Trial by ordeal,

Mot suck fun
By GRACE CON WAY
DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE Odeon, Leicester Square Friday, March 26, Certificate U Director: Ralph Thomas
MEDICAL student who had just passed his finals
told me once that the successful ones had to sign their names in a book.
The signatures, he said, told their own tale. They might have been those of old men with the ague. Which points to the fact that passing finals is very much a trial by ordeal. Especially in the river. "Doctor in the House" gives us a glimpse of soung men undergoing this horror. and it seems to be quite as terrifying as I imagined.
But this is no horror picture. I've seldom heard such healthy laughter rolling round the cinema, contributed, it was evident in goodly proportion, by squads from some of the London medical schools. But the rest of us were amused vastly, too.
The film. based on Richard Gordon's best-seller (he has adapted it to the screen himself), depicts the progress of a student from his first year (at such a place as Baits), to the moment when he writes that shaky signature in the book.
Like all medical institutions, this is a small world of its own. The doctors and the nurses. the students and the patients are welded together in the communal life and in the battle of the body against sickness, accident and death.
Into this small, tight but palpitating world comes a young student (Dirk Bogarde). He learns up with two "Chronics" (students who go on for ever without getting their finals and played by Kenneth More and Donald Sinden) and one whose main interest is rugger (Donald Houston). If the filmic treatment is rather spasmodic it is because there is so much a medical student must pack into the normal day.
Every aspect of hospital life is here. from the great day when Sir Lancelot —famous surgeon—comes to conduct the students round the wards and lecture on the patients (and what a superb performance James Robertson Justice gives in this part), to the classic entry through the roof of a nurse (Muriel Pavlov) who has not got a late pass; and taking in on the way, a wild street "battle" when the students of the opposing rugger team. come to the hospital to kidnap the mascot.
All the supporting parts are as capably handled as we have !earned to expect from the best British studios. it is a lengthy cast and the film is full of small, deftly drawn portraits by some of our best actors. Dirk Bogardc has never played with more assurance. After this. he would be foolish indeed to forsake British studios, no matter what carrots Hollywood dangle before him.
RED GARTERS Plaza, Certificate U Director: George Marshall HOLLYWOOD turns round and 'bites the hand that has fed it from its infancy. For in "Red
Garters" it has a glorious time guying all Westerns. This you may think has been done before but not with the present technique.
The whole action is shot in the primary sort of colours they used in the stage settings of Oklahomablinding yellows, blazing reds, hot maroons with an occasional pastel cardboard tree to lessen the shock.
Characters come on and off a studio set—sham facades of taverns, interiors with skeleton fronts.
A rather fearsome troupe of dancing girls (the Red Garters), who wave their legs across the camera's eve like some crimson-dipped centipede, is a doubtful pleasure. But those aside. this is lots of fun with a rather pokerfaced Rosemary Clooney singing songs that don't fit the character she is asked to portras; Jack Carson sweeping off his Stetson in a mock gesture of reverence whenever the "Code of the West" is mentioned. and Guy Mitchell who, I understand. makes those crooning discs that the disc jockeys like to spin in Housewives' Choice.
You may find the joke wearing a bit thin once or twice. So did I.
DEVIL ON HORSEBACK
London Pavilion : Certificate U Director : Cyril Frankel VOU need not be a racing fan to .1 recognise the quality and believe in the authenticity. This is a Group 3 production, which always do something different.
The "Devil" in the case is a boy miner turned jockey apprentice— cocksure. arrogant and feeling his genius with horses in his bones. Then, disregarding the instructions of the trainer (John McCallum) and trying to please the owner (Googie Withers), he drives a valuable racehorse beyond its powers amp it dies.
He is suspended and learns a sharp and salutary lesson. We leave him a wiser and a better boy—all set to be another Lester Piggott, Jeremy Spenser, who plays the part of the jockey, has covered a lot of ground since we hailed him in his first important part as a boy conductor. He has some formidable competition, which he meets successfully, from a company of experts headed by Liam Redmond as an old "hasbeen" about the stables, and with Meredith Edwards in support, A racing picture that manages to he exciting and convincing without having to resort to hysteria, tragedy or melodrama.
EIGHT O'CLOCK WALK, on the same programme, brings Richard Attenborough back to the screen for one of his now rare appearances in I well-directed, well-acted but gloomy story about the terror of being convicted on circumstantial evidence.
THE EMPEROR'S BAKER La Continentate: Certificate U Director : Martin Prie A WITTY, well-scripted, wellCI directed colour film from Czechoslovakia about life at the Court of Bohemia in the reign of the Emperor Rudolf II whose hobby was alchemy and who kept a .small army of quacks and charlatans working in the cellars of the palace looking for an elixir of life.