Carry on Emmannuelle

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.

Emmannuelle Prevert is the wife of the French Ambassador to the UK. After a separation of some time, she returns to the UK on Concorde to give it another chance. However her husband is only interested in body building and is unwilling to satisfy her very high sex drive. After much pleading, Emmannuelle goes out to see the sights of London and hopefully get some satisfaction along the way.

With the opening of the film on Concorde (spoofing Emmanuelle's own plane moment) we have the height of intelligence of this film (in the reference to that film) but a split second later we are in the territory of crude and obvious jokes starting as it continues with an erect Concorde and the predictable 'are you coming' joke. The material basically continues like this for the rest of the film, with only a very vague (and uninteresting) plot to provide a loose structure. Within this structure are hung endless sex jokes and titillating material (for the period) that started out being lame but ended up being pathetic and just plain stupid. They are totally lacking in the wit that the best of the Carry On films have, instead it is obvious and crude – there is no sparkle to the deliver, it is just plodding and lacking in anything of value.

The accents in the film are pretty awful but I think that's the point as the French people are played by English actors. Danielle is quite sexy and could almost pass as French but she can't act and her sexuality is wasted due to the tame standards required of the film (a group orgy with a football team involves her kissing each of them slightly and that's it – no nudity from her!). The rest of the cast is made up of famous Carry On stars and you can see it in their delivery that they know their glory days are gone and they are not too taken by the material, but it is to their credit that many of them still put on a brave face. Williams has no good lines to work with even if his character is amusing, Connor hams it up rather a lot but enjoys himself, Butterworth is wasted totally while Joan Sims only contribution seems to be having a crude name (Mrs Dangle). Douglas is so-so but Larry Dann is pretty rubbish which is a shame since he is supposed to be a big part of the 'plot'.

Overall, this is rubbish. I wanted to find some silly laughs in it but I found nothing of any value here. The 'jokes' are crude and obvious and there are no moments of clever writing in it at all: the Carry-On series may never have been the height of wit but this entry (oh-err missus) in the series makes some of the early films look like the pinnacle of modern humour. I love many of the Carry On movies and even I hated this one – silly, banal and a disgrace even by the less than high standards of the series.

The permissive society of the seventies led to a growing number of erotic films in both Britain and France. The two countries, however, often had very different approaches to erotica. The characteristic British erotic film of the period was the 'sex comedy', typified by the later 'Carry On' films as well as the 'Confessions' series, 'Percy' and cinematic versions of stage farces such as 'Don't Just Lie There, Say Something' and 'No Sex Please, We're British'. These films all started from the premise that sex is something intrinsically comic, and attempted to get laughs from innuendo, doubles ententes and smutty, sniggering humour about breasts, bottoms, penises and bodily functions.

The typical French erotic film of the period- characterised by the 'Emmanuelle' series- took quite the opposite approach. The 'Emmanuelle' films approach their subject with an almost reverential seriousness, and are filled not only with sex scenes but also with much tedious sermonising about the Meaning of Life (which generally means having as much sex as possible). Whereas the British made sex seem ridiculous, the French came close to making it seem boring.

'Carry On Emmannuelle' would therefore seem to represent an intriguing fusion of two quite different approaches to the erotic film. The 'Carry On' films were by no means uniformly bad. They were generally at their best in the fifties and sixties when they concentrated on exploiting a vein of humour which was later to be mined to great effect by Mel Brooks- the deliberate parody of an established film or television genre. Thus 'Carry On Cowboy' parodied the western, 'Carry On Cleo' the sword-and-sandal epic (especially 'Cleopatra' itself) and 'Carry On Constable' British TV cop shows such as 'Dixon of Dock Green'.

The 'Emmanuelle' films might be thought to offer plenty of targets to the parodist or satirist, with their misty, soft-focus photography, their stilted dialogue and their pretentious philosophising. 'Carry On Emmannuelle' does not, however, attempt to guy the affectations of its original models, but is made as a fairly standard piece of British sex comedy- the main difference between this and earlier 'Carry Ons' is that smutty innuendo has largely been replaced by direct sexual references. The only links to the original films are the name of the heroine (deliberately misspelled- apparently for copyright reasons), the fact that she is married to an older man who works for the French diplomatic service (in London rather than in Bangkok) and the fact that she is continually unfaithful to him. The actress who plays Emmannuelle, Suzanne Danielle, another long-legged, curly-haired brunette, has a passing resemblance to Sylvia Kristel, although she is more voluptuous and lacks the Dutch girl's delicate features. Emmannuelle's husband M. Prevert (a fairly common French surname meaning 'green meadow', but probably chosen in this instance because of its closeness to the English word 'pervert') is impotent, so she enjoys herself with any other man she can find, including a gallery of VIPs, an entire football team, various embassy servants and an Australian body-builder. (Unlike her namesake one-n Emmanuelle, who takes as many female lovers as male ones, two-n Emmannuelle seems to be exclusively heterosexual).

The film does not, however, generate any humour from Emmannuelle's frantic sexual couplings. It simply assumes that the fact that she seduces so many men is a hugely amusing joke in itself. The film's theme tune 'Love Crazy' (apart from being intensely irritating) is not appropriately named. Emmannuelle may be sex-crazy, but that is not the same thing. Love is not an emotion featured anywhere in this film. The script's attempts at wit are feeble in the extreme- a running joke about the butler Lyons, whose name Emmannuelle consistently mispronounces as 'Loins', is as about as good as it gets. There is the typical 'Carry On' assumption that any sexual or lavatorial reference is automatically good for a laugh. All genuine humour seems to have been surgically removed.

This is a good example of one of the most miserable types of film, the failed comedy. A wretched serious drama can at least provide inadvertent humour of the 'so-bad-it's-funny' kind. A wretched comedy cannot. 'Carry On Emmannuelle' is so bad it's unfunny. When she walked out on this film, Barbara Windsor showed a greater discernment than I thought she possessed. The producers of the 'Carry On' films seem to have agreed that it was a failure, because it persuaded them to wind up the series and we were spared more offerings of this nature in the eighties. The failure of the attempted revival 'Carry On Columbus' (another rat-wretched 'comedy') in the early nineties shows what a wise decision that was. 2/10.

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.

As the 'last' carry on it is often cited as the worst of the series (Along with the awful Carry on England). There's plenty of really bad d*** jokes, theres a couple of (very) soft porn scenes and some peeping toms. On the plus side there is a rather nifty pop tune 'love crazy' sounding very 70's. Kenneth Williams puts in a good performance even though it is an embarrassing movie (Credibility wise) however the rest of the remaining (whats left of the) carry on crew don't do much. I actually enjoyed this as a 'so bad its fairly good!' movie, plus any movie that sends up the 70's porn movie genre deserves a quick look!