With It (wacky dentist inventors), The Secret Partner (blackmailing dentist), The Shakiest Gun in the West (wacky Don Knotts in a horrid remake of The Paleface) and Cactus Flower (Goldie Hawn-loving dentist Walter Matthau).

The next time the public would be exposed to dental expertise of any note was in John Schlesinger's watershed film Marathon Man, released in 1976. What makes Marathon Man so fascinating is that it is one of the few films in the entire canon of dental cinema in which the dentist does not suffer from low self-esteem. Yes, Laurence Olivier plays a sadistic Nazi hiding out in South America. Yes, he is a fiendish killer. And yes, he's a practitioner of some of the most aggressive dental procedures imaginable. But nothing in Olivier's performance suggests that he suffers from any doubts about his own worth as a person or a dentist. That's one thing you have to give the Third Reich: they really knew how to make their employees feel good about themselves.

Perhaps owing to the dark shadow cast over the profession by Olivier's nauseating antics, dentistry did not resurface in any meaningful way until 1985, when Joe Mantegna played a mobbed-up dentist in Compromising Positions. This intermittently entertaining film, starring Susan Sarandon as a nosy housewife/reporter investigating the dentist's murder, opens with some fascinating shots inside her mouth, with Mantegna asking if she's been using unwaxed dental floss and the Water Pik. This is, as far as I can determine, the first time that flossing is ever mentioned in a film about dentists. And doesn't that say a lot about Hollywood's idiot culture?

Pages: 1 2 3