Appendix 3.2: Sample films - synopses and character lists
DOCTOR AT SEA UK 56
unnecessary.
since she implicitly wins - or at least captures - him in the
end. What is of interest to the female reader of this film, if
she has not walked out or switched off during the first few
minutes, is the course of the relationship between the young
and handsome doctor and the young and beautiful cabaret
artist. We should note that the audience has been encouraged
to empathise with the realism of Simon's approach to gender
politics when, early in the narrative, he responds to the
Captain's diatribe against women:
But surely Sir, Even a seaman has to get launched
somehow.
For the voice of reason then, insofar as it appears in the
film, women are necessary for ultimate stability (=marriage)
and as mothers. However this monogamous stability is to be
deferred for as long as possible. Despite his intentions to
avoid the disruptive influence of women by going to sea, and
to ignore their presence in port, Simon eventually succumbs to
Helene's attraction when she is a passenger for the return
voyage. Yet when, near the end of the film, he asks her to go
with him on the ship's next voyage to Rio she refuses:
Helene: I don't think I'd make a very good Doctor's
wife.
Simon: No - and I wouldn't be very good in cabaret.
This exchange seems to validate their professional personae
egually despite the fact that the film subsequently has it
both ways by ending on an embrace between the two as Simon
brings her the telegram offering her a job in Rio. Both these
characters however, Miss Mallet and Helene Colbert, are only
of interest insofar as they present obstacles to the male
protagonists. The only character with whom the audience is
invited to empathise, to whose point of view we are offered
access, is Simon Sparrow: he has the opening narration and the
position of reason distinguished from the extremity and
absurdity of all other characters in the film, except for his
eventual partner, Helene.
Despite the ambiguities of the various and more or less
successful comic moments in the film, however, in the end we
have here a representation of a male world irredeemably
steeped in 'traditional' class and gender values in which the
only discernible movement is in the direction of a general
levelling out of these hierarchies. There is a general
'démocratisation' in which humour is to be had from debunking
the social elite of the medical profession as much as from
debunking the hidebound solidarity of the working class,
exemplified in the seamen whose delegation finally accepts
Simon after he has successfully performed an appendectomy on
one of their number.
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