Appendix 3.2: Sample films - synopses and character lists
DOCTOR AT SEA UK 56
I say, what a dish
Let’s move in, she may have some friends.
and always assumed to be troublesome
They say that worse things can happen at sea, but what
could be worse than being landed with Wendy. The Lotus
had one great advantage. She carried no passengers - and
that meant no women.
What sent you to sea?
Wine, women or crime?
Wives and waves don't mix old boy
in the disruptions they provoke. Yet marriage is
characterised as an almost inevitable condition for
professional advancement:
Time you though about getting married dear boy. Patients
prefer married doctors, they feel safer.
Steamship lines do like their Commodores to be married.
It seems to make them more stable.
The resolution of the narrative, such as it is, does seem to
give the last laugh to the women as Miss Mallet (Brenda da
Banzie), daughter of the steamship line's chairman, prepares
to nurse the formidable Captain Hogg (James Robertson Justice)
now safely immobilised with his leg in plaster:
Capt Hogg: How long do you suppose it'll be?
Miss Mallet: Oh, for about another forty years or so I
expect. Now Wentworth, take your medicine
like a good boy or I shall tell Daddy.
Yet this couple, Miss Mallet and Captain Hogg, as their names
suggest, are both exaggerated comical types rather than
believable characters. Miss Mallet is a middleaged woman,
opposed in the narrative to the young, beautiful and desirable
Helene Colbert (Brigitte Bardot). Her inappropriate attitude
to seamanship
Captain Beamish didn't have nearly such a pretty bridge
as you do, Captain. You know, it would be rather nice if
you had some ivy in pots, sort of trailing over
everything, wouldn't it?
and her inappropriately girlish references to 'Daddy' thinly
veil a determination which in the end proves to be stronger
even than that of the violent and misogynist Captain Hogg:
I don't approve of women. They're unseamanlike and
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