attached to ‘Cyranose’. Depardieu plays the bashful, swashbuckling poet who, embarrassed by his hooter, romances the beautiful Roxane by proxy, assisting the dashing, tongue-tied Christian de Neuvillette in his wooing of her.
STEVE MARTIN
ROXANNE (1987)
‘Laugh and the world laughs with you; sneeze and it’s goodbye Seattle.’ Steve Martin stars in Fred Schepisi’s Cyrano update, most famous for the fabulous string of nose-ist gags which the impressively proboscissed Martin recites.
PINOCCHIO (1940)
The real giant of movie snouts, Pinocchio’s extending schnozzle has had generations of children going cross-eyed as they test out the ‘tell me lies and your nose will grow’ theory.
EMMA THOMPSON
NANNY MCPHEE (2005)
The Reverse Pinocchio – Nanny McPhee’s appearance is a bellwether for the behaviour of the seven unruly Brown children. Her nose starts off as a bulbous, warty potato, but with every step in the right direction Cedric Brown’s seven children not only transform their family’s fortunes, but turn their hideous nanny into Emma Thompson – and what could be better than that?
DAN AYKROYD
NOTHING BUT TROUBLE (1991)
Writer/director Dan Aykroyd plays a 106-year-old judge with – and there’s no other way of putting this – a penis for a nose. Sadly, that’s the most interesting thing that can be said about this ‘adventure comedy horror’ romp. Really.
RALPH FIENNES
HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 1 (2010) AND PART 2 (2011)
Harry Potter: My nemesis’s got no nose. Dumbledore: How does he smell? Harry Potter: Horful!
SQUEAKY CLEAN
The Good Dentist Guide
A tricky area. We assume that if you find yourself in this section of our ENT Clinic, your dental check-ups to date may not been entirely regular. You may, like Dr Mayo, have had a school dentist. And you may think that surely only the sweetest, most compassionate of dental practitioners would have been allowed to practise on the nation’s youth? You would be wrong.
In fact, testifies Dr Mayo, the opposite seems to have been the case. All dental treatment was to be dispensed as swiftly as possible. Anaesthetics were far too costly (three shillings and fourpence per dose) so despite these being the druggy sixties, no medication was available to small boys who needed pain relief in Croydon.
This association of dentists with misery is commonplace, both in real life and in the movies. You need look no further than Marathon Man (1976) for proof. Dr Mayo grew up thinking all dentists were Nazis anyway, so the idea of Laurence Olivier playing one for real was no surprise. The famous ‘I’m now going to drill your whole mouth away’ sequence is, rightly, regarded as one of the most horrific ever filmed (see p.102).
So the cinematic tradition here is that teeth = pain (except for the 2007 movie Teeth, which, like its 2004 Japanese predecessor Sexual Parasite: Killer Pussy, is about castration anxiety). The Movie Doctors therefore have tried to change this for you. We have managed the impossible; we have found five movies where – get this – dentists are portrayed as good people. That’s right. Not sadists, not idiots, not even morally dubious, but good, decent folk you’d hang out with. If there was really no other option.
EVERSMILE, NEW JERSEY (1989)
Would you trust Daniel Day-Lewis if he was your dentist? Would your mind fill with the random acts of violence he has performed on screen over the years? Beatings, scalpings, that kind of thing? Well, this obscure offering (maybe the least viewed Day-Lewis picture ever) offers us our hero as Dr Fergus O’Connell, an Irish dental missionary pounding the back roads of Patagonia. They don’t want to trust him either. Despite being on a mission to improve the nation’s oral health, he ends up getting beaten up or shunned by most of his would-be patients. You see, he may be a good man but Dr O’Connell is definitely a bit weird too.
But DDL still smiles that anti-bacterial, teeth-whitening smile, and so all is well. The next time you find a gaucho with a rotting molar, you’ll know who to call.
THUMBSUCKER (2005)
If Dr Day-Lewis can’t see you, why not sign on with Dr Keanu Reeves? He seems just your sort. Young, floppy-haired and prone to saying things like ‘the trick . . . is living without an answer’ – he is either a guru, a visionary or just deeply annoying. But if he’s a great dentist, who cares if he mumbles his way through the Van Morrison phrase book?
In Thumbsucker he plays Perry Lyman, an orthodontist who shows how cool he is by smoking in his surgery. Seventeen-year-old Justin, who needs a new approach, is impressed. He is the titular thumbsucker and, having fallen for beautiful Rebecca, is finding the habit rather embarrassing. His real problem, however, turns out to be his parents Audrey and Mike, played by Tilda Swinton and Vincent D’Onofrio. The issue is not Tilda’s suspect record as an on-screen parent (We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) didn’t end too well for anyone) the issue is this: he calls them Audrey and Mike. Science shows us that any child who calls his or her parents by their first names will grow up to be problematic.
But at least he has found a mentor in Keanu Reeves, one of the few on-screen dentists not wanted for trial at the International Court of Human Rights.
GHOST TOWN (2008)
If Daniel Day-Lewis is action man dentist and Keanu Reeves is spiritual dentist, Ricky Gervais is spectrum dentist. He plays Bertram Pincus, an uptight, misanthropic, Scrooge-like Brit (surprise!) who likes dentistry but hates his patients. He is never happier than when filling their mouths with cotton wool and dental equipment, just to shut them up.
Nervous readers might query our selection of such a film as being uncomfortably true to their own experience. But salvation, maybe for the first time, comes in the form of a colonoscopy. While undergoing this simple medical procedure, Pincus ‘dies’ for seven minutes. He subsequently finds he can see dead people, who turn out to be more needy than the living.
But just hang on a minute – there’s a girl who is neither a hygienist nor Tilda Swinton, so his road to redemption becomes clear. An almost-cuddly, funny and skilful dentist emerges and we can chalk up another orthodontist who isn’t going to hell.
FINDING NEMO (2003)
Yes, we are reduced to finding comfort in cartoon characters. In Pixar’s acclaimed story of the timid clown fish, not enough praise has gone to dentist Philip Sherman. He has been unfairly lambasted for his role in taking Nemo from the ocean and putting him in the compulsory dentist’s fish tank. He then wants to hand Nemo to his hideous niece Darla who, we know, is so terrifying she must have come straight from
