it. I take my four students through three or four years of medical training and make that the story." She later said she was "very lucky" to get Nicholas Phipps to write the script. "There wasn't a great deal of the book in it, except for the characters", she said. "I'd never made comedies before but I reckoned I wanted to make it both real and funny and so I wouldn't deal with comedians." Rank executives thought that people would not be interested in a film about medicine, and that Bogarde, who up to then had played spivs and Second World War heroes, lacked sex appeal and could not play light comedy. As a result, the filmmakers got a low budget and were only allowed to use available Rank contract artists. "They didn't really have any funny actors to work with; they were all straight actors. Dirk Bogarde... had never played a funny line in his life", said Thomas. "Not one of them ever did anything because they wanted to make it funny", Thomas added. "They played it within a very strict, tight limit of believability. Dirk was able to do that, he got away with it and it stopped him from being just another bright, good looking leading man and made him a star." St Swithin's Hospital is represented by the front of University College London, and is thought to be based upon Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, the medical school attached to St Bartholomew's Hospital, where Richard Gordon was a student. Kenneth More had just made Genevieve (1953) when he signed to appear in the cast, but Genevieve had not been released yet. Accordingly, his fee was only £3,500. Robert Morley was approached to play the surgeon but his agent insisted on a fee of £15,000 so they cast James Robertson Justice instead at a fee of £1,500. Filming started in September 1953. Reception The film was a massive success at the box office. Betty Box estimated it recouped its budget in the first six weeks of release. Thomas says it paid for itself in two weeks and claims it was the first "purely British picture without any foreign involvement to make a million pounds' profit within two years." It became the most successful film in Rank's history and had admissions of 15,500,000 – one third of the British population. Thomas put its success