Carry on Dick

England is rife with lawlessness and highway robbers but the Bow Street Runners are on the case – using all manner of traps and tricks to round the criminals up. However one robber has evaded captured and succeeded in even giving Sir Roger Daley a bloody nose in front of his own men. Thus Captain Fancey is assigned to go undercover and catch the famous Dick Turpin and bring him to justice. However the cunning Dick is not going to be caught that easily and for years has moved incognito under the alias Rev Flasher.

Although the better entries in the Carry On series tend to be the costume spoofs, this is not one of them. The story is a reasonable stab at having a frame for the jokes to roughly hang within but the problem is that the material just isn't there to deliver the goods. The humour will appeal to some because it is broad and the usual double-entendre stuff but for me it was lacking in any wit or intelligence and just felt like someone had collected up all the rejected gags from other films and put them together in a script of sorts. So, yes, some of it is funny but mostly it is uninspired and far from being the series at its best.

A lot of it seems to rely on the actors being a draw in themselves and it shows because most of them force their personalities forward in place of good material. James is the most obviously guilty of this as he overdoes his trademark laugh and is larger than the character. Windsor likewise just trades on her body and giggle; Williams is so-so but cannot raise the poor material he is handed and he can't rely on Jack Douglas for any help. Bresslaw at least gets a different role from his usual ethnic face-paint stuff but Jacques, Connor and Sims all seem stuck with nothing to do in minor roles. They all appear to be trying but none of them can make the material more than it is – lacklustre.

Overall this is a broad and crude affair that might please some Carry On fans but will be far too basic to be of interest to the majority of viewers. The cast are all trying hard but really the material isn't there for them to work with and the whole thing ends up being disappointing even by the standards of Carry On movies.

Notorious highwayman Dick Turpin disguises himself as the Reverend Flasher to avoid detection and terrorises the countryside with his gang

Sid James plays Dick Turpin in his last Carry on, and he's surrounded by the usual team members, with the exception of Charles Hawtrey. It's got some good one liners and funny scenes, though some of jokes can be repetitive, and it lacks the sharpness and energy of the peak years. Still it's fun. With such a legendary cast and great direction, it would be hard to get a limp Carry on entry.

To be honest, I struggled with this a bit. It all centres on "Capt. Fancey" (Kenneth Williams) on the hunt for the legendary highwayman "Dick Turpin" - aka "Big Dick". Sadly, that's about the level of the rather crass and banal humour that pervades the rest of this pretty mediocre costume drama. The more "Carry On" films I watch, the more I do realise just how much Joan Sims contributed and here she shines as "Madame Desirée", but the rest of the cast seem content to take us down a rather childishly written path of stereotypes and slapstick and through a story that is a poor relation of "Doctor Syn" (1937). This franchise is reaching it's end now, the originality and playful humour of those made ten years ago has been replaced by an almost bawdy form of in-your-face comedy that really isn't anyone's finest work. Sorry, but I thought that this was quite poor.

This film is perhaps the last truly amusing one from the carry on stable. With Sid James in the title role as Dick Turpin the usual jokes are bound to surface "Have you seen dick" etc, etc.

However this Carry on is the last one to use all your favourites ie; Williams, Jaques, James etc.

A good movie for a sunday afternoon.

Filled to the brim with uninspired sexual innuendos and lame jokes, "Carry on Dick" is a far cry from two years prior "Carry on Abroad" which also had it's share of problems, but still managed to be hilarious because of some genius performances. Kenneth Williams and Jack Douglas are awful, uninspired and over the top in a wrong way and are really bad main characters, while almost every appearance of Sid James is unfunny and focused on sexual jokes. Kenneth Connor is present in the movie but is criminally underused. All in all, "Carry on Dick" is a bad comedy movie with very little funny moments in it and you will feel glad once it ends. 5/10! I don't really recommend it to anyone other than to the fans of the series.