Imagine my surprise when I discovered that NetFlix had a few of the Carry On… series of motion pictures available for streaming.
If you’re not aware of them the Carry On… pictures, more than thirty of them in all, were made from the late fifties all the way to 1992. They were a series of British comedy pictures, broad, risque farces, starring very much the same cast over their entire lifespan. Jim Dale, Joan Sims, Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Hattie Jacques, Barbar Windsor, and others. They lampooned the British military, medicine, the British Empire, other movies, organized labor, and anything else that occurred to the writers. It has the largest number of films of any British film series and the longest lifetime of any series other than the James Bond series. One, of the pictures, Carry On Up the Khyber, is on the BFI’s list of 100 best British films.
I saw quite a number of the Carry On… pictures when they first came out but I hadn’t seen one in forty years until I caught one streaming, Carry On Cleo, a spoof of the Burton-Taylor vehicle, ironically made with some of the same sets and costumes as the big budget extravaganza that the makers of Cleopatra had just abandoned at the end of filming. I was amazed at how much of it I remembered.
Mostly they’re just a bit of nostalgia. What was considered pretty daring a half century ago is pretty tame by today’s standards.
They never rocked my boat, even as a lascivious teenager. I found the humor in the Alistair Sim, Stanley Holloway, and Alec Guinness films more to my liking… things like Lavender Hill Mob or Passport to Pimlico.
Quite a few cast overlaps between The Lavender Hill Mob and the Carry On pictures. Sid James, of course, has a principle role in both. Another half dozen of the Carry On gang appears in it as well, mostly in bit parts.