Carry on Henry

This is a fabulously funny send up of history and the Carry on cast are in great form. Leading the fun is Sid James who plays Sid James playing Henry. Sid always played Sid and when he was in top form as a lovable rogue or old lecherous womaniser few could be better. He is wonderful here and I agree with others here who say the old boy was born to play this part. It is his movie but he does get great support. The great stalwarts are there Williams, Hawtrey and Sims. There's lovely work from Terry Scott. A real stand out is a brilliant cameo from an actor I know little about. Julian Orchard is brilliant and he camps it up deliciously.What a superb actor this man is, must read more about him. He had me in stitches. I normally found Kenneth Connor annoying but in this he shows he was actually a good actor when he was not stuck playing annoying mannerisms and clichés. His slap stick in other movies is awful and unfunny, here is restrained and good to watch. The carry on movies are attacked because they objectify women and are not politically correct. Not so. If you look at the movies very carefully surely it's at least commendable that the sexy women are not the anorexic women cast as sex idols today. Barbara Windsor is superb in this. She always was. She is certainly sexy but she was a full rounded, buxom woman with womanly features. She was not a match stick. The carry on movies are never given credit for this.Today anorexia is rife amongst young women and the carry on movies showed that you do not have to be slim to be sexy. Windsor was and even today is sexy. A glamorous great star.

The gag of the garlic does not work today because this was made at a time when garlic was not something popular with the conservative English diet. Today we have all developed a love and taste for garlic. Back then it was exotic and most people, including those who never tried it, hated it.It was odd continental stuff and it stunk. We are all over that now. Garlic actually smells quite sexy, especially if you both are eating it. We also know its very good for you, natrures medicine. It was never eaten here in Australia until Italians immigrated. So its odd to us today to quite connect with the attitude that garlic was something horrible. Henry is however a classic Carry On and I loved it. The pace of the movie is zesty and crackles along brightly. It looks great with lovely costumes and sets. The music is wonderful. Its one of the best. I loved it.

..or "Carry on History"? Henry VIII (Sid James) manages to squeeze in two extra wives into this daft historical romp that sees Cardinal Wolsey (Terry Scott) and Lord Chancellor Cromwell (Kenneth Williams) having to run the gauntlet of the King's pleasure as he marries "Marie" (Joan Sims) then decides he needs to divorce her for "nonconsumption" so he can marry the playful young "Bettina" (Barbara Windsor). It's off with their heads a-plenty as the lustful king plays politics and romance much to the chagrin of his officials, and I thought - in quite an entertaining fashion. The script is riddled with double-entendres, but they are actually quite a bit cleverer this time and Williams, James and the often underused Charles Hawtrey (poor old "Sir Roger") deliver this film well enough. This was certainly one of my favourites from this gang - it looks good and maybe Guy Faulkes should have watched it first?

RANKING: Just in the top ten but lacks some of the originality and sparkle the better ones have. Unlike the ones which followed, this one had actually had a budget and looks pretty polished.

TYPICAL: Perhaps this one is too typical. It's one of the later historical pictures and it does feel a little like they're doing the same thing as before but this time with different costumes on.....but the same old thing is still funny! Sid James is fabulous as King Henry - giving possibly one of the greatest portrayals of Henry in movie history (who are we to know?). Whether or not this is a classic Carry On, it's certainly classic Sid James.

Apart from Jim Dale, who'd left the team by now, virtually everyone else is in this all playing their expected roles. As for the story - it's pretty weak but because they all seem to be enjoying themselves, we do too.

SEXY LADIES: That essential Carry On ingredient in this is provided by Barbara Windsor who is pretty sweet and cute in this one.

For most spoofs, the holy grail is to make so ridiculous the subject of attack that it will be impossible to take it seriously again. AIRPLANE! achieved this with the AIRPORT series, admittedly an easy target. CARRY ON HENRY may not have had quite the same effect - such is the unshakeable British obsession with the past, one of the film's main targets - but it's always nice to see that someone else found A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS and THE LION IN WINTER to be pompous tripe as well.

HENRY, like CARRY ON UP THE KHYBER, is an example of a modest franchise miraculously finding an appropriate subject and creating a work of art. It may lack the jawdropping Bunuellian genius of KHYBER, but it has its own juicy pleasures. The jokes are franker than were usual at this point, but clever rather than crude, and funny when they were crude.

This is also the last time the cast would be as brilliant as this - a well-oiled machine perfectly in control of the material. Kenneth Williams is aptly, hilariously Machiavellian; Charles Hawtrey is endearingly inappropriate as the brave knight and lover who undergoes all sorts of horrible tortures for his Queen - the heterosexual potency of these obviously gay stars are an uproarious counterpoint to the macho King's unsuccessful promiscuity. Joan Sims is glorious as ever as the ample, lascivious, French, garlic-obsessed Queen. But it is the godlike Sid James who rightly walks away with the film, cinema's best ever King Henry. The merging of his usual persona - the chuckling lecher who is repeatedly thwarted in his amorous endeavours (itself a remarkable comment of tyranny throughout the ages), married to a sex-mad woman he can't abide - with the portrayal of an historical icon creates satire of great depth.

Whereas the aforementined, Oscar-garlanded pageants are rigidly respectful of English history, HENRY is breezily sceptical. Rather than search for continuity with the past, or examine various notions of Englishness, HENRY is very modern in its rejection of a certain kind of history, the meticulous reconstruction of a mythic past that can teach us about the present. HENRY knows that the past can only be viewed through the prism of the present, that history is a fluid, ever vanishing, entity, always reinterpreted to each generation's needs. The film quite clearly sets out its stall of bogusnes - it is based on recently discovered documents by William Cobbler - only to show how unreliable our grasp of history is; how it's always told in somebody's vested interests, at the expense of someone else.

The film therefore prefigures the awesome Monty Python deconstructions of the 70s, with jokes about the Labour government, and with King's wenches who demand payment before favours, and whose fathers complain about taxation. The reduction here of English history to an aristorcratic bedroom farce is a more profound insight than any 'serious' epic has ever managed.

An unofficial tale about Henry VIII's two brief marriages between Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour.

The usual crude humour of the series is reasonably neglected in preference of real wit and poignancy, the acting shows unexpected sophistication, the dialogue sharp, and even the period detail seems stimulatingly accurate in this surprisingly effective travesty of "Anne of the Thousand Days", "Lion in Winter", "A Man for All Seasons" and other British historical sagas. One of the best efforts of all concerned.