AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS PRINT ARCHIVE 2003 |
CARRY ON - CARRY ON UP
YOUR by Harlan
Kennedy COLUMBUS (Kenneth
Williams) I can see land! I can see land!
Hard about, 'BOOBS' THE CABIN GIRL Over here, sir. Do you want to get it up? Yes, yes, quickly. I can see the natives massing on the shore. FIRST MATE (Charles Hawtrey) Oonghh, well, I hope they clean up
before we get
there. Massing,
I said, not messing. INDIAN MESSENGER climbs on board and approaches Well, don't just stand there, man, get it out! MESSENGER (Bernard Bresslaw) I come to deliver a message from my chief. He say
to you on behalf of all Native Americans,
"Hello sailor." Yes, well, and hello to him. And as a special surprise you may tell him
I have brought the King of Enter Philip, King of PHILIP (Sidney James) 'Allo, moosh.
In the name of MESSENGER I
will tell my chief. If you come in peace, he
will have the hostile greeting party off the shore as soon as it may be possible. PHILIP Yes, well, make sure 'e 'as it off by the time we get there. Sexism, classism, funny
foreigners, puns,
blue jokes, innuendo. That But political incorrectness – or the new backlash
against "correctness" – may also explain the glee with which the Carry On phenomenon has been
resurrected in In many hearts and minds it
still is. Never have so many trees fallen
to furnish paper for Carry On
thesis-writers; never has nostalgia for a bygone movie age so striven to turn celebration into cerebration. The series has even snuck into the latest Top Ten poll conducted by
Sight
and Sound. One critic voted for Carry On Up the
Khyber in his All-Time Ten Best films; one screenwriter, My Beautiful Laundrette's
Hanif Kureishi, voted for Carry On Camping. Watch
out, Citizen Kane. The facts: 27 Carry Ons were made between 1958 and 1974. Though some films didn't have the magic bi-vocable in their titles (Don't Lose Your Head, Follow That Camel), all were directed by Gerald Thomas and produced by Peter Rogers, all starred some combination of the same core team of comics, and all subjected an aspect of life past (Carry On Cleo) or present (Carry On Cabby) to systematic farce. As each movie unrolled, the usual histrionic suspects were rounded up: Kenneth Williams, a small camp tornado with a voice that sneered, minced, or brayed at will; Sidney James, an on-the-make cockney with a face like a traffic accident
and a laugh like a drain; Charles Hawtrey, thin, prune-faced, and precious with granny specs and an ooggh-I-say delivery; Joan Sims, a Rubens siren
with dimpled-pillow face; and Barbara Windsor, a blonde cockney sparrow with waddling walk and bionic breasts. In addition there were blithe but occasional
star performers like Frankie
Howerd (camp), Jim Dale (straightish), and
Hattie Jacques (think of Joan Sims and
multiply by three). What were they all about, these movies that tickled a whole generation of British moviegoers and a
few non-British ones, too? Andy Warhol was a fan; so was Paul Morrissey, who made the Peter Cook–Dudley The recent critical raptures have rightly noted the series' outrageous artificiality. If all the world's a stage, in the Carry Ons it's a music hall stage. The films make vaudevillian whoopee with every revered institution or icon they can find. Instead of having the grace to pepper semi-lifelike targets – as in such rival British postwar series as the Doctor films and the Boulting brothers' comedies – they turn everyone and everything into highly colored cardboard and then blow rude noises at them. It may not be Shakespeare – but you could call it Ben Jonson
with a dash of Rabelais. On the
Carry Ons' artfully reductive comic canvas, sex and physical functions loomed ever larger. One way to cope with Ergo, sex was on, hypocrisy was off. Jokes about bosoms and bottoms superseded well-dressed Wildean epigrams. Foreigners were, by definition, funny;
its world role disintegrating, B ut then, the
Carry On series is a great rebuff not
just to PC crusaders but to CC ones. Cinematic Correctness insists you can't do any
of the things this saga did for two decades
without taking a breath. From Carry
On Sergeant to Carry On Emmannuelle, via Nurse, Teacher, Cabby, Jack, Cowboy,
Dick, Up the Khyber, Up the Jungle, and At Your Convenience, the
films perpetrated the following
insults to pure cinema: • The camera was used baldly and boldly as a recording instrument for stand-and-deliver performances. *The sets were knocked up as
quickly and cheaply as for a school
play, and looked it. Either that or
they were cannibalized from other
film sets at the same studio ( • The characters were walking stereotypes used and reused from film to film. The epicene snob (Kenneth Williams), the lecherous spiv (Sid James), the big-bosomed waif (Barbara Windsor), the stentorian matriarch (Hattie
Jacques) .... • The comic idiom was more stage-than screen-oriented: a rush of
exits and entrances (count them in Carry On Matron, more than 80 opening
and closing doors in 90 minutes),
of recitative and punchline, of "Geddit?"
overemphasis in the performances. Guilty on all counts. But then we're writing in a time that cherishes guilty pleasures. And just as anti-theater – R.W. Fassbinder – is a great stimulus to defining and redefining theater, so anti-cinema can be a stirrer-up of our thesaurus of definitions about cinema. Fassbinder proves a felicitous reference point. RWF reinvigorated cinema by injecting theater straight into its bloodstream: explicitly in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, stylistically in the baroque, artfully attitudinizing portrayals of players like Hanna Schygulla and Margit Carstensen. Fassbinder attributed his use of this sculptured emotionalism to the influence of favorite Hollywood directors like Douglas Sirk and Josef von Sternberg, but in the kingdom of theater-cinema – those movies where everyone is "on stage" and hunt-the-subtext becomes a truly underground activity – the Carry On films deserve pride of place as the collective court jester. Like a jester they have a
formal license and frank intent to deflate
pretension and democratize human
experience. When the Carry On team
crash into Henry VIII's England, Cleopatra's Egypt, or Louis XVI's
France, it's to prove that base
instincts and bodily processes are
just as prevalent in a world pseudo-sanitized
by wealth, grandeur, or history as
in the seaside-postcard context
that commentators see as the movie saga's
matrix. (Note from And yet the Carry Ons aren't just exercises in licensed postcard-printing or
graffiti-writing. The theatricalism that gives them their crazed formality also ceremonializes their perfect algebra of character interplay. That algebra could be expressed as E=MR2.
If E stands for emancipation, M for monomania, and R for repression, the squared-and-multiplied forces of Anglo-Saxon psychosexual neurosis – usually
impersonated by Hawtrey and Williams – are just
about equal in energy and effect to
the moral and sexual liberation
represented by Sid James. The perfect playoff is in Carry On Matron. Sid is the smart-alecky crook trying to break into a hospital to steal its supply of contraceptive pills, aided by two gormless henchmen
(Bernard Bresslaw, Kenneth Cope). Opposite the James gang are chief surgeon Kenneth Williams and matron Hattie Jacques. Jacques is a frustrated spinster of tentlike proportions, Charles Hawtrey
a campily dotty shrink, and Williams a psychological
stretcher-case: he is afraid, amid
other hypochondrias, that he is
changing sex. "Your mail," says Jacques, handing him his letters. "I know I am!" he screams. But he keeps looking up books on gender mutation, in between checking that he doesn't have lung cancer or leukemia. Meanwhile Jacques, frustratedly
in love with Williams, forms an innocent TV-and-cocoa friendship
with the mincing Hawtrey. When all three converge
in Hawtrey's room, in a climactic mayhem of dropped trousers
and double-entendres, it's like watching a Feydeau
farce played out in a friary. We know
nothing carnal will happen. More Britishly, nothing
carnal could happen. For Williams and Hawtrey are the
film's – and in Williams's case, the series' – hothouse blooms. Crazed by celibacy, they either hyperbolize their sexual responses to the world by "Ooh!"ing
and "Aah!"ing at
every hint of Eros, or channel
their unspent energies into other,
wilder monomanias. Sid James's role in Carry
On Matron couldn't be more symbolically
apt. He's the robust, priapic male to whom
moral caveats are put up to be knocked
down – just
like the doors to that hygienic fortress
called a hospital –
and for whom "hidden treasure' is a cache of sex aids.
James in the Carry Ons is the New Man banging on the door of a British traditionalism
past its sell-by date. (South African-born,
the actor himself is the only non-Briton among the series regulars.) As Henry VIII in Carry On Henry, his quasi-cockney street vernacular vandalizes moral prudery as surely as it vandalizes costume-pie linguistic protocol. 'After six months' married life, the only thing I'm 'aving off
is 'er 'ead," he complains to Williams's Cromwell. Later he climbs
into bed alongside his new wife (Windsor)
with a cursory, rumbustious "'Ere we go
then!" Shakespeare couldn't have
put it better. But Shakespeare might have blueprinted the Sid James character. James is Carry On's answer to
the unfettered moral commentator the Bard wrote into his plays as the "common man": Launcelot Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra, the Gravedigger in Hamlet. By putting him center screen
as period royalty hybridized with
modern antihero, the Carry On
films found an ingenious way to foreground swaggering anachronism and lèse-majesté even in His Majesty. The Carry On movies couldn't
always function, though they functioned
best, through the camp counterpoint
between James and Williams. But the leitmotif of involuted eccentricity tussling with extrovert appetite gave the films the harmonic unity they have. On our left, the seedy, energetic carpetbagger; on our right, the casualties of a world now strewn with not just postimperial, but post-Freudian, terrors. No wonder
every sentence becomes a double-entendre and every century a virgin world ripe for deflowerment by jokes about sex, bathrooms, and the human anatomy. Antony
and Cleopatra, the French Revolution., the winning of the West ... the landmark episodes of history are duly ravished. Indeed, so often are great reversals of power the subject of the "Carry On History" films that it's hard
to doubt that one of the series'
aims, even if unconscious, is to
take Britain's own loss of Empire and exorcize that historical trauma by satirical reenactment. Though all Carry Ons crusadingly debunk, the costume specimens have a subtle difference from the modern-dress ones. Carry On Matron, Doctor, or Teacher
are upwardly spiraling farces about chaos invading institutional life. The history films are downward spirals aimed at sending history and its pretensions into a comic tailspin. What goes up must come down, including inflated scenarios of human heroism. Hence the pinpricking plethora of
puns in the series. These provide
ideal double-take deflation. We think
we are hearing decent elevated dialogue;
we suddenly realize that idiocy or
indecency – or just inspired linguistic bathos – has snuck into the soundwaves.
Who could forget the moment when Kenneth Williams's Caesar runs from an assassination bid in Carry On Cleo
crying, "Infamy!
Infamy! They've all got it in for me!" It's the role of the pun in turning the rare and refined into the rude or risqué that gets us to the heart of the Carry On series. In the peerless Carry On Up the Jungle the Great Tradition of Victorian exploration – that age when no Englishman could get on a boat-train without ending up in a pith helmet discovering a new African country – is dismembered in a sendup
of the Stanley-Livingstone story.
The entire dignified lexicon of exploration
is here up for grabs. Show the
camera an elephant gun and you get this
exchange. Joan Sims: "That's a big one." Sid James: "Yes, I'm going hunting."
Sims: "Game?"
James: 'Any time you are." Show the
camera a couple of exotic monkeys and you get this. Sims: "Would they come if one threw them some peanuts?" James: "Would you?" The boomerang technique of the Carry On history films – send your characters out into a death-or-glory context and then bring them spinning back to earthy banality – is defined by plot strategies
as well as puns. The Livingstone character
in Carry On Up the Jungle turns out to be no mythic missionary but merely Charles Hawtrey as a gone-native
English nutter. Sims's longlost
husband, Hawtrey
has found a new name (The Great
Tonka) and a new home amid the
flowered skirts and freelove tribal culture. Likewise in Carry On Cowboy we cross whole
continents, leap whole cultures,
and at journey's end find Hawtrey and his
physical needs and functions. Who
else should the all-powerful
Indian chief, much talked of during plot
buildup by Judge Kenneth Williams and
outlaw Sid James, finally turn out to be? "Oh Hull-o!" Hawtrey minces, emerging
from a call of nature in his porta-wigwam. And when his visitors try to converse with him in fluent
Indian, he merely says, "Ooh you do talk funny." In this world of imploded imperialism, all you find at the far edge of
the world is the same people, the
same patter, and the same
elementary or alimentary concerns you left at home. It's a deft comic formula, and the failure to reexploit it in the new Carry On Columbus accounts
for that pic's misfire. What Jim Dale as C.C. should have
discovered on reaching the New World
is the Old World all over again: if not in the exotically clapped-out form we knew and loved in Hawtrey – now, alas, along with Williams and James gone to the great carry-on in the skies – then at least in a suitably
potty and parochial equivalent. Instead
there was lame comedy with Brooklyn-accented
Indians led by Larry Miller and
Charles Fleischer. Carry On Columbus offended
in another way. It reeked of sexual right-mindedness. The old Carry Ons made a virtue
of their honest vices. Every woman of whistleable age became a magnetic field for the films' daft lubricity. This was so
winking-nodding-and-chuckling that
it bypassed offensiveness and
entered a zone of childlike innocence.
To call a character the Reverend Flasher (Sid James in Carry On Dick) and have him utter lines to Barbara Windsor like "I'd like to get my organ in use again" is as morally censurable as a child
doing a naughty drawing in his schoolbook. Fact is, the "naughtiness" of the Carry On films was less politically incorrect than politically essential to their (probably unconscious) thematic thrust. In these movies the world is a playground in which semi-retarded adults spend their lives mimicking great ideals – the
profession of medicine, the aspirations
of empire or exploration – while constantly being brought back to rude reality. Carry On Columbus threw
out all hints of busty women and
confined its sexual innuendoes to
the ghetto safety of gay jokes. The other great political unmentionable, at least in modern Time to laugh at it all again ourselves. The Carry On series is a jewel in the crown of British camp. It began as a product of blessed coincidences: the right director-producer duo, the perfect jigsaw cast, the moment in national history. It then rolled on, gathering mantric mannerisms
as it went. Today, when we laugh at
names like Bungdit Din in Carry On Up
the Khyber or Citizen Camembert ("He's the big cheese around here") in Don't Lose Your Head, or when we giggle at the Pelion-on-Ossa double-entendres – Barbara Windsor: "My mother says
drink inflames the ardor"; Sidney James: "Yes, the more you drink the 'arder it
gets" – it's with the nervous
rapture of rediscovery. Did we really once think these films were bad/silly/trivial/demeaning? And even if they are (give the devil's advocate his due), don't they get points for tonal consistency, bawdy honesty, metafictive
artifice, comic rhythm, and Joycean verbal gymnastics? Let alone for being a voice crying in the wilderness of right-on politics. For this was a movie series that ululated Tarzan-like for the virtues of primal response in such primal areas as sex, race, creed, and class. And it was a series that helped COURTESY T.P.
MOVIE NEWS. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE JAN-FEB 1993 ISSUE OF FILM COMMENT. ©HARLAN KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
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