Raising the Wind

It,s Interesting that the reviews here criticising it are British and the one who gives it the thumbs up is American and I agree with him this film is very good. It,s less smutty than the carry on films and not really slapstick It,s just good clean fun.

This may not be the greatest film ever made but it is good. A great cast and they do deliver they Hit the Right Note It,s funny and well written, Jill Ireland appears in one of her first roles as does Jim Dale Who after this film got the recommendation of Kenneth Williams to join the Carry on team, (His first Carry On, Cabby, wasn,t originally a carry on).

It seems that the British are the first to run British films down, thats sad.

Peter Rogers produces, Gerald Thomas directs, it's got Sid James and Kenneth Williams in it, but it's not a Carry On.

It's got James Robertson Justice as the irascible professor who disguises his real opinions of his students by being offensive.

So it's a Doctor In The House movie, except that it's set in a music college (which happens to look immensely like University College London on the outside, and which has a dead ringer for the Conway Hall as its main theatre).

JRJ is fun to watch, but this is very drab fare indeed.

Mercurial film-making talent Gerald Thomas, the iconic 'Carry On' impresario directs an unexpectedly spry and witty 60s musical comedy which proved to the finest in his cinematic Laugh-Time! The breezy, bon-mottled script by gifted composer Bruce Montomery is an unexpectedly clever, effervescent delight, being no less brightly performed by a luminous cast of sterling film & TV favourites, including an especially colourful performance by the avuncular character actor James Robertson Justice who is on splendidly Stentorian form as the imperious Sir Benjamin Boyd, making the most of his deliciously acid monologues! A whimsical, beautifully composed, altogether soulful comedy which rarely misses a beat! Encore! Encore!

A group of students at an elite music school decide to share a flat in order to cut their living costs and have somewhere to practice together. They get into quite a few scraps and adventures, including impersonating a celebrity quintet. However when Mervyn Hughes accidentally sells a catchy pop tune to an advertising agency he risks losing his scholarship unless he and his friends can raise the money to buy the rights back.

With an impressive sounding Carry-On cast featuring quite a few famous names from British comedy I was quite looking forward to this being a gently amusing little piece. Sadly I was fooled and this film turned out to be as weak and unfunny as you can imagine. The plot sees some of the oldest students I've seen sharing a flat; from here the plot has a few adventures, before splitting to be about Hughes' drunken mistakes and Malcolm's attempts to win a conducting prize. None of it really engages and, more importantly, none of it is ever really funny.

It's a shame cause you can see what they are trying to do, but none of it works and the talented cast are left high and dry without anything that is more than sporadically funny. Phillips does his usual stuff but he isn't that good; Fraser is cast as a dream girl but I have never found her looks to be worthy of that sort of role. The rest of the students seem quite bland and unmemorable - making it hard to care. Justice is OK and has good screen presence and the support cast includes cameos from James, Williams and Dale but they don't do much.

Overall this is a pretty big disappointment. The plot doesn't engage but that wouldn't matter if I'd laughed at least once or twice - but I didn't. A talented cast may draw viewers to this film but I can guarantee that they won't be enough to keep you watching. A real shame - puts paid to the idea that British comedy of the period could do no wrong.

Although largely the work of the 'Carry On' team (it was a pet project of producer Peter Rogers') it actually feels more like one of the 'Doctor' films with bluer jokes - shot like them in pretty colour - and dealing with the travails of a mature-looking bunch of students in the days when students wore jackets & ties and £4 a week seemed a steep rent. And, of course, there's the presence of James Robertson Justice and University College Hospital standing in for the London Academy of Music and the Arts instead of St.Swithin's (while Leslie Phillips later switched to the 'Doctor' series).

This is possibly the only movie on which the composer is also the author of the script, Bruce Montgomery (briefly glimpsed conducting Handel's 'Messiah' in one sequence) being the real name of the eminent crime writer Edmund Crispin whose only screenplay this was.