Carry on Emmannuelle

Some years ago I saw Carry On England, and was appalled. It was utterly unfunny, execrable, sleazy drivel. (You guessed it – I didn't like it!) It also bore no relation at all to the previous Carry On films.

I had assumed that England was the last of the original series, and was surprised to see Carry On Emmannuelle recently listed in the TV schedules. Given the unadulterated rubbish that was the previous film, I had intended to give Emmannuelle a miss – but decided to record it just to take a look.

When I came to watch the film, I did so with my finger poised over the Erase button. But I was pleasantly surprised; the Erase button remained untouched. No, it's not a great film, or even very good, but it is OK. It is quite funny overall, and occasionally very funny indeed.

I also found the film to be extremely sexy. This is quite an achievement for a silly comedy, and is entirely due to Suzanne Danielle in the title role. She is simply stunning, with a magnificent body. But more than this, she plays the part with a charming innocence – hard to achieve when her character is engaged in promiscuous sexual acts (and frequently disrobed) throughout the movie. On the strength of her performance here (aged just 21) it is hard to understand why her career never really took off. Perhaps her appearance in this silly film marked her, or possibly her heart wasn't really in it (she left acting permanently when she married in 1988). Whatever, in this film she shines – she IS the film, and I found her more attractive, appealing and sexy than Sylvia Kristel ever was in the real Emmanuelle.

Some members of the old Carry On cast appear in this film, but only Kenneth Williams has a significant role. The others are really just part of the scenery. This is appropriate, since the film really has no place in the Carry On series. The original films (Carry On England excepted) were funny, joyful affairs. Innuendo and double entendres were famously rife, but were mild and included in an innocent, fun manner. There was never any overt sex or nudity on show. Emmannuelle, in marked contrast, is a film that is entirely centred on sex. Both sex and nudity are blatant and frequent. The nudity is mild, the sex never graphic (and more implied than depicted) but this film is nevertheless VERY different from previous offerings in the series. Innuendo has become statement of fact, double entendres are now bald sexual comments, and the script is far less clever.

Carry On Emmannuelle was obviously an attempt to update the series, a response to the changing mores of the movie (and real) world. It can realistically be characterised as a soft-porn comedy. As such, I feel that an enormous amount has been lost and nothing gained. The old films were clever, and they were fun. Not great contributions to the world of cinema, but hugely enjoyable. They have become a part of British life, discovered anew by succeeding generations, and of fond remembrance to adults who found them as children and enjoy dipping into them again occasionally when they appear on television. Carry On Emmannuelle will never achieve this status.

It's a pity. If the producers had made a film in the old mould perhaps the series could have continued. Or perhaps not. Possibly the original films were products of their time, and by 1978 their time had passed. Perhaps audiences enjoyed the re-runs of the old films on television, but wouldn't have paid to go to the cinema to see a new film in the same genre. Still, I would like to have seen the attempt made. As it is, the series ended with Emmannuelle. It had to. The film just wasn't good enough to garner a new audience, and was so far removed from the earlier films that the old audience were never going to transfer to the new film.

Carry On Emmannuelle is best viewed entirely apart from the previous films. There really is no connection to the series other than the reappearance of some of the same actors. Next to the old films, it is lost in a fog of disappointment and shock at what became of the series. However, judged as an entirely separate film I can say that I quite enjoyed it. It is far from outstanfding, but I found it more enjoyable than the average film. Eighty eight minutes were spent quite happily, and never dragged.

I fully understand why others might hold a very different opinion. The film is far less than the originals, and many who happily watch those films with their family will be appalled at the sexual content and nudity. If mild nudity and sexual content offend you, I recommend that you avoid the film entirely. Otherwise, why not take a look for yourself? (If nothing else, if you are male you will certainly enjoy Suzanne Danielle!)

If you do watch this film, please be sure to cast thoughts of other Carry On films from your mind and enjoy this silly but entertaining film on its own merits. Like me, you may quite enjoy the blend of mild sexual content and comedy on offer.

Rating - 6.5 / 10

By the time that Carry On Emmannuelle rolled around, the boom in smutty sex comedies in the UK reached it's zenith and the comparatively innocent double-entendres of the Carry On movies were looking increasingly dated with audiences preferring to seek out something with strong nudity and some crude laughs, rather than watch another Carry On movie in the hope that there might be a fleeting glimpse of a pair of breasts.

With the Confession movies pulling in the punters, and with David Sullivan muscling into the scene with movies like Come Play With Me & Playbirds, Gerald Thomas & Peter Rogers ventured into previously unexplored territory and plunged into spoofing adult movies.

The result was ghastly.

Featuring only a handful of the regular cast, most of them had flown the coup by this time. Kenneth Williams only appeared in the movie as a favour to Gerald Thomas, Kenneth Conner (the unsung hero of the Carry On series in our opinion) tries to have fun with the appalling material, but just ends up making himself look foolish - a great pity. Of the others, only Joan Sims, Peter Butterworth & belated regular Jack Douglas are on hand to help tie this car-crash of a movie to the Carry On series.

One joke that will have a modern audience spitting their drinks across the room involves Dino "Mind Your Language" Shafeek as an immigration officer at an airport.

The saddest slight of all in this non-starter of a movie has Kenneth Conner as Leyland, the Ambassador's chauffeur, showing Suzanne Danielle around London, in a bid to get her sexually excited - driving past Nelson's Column, he starts gurning and emoting "corr", or terms along those lines. Dear oh dear...

Ultimately, Carry On Emmannuelle was too tame for the Dirty Mac Brigade and too strong for those who loved the more innocent Carry On movies. No wonder this was the last regular entry in the series.

During the rehearsal stage for this film Barbara Windsor walked out. Who can blame her, this amusing british film series had been reduced to a pathetic joke.

Kenneth Williams and Co labour as best they can with the woeful script. The editing sloppy and a totally abysmal performance from Suzanne Danielle as Emmannuelle Pervert.

Considering the fun the "Carry ons" have given so many of us this is frankly just pathetic.

Love 'em or loath 'em, a certain indefineable Englishness could always be distilled from the Carry Ons, even the ones set in Ancient Rome or The Wild West. They started out in black and white, stable mates to Norman Wisdom and assorted Ealing comedies and wound down two decades later when the permissive society has made their nudging winking humour obsolete. Through the years, the same actors kept resurfacing parodies of silly suburban Englishness: the leathery lecher Sid James, the squeaky blonde Babs Windsor along with demure Charlie Hawtrey, bulgy eyed Kenneth Williams, repressed matron Hattie Jacques and sharp faced nag Joan Sims. It was the repetition and safeness we cherished, the over the top boooiings! and deliberately crass innuendos, Babs' bra flying off amid stretching exercises and hitting a horror-struck Williams in the face: "Oooh! Matron! take them away!" Far from being 'sex comedies', the Carry Ons are also childishly innocent. None of the villains e.g. Bernard Bresslaw as Bunghit Din in 'Up the Kyber' are genuinely bad. Sid's ear is forever being grabbed by Sims before he can do anything with Babs. All of these elements are absent from Emmanuelle and the result is painful and repulsive. Rogers' dire payment of his actors meant they had little choice but to return time and time again to Rothwell's scripts. By 1978, Sid James was dead, Charles Hawtrey sacked and Jacques (along with Windsor Davies and Terry Scott) committed to better-paying BBC sitcoms. Barbara Windsor reportedly walked out on this one and it's puzzling that her close friend Williams didn't do likewise as he'd already been burnt by the wretched 'Hound of the Baskervilles.' Peter Butterworth, Joan Sims and Kenneth Connor chip in but you know a movie is in trouble when Benny Hill's straight man (Henry McGee) is brought along to make up the numbers. Attempting to capitalise on the success of the French 'Emmanuelle' movies, the old pre-feminist and pre-pill approach to sex is junked in favour of a movie where the elderly Williams is shown copulating with Suzanne Danielle. In her role as Emmanuelle Prevert (pervert get it...? Swiftian wit,we think) Danielle attempts to find satisfaction after Williams was castrated in a nude hand-gliding incident by bedding innumerable men, while a rubbish 'disco' number plays. Meanwhile, shy mother's boy Theodore falls for Danielle and the servants recall their own lamentably unsexy brushes with the permissive society. By the time of this movie's release, the Carry Ons were already dinosaurs and the 1974 effort 'Carry on Dick' was when the series should have been wound up. Other comedies of the time 'Confessions of a...' or 'Percy' have not dated well, but the sea side bawdiness of the 1960s Carry Ons will just about make them watchable on a Sunday afternoon. Not this effort, interesting only as a cruddy little snapshot of post-sixties, pre-Aids views on sex. With Emmanuelle, the Carry Ons died although the stake had to be sharpened one last time in 1992 when the even worse 'Carry on Columbus' rose from the coffin.

CARRY ON EMMANNUELLE

Aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Sound format: Mono

"Carry On" regular Sid James had been dead for almost two years when this threadbare concoction hit UK cinemas in 1978, and principal scriptwriter Talbot Rothwell had retired from the business in 1975 following a bout of ill health, throwing the long-standing (and extremely lucrative) "Carry On" series into disarray. While CARRY ON EMMANNUELLE isn't the worst of them - that 'honor' belongs to CARRY ON ENGLAND (1976), an utterly turgid wartime entry - Lance Peters' script was initially rejected by star Kenneth Williams as unworkable, though the finished product could hardly be worse! A mild, half-baked spin on the "Emmanuelle" series (inspired by Just Jaeckin's 1974 softcore drama), the 29th "Carry On" epic features Williams as the French ambassador to London, whose sexpot wife (Suzanne Danielle, surprisingly assured in her screen debut) has it off with all and sundry whilst pining for her husband's absent libido (lost when he landed on a church spire during a parachute jump - which demonstrates the film's level of wit). Series stalwarts Joan Sims, Jack Douglas, Kenneth Connor and Peter Butterworth look suitably embarrassed as members of the ambassador's household staff, and Larry Dann plays a downtrodden nerd who falls in love with Danielle following an amorous encounter on Concorde; Beryl Reid is his mum, a vision in chintz.

Opening with a dreadful disco ditty ('Love Crazy', written by Kenny Lynch and sung by 'Masterplan') which must have seemed dated even in 1978, CARRY ON EMMANNUELLE swaps the double entendres and deconstructive satire of Rothwell's era for a barrage of blatantly obvious sex jokes, none of which are even remotely funny, while Williams is reduced to mugging frantically over Danielle's 'suggestive' dialogue and dropping his drawers every time there's a lull in the action. While exploitation fans in other countries had been enjoying frank cinematic depictions of sex and sexuality since the late 1960's, British voyeurs - ie. those whose tastes ran more to NAUGHTY KNICKERS (1970) and DEEP THROAT (1972) than the mature exploration of adult themes favored by Ken Russell (THE DEVILS), Stanley Kubrick (A CLOCKWORK ORANGE) and others at the cutting edge of mainstream outrage - were forced to endure heavily censored imports and tawdry homegrown comedies (I'M NOT FEELING MYSELF TONIGHT, CAN YOU KEEP IT UP FOR A WEEK?, LET'S GET LAID, etc.) which reinforced sexual stereotypes of every persuasion, and CARRY ON EMMANNUELLE is no better or worse than any of them. Having bombed at the box-office, this SHOULD have been the series' last gasp, but director Gerald Thomas and producer Peter Rogers revived the format in 1992 for the equally lackluster CARRY ON COLUMBUS, while "Carry On London" (shudder!) currently exists in pre-production limbo. All together now:

"That woman is lo-o-ve crazy / She's lovin' all night! / That woman is lo-o-ve crazy / Won't stop for a bite!..."

Told you it was dreadful, didn't I?...