Rating: C
Dir: Gerald Thomas
Star: Sid James, Bernard Bresslaw, Kenneth Williams, Hattie Jacques
This was a massive hit, topping the British box-office for the year and has remained well-loved, topping a 2008 poll of the franchise entries. The image of Barbara Windsor losing her top (top, as it were) may be the single most iconic image in all Carry On, summing up the seaside post-card humour at the series’s core. Yet… I can’t honestly say this is close to one of my favourites. While there was always a loose approach to plotting, the entry almost abandons it entirely, in favour of a parade of unconnected sketches and jokes, some of which positively have whiskers on them. You just have a bunch of characters on a camping site in a field. Hilarity kinda occasionally ensues.
The central ones are Sid Boggle (James) and Bernie Lugg (Bresslaw), who think they’ve booked a weekend with their (unwitting) girlfriends at a nudist camp. It is, instead, just a boring camping ground, At least, until the pupils of Chayste Place finishing school show up, along with headmaster Doctor Soaper (Williams) and Matron Haggard (Jacques). All of a sudden, Sid and Bernie are keen to stay. This lusting after teenagers aspect has not aged well, James being in his mid-fifties at the time. Mind you, Windsor was thirty-one when playing the main schoolgirl, Babs, which is several years older than Olivia Newton-John was when making Grease.
We first encounter Babs rolling around in a cat-fight with another pupil, clad in stockings and suspenders. Add the “nudist colony” movie at the beginning – actual breasts, accompanied by commentary from James at his most deliciously lecherous – and this feels raunchier than previous entries, as censorship loosened. Funnier? I don’t think so, with a lot of the double entendres more like single ones, especially once you get out of James’s expert hands. Babs and pals don’t even show up at the campground until almost the two-thirds point, and the closest the film has to escalation is the sudden arrival of a hippie band in the next field. It comes out of nowhere, and doesn’t go anywhere much either.
By all accounts, the main shoot was a rough one, with winter standing in for summer, to the extent leaves on the trees had to be spray-painted green. I did note rare evidence of the Carry On Cinematic Universe. Williams and Jacques are in the same situation as Carry On Doctor, with her carrying an unrequited torch for him. This is explicitly referenced when Matron Haggard says, “Before I came to your school, I was matron at a hospital. There was a doctor there. He was brilliant. He looked just like you. I worshipped him, but he ignored it.” I can’t recall any other time where a movie acknowledged the existence of another in its dialogue. Yet the recycling of their relationship is perhaps evidence that this is closer to warmed-up leftovers than a comedic souffle, with the first cracks beginning to appear in the franchise’s facade.