The Dentist

W.C. Fields as a small-town dentist whose waiting room is a circle of hell and whose drill is an instrument of class revenge. Sennett two-reeler, 1932, directed by Leslie Pearce: Fields golfs through the office, manhandles a patient (Elise Cavanna) in a chair that becomes a torture device, and treats his daughter (Babe Kane) as a second practice. The sound is the point. Fields's mutter, the drill, the screams — Sennett's slapstick plus the voice that made Fields a radio star. It is meaner than the features, and funnier for it.