Tooth-watching in the movies

There's a gag in Jackass 3D called " Lamborghini tooth pull " and I think we all know what that means. For all the scatological tomfoolery and "Ow, my balls!" genital mistreatment on view, I bet this is the stunt that will make us wince the most, particularly as the film opens the same week the Daily Mail has reported that increasing numbers of people are trying to avoid exorbitant dental fees by pulling their own teeth out. If you don't have a Lamborghini, you could always try the ice-skate option, like Tom Hanks in Cast Away. Or you could splice your genes with those of a housefly, like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, who subsequently finds it easy to extract a tooth using just his fingers. Or, if you were really desperate, you could get Oldboy's Choi Min-sik to tape you to a chair and pull out your teeth with a claw-hammer – which makes Marathon Man's Laurence Olivier demanding "Is it safe?" while drilling into Dustin Hoffman's cavities without anaesthetic seem like very small beer indeed. I once had a dentist who would regularly rebuke me about the way his profession was misrepresented in the movies, as though it were my fault. "It's no wonder people associate dentists with pain," he complained after seeing the Little Shop of Horrors musical remake, and since I had my mouth stuffed with Cronenbergian instruments of torture, I was unable to tell him Steve Martin's sadistic behaviour was a walk in the park next to Corbin Bernsen in The Dentist, or Doug "Pinhead" Bradley in On Edge, adapted from a particularly horrible Christopher Fowler short story about a dentist. But it's true you don't often see movie dentists who are regular guys. When they're not psychos, they're played for laughs, like Bob Monkhouse in Dentist in the Chair or Norman Wisdom in A Stitch in Time. The mere fact of someone being a dentist is often assumed to be comedy gold in itself; witness Ricky Gervais in Ghost Town, Matthew Perry in The Whole Nine Yards or their predecessor, Bob Hope, as cowardly "Painless Potter" ("Brave men run in my family") in The Paleface. One wonders if Frank Tashlin and Edmund Hartmann, who wrote the screenplay for The Paleface, took their cue from what would have probably been the greatest dentist-related film of all time, if only a janitor hadn't thrown 32 of its 42 reels into an incinerator. In Erich von Stroheim's Greed, there's an itinerant dentist called, yes, "Painless Potter", who travels around with a big gold molar dangling from his wagon. When McTeague starts his own dental practice, his wife buys him his very own big gold molar to hang outside his surgery. But tooth-watching in the movies can be a rewarding pastime. It's always amusing to spot medieval peasants or Columbus-era sailors with mouths full of impeccable Hollywood orthodontics, though I'll allow that Burt Lancaster's teeth are expressive in any era, and I get a kick out of watching Julia Roberts say words such as "guaranteed" because it exposes nearly all her teeth at once. If you get bored with The Crucible, as I did, there's diversion to be had in keeping an eye on Daniel Day-Lewis's mouth and the fastest-developing case of gingivitis in film history. Even duff family fare such as Dennis (Denis the Menace in the US, but retitled for the UK so as not to confuse fans of The Beano) has a memorable moment of DIY dentistry when the eponymous scamp replaces the teeth in Walter Matthau's dentures with chewing gum. Dreaming about teeth, apparently, can symbolise both attack and defence, but I reckon the reason so many of us have nightmares about them is they're also one of the most brutal signifiers of ageing and bodily decay. In this respect, the most heart-stopping dental moment is not your Deep Red psycho smashing a victim's teeth against the edge of a mantelpiece, nasty though that is, but in the American indie drama Guinevere, when Stephen Rea's bridgework crumbles away while he's eating. As someone who once lost a tooth while chewing on a croissant, I know just how he feels.