Cor, Blimey!

The British public's love affair with the 'Carry On' movies continues with this triumphant re-telling of actress Barbara Windsor's ill-fated romance with her comedy co-star Sidney James.

The film covers the period 1964-1978 and is based on Terry Johnson's hugely successful 1998 stage-play "Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick", now nicely opened up for the big screen. Utilising many of the play's original actors, including Samantha Spiro, Geoff Hutchings and Adam Godley, 'Cor Blimey!' is a real treat for any self-respecting 'Carry On' fan. In particular, Spiro excels as the younger Babs Windsor. She is uncannily accurate in looks, mannerisms and voice, so much so that when the real Windsor appears as herself in the final scene, the join between the two actresses is hardly noticeable.

Hutchings and Godley are also perfectly cast as Sid James and Kenneth Williams respectively, but viewers expecting just laughs will be a little disappointed. Aside from the leads, Williams is portrayed as a lonely unfulfilled hypochondriac and Charles Hawtrey (played by Hugh Walters) as an alcoholic mother's boy.

Always moving and sensitively acted, 'Cor Blimey!' is a touching but extremely engaging and enjoyable film. Many fans will be left with tears in their eyes by the end. Several factual inaccuracies aside, this is top notch entertainment, no messing about! Highly recommended.

Almost every bit as saucy, bawdy and occasionally seedy as the "Carry On" movies themselves, this warts and all encapsulation of the doomed relationship between older man Sid James and bright young thing Barbara Windsor provided captivating entertainment. Commencing brightly and convincingly with some cute camera perspective tricks, perhaps demonstrating the illusory and ultimately false world of entertainment and entertainers, the story contains just about the right mix of drama, pathos and humour throughout, helped by convincing portrayals of almost all the leading players, themselves so familiar to a generation of us who can still hardly turn on the TV here without one of the series beaming out at you (my personal favourite? - "Carry on Cowboy"!).

Although concentrating naturally on the James/Windsor axis, (to the exclusion of both protagonists' spouses), the third side of their love triangle turns out surprisingly to be the acerbic, extrovert but ultimately self-loathing Kenneth Williams, acting as a lightning-rod to James' adulterous excesses (which seemed to extend to bedding every available young female on set) and comforting-board to Windsor as she agonises whether to give in firstly to his physical desire and then later emotional need for her. It's impossible of course to know the full extent of the emotional complexities of this troubled group of actors, besides the accurate extensions of their obvious on-screen personas, but given that Ms Windsor was on board here as a consultant and contributed a cameo piece as herself, I'm prepared to accept what I saw as true-to-life.

One or two James fans might demur at his portrayal as a serial philanderer but I still found his lovable rogue depiction sympathetic. The acting is universally excellent, all the leads capturing the trademark vocal and physical characteristics of their precedents (as indeed is the case with minor characters too) and it was fun to see accurate on-set recreations of famous "Carry On" scenes, including Windor's famous bikini-bursting scene from "Carry on Camping". The dialogue throughout was natural and seemed to me wholly in character, with many witty aphorisms especially, as you'd expect, from the Kenneth Williams character.

All in all, a convincing insight into the lives and far from starry lifestyles of UK national acting treasures and a worthy celebration of a long-standing British cinematic institution.

In the U.S. in the 60's and into the early 70's the 'Carry On' films were telecast as Late - or more usually, as Late, Late Shows: in the age before wall-to-wall content/media these films were, in the States, filler fare - almost throwaways, because it's likely that U.S. distributors didn't, or couldn't, demand or get great sums for the 'Carry On' films from broadcasters who used them to flesh-out (pun definitely and cheekily intended!) their late-night schedules. But whenever a 'Carry On' film aired I did my best to see and enjoy it - there's just something so utterly and unselfconsciously charming about them that made them irresistible to me. (My favorite, by the way, is 'Carry On, Sergeant,' because it features the brilliant, and under-appreciated - at least on this side of the Pond, William Hartnell.) The 'Carry On' films are from a time when good, clean fun could be and was enjoyed, a time before the soul-corroding rubbish of political correctness and the supercilious hypersensitivity with which it burdened life in all of its dimensions except for the realm of the individual's soul, hadn't yet begun to darken everyone's doorway and to dumb-down and dull to death what now passes for education, newspapers, and television and theatre; it was also a time before we let our children be soaked in the properly adult matters of sex and sexuality - and yet even children could and did enjoy the 'Carry On' series. It was a time in which harmless titillation and suggestiveness allowed viewers' imaginations to do their own good and joyous work; it was nothing like nowadays when the Beeb, and much of Hollywood, vomits monotonously nothing but dull Orwellian multi-culti preachiness and strictures - which are far worse than "liberal" and "progressive" critics of the foregoing vibrant and delectable "monoculture" have had the imagination to have yet grasped (heaven forfend that anyone should scandalize a Mohammedan or offend another nunnish radical feminist to anguished despond and spitefulness). It was the existence of the now dead and late lamented, at least by me, monoculture's healthful customs and manners that made the Carry On films the widely enjoyed success that they were; nowadays, with the so-called barriers to everything and anything (except, obviously, to genuineness and to the decency which it begets and widespreads) having been demolished, and all babies having been thrown out with the bath water of the monoculture's supposedly unique and malicious "Eurocentric" hypocrisy, the consequent lack of spontaneity and decency have yielded nothing but Orwellian dullness and monotony which the monoculture's detractors had supposed themselves to be gloriously relieving us of. It was the existence of sound rules and healthful customs that made funny business funny; now that all those old rules have gone, the lack of rules and "barriers" (except, of course, those prescribed for us by our self-vaunted "correct" elites who have replaced the people we once knew to be our betters) has rendered nothing funny and everything grim and seedy and contentious - 'Much Ado About Nothing' indeed.

U.S. 'Carry On' film fans saw very little of the UK publicity for, or British gossip sheets' focus on, the 'Carry On' cast members, so I ought to take 'Cor, Blimey!'s' account of the James-Windsor affair with a large grain of salt; and comments made by Britons here on IMDb, having pointed out the film's taken licenses and liberties, I feel that grain of salt is a proper one to take. It was filmed on a very low budget as its resort to extant, ready-to-hand cinema sets, props, and costumes testifies amply; and yet, like the 'Carry On' films themselves, 'Cor, Blimey!' has its own irresistible charms because it's well-cast, well-played and, almost throughout, astutely written from an ear finely attuned to the sensibilities of its period and the milieu in which James and Windsor carried on their affair. Despite its lackluster editing and somewhat muddy soundtrack, I enjoyed it immensely, and so with great enthusiasm I recommend 'Cor, Blimey!' to everyone who's ever enjoyed - even secretly lest they dread to suffer accusation of deserving to belong to the vulgar mass or, perhaps worse, to one or another of the so-called "Oppressor classes" - a good old, pull-the-bung-out (but only halfway, because it's always far funnier when your imagination does the really funny work) hilarious 'Carry On' film.

Now, since "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity," let men go out and stare unselfconsciously at greater and lesser bosoms and let women giggle gleefully at the men making fools of themselves. Carry On, All!

The opening half of this film dramatising the affair between two of Britain's best and best-loved comedians, Sid James and Barbara Windsor, is a wonderful marriage of form and content, and a lesson to anyone who dares to make period dramas. From the cheeky title and CARRY ON-style credits, we know we're in for a treat that will not betray its subjects with deadly respectability.

This half is filmed like a CARRY ON, with the central romance between Sid and Babs diffused by innuendo-laden bits of business featuring Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey et al. There is one stunning shot at the beginning where the vast Roman ampitheatre through which a soldier walks is revealed to be a tiny model, pointing to the themes of reality and appearance that will be the film's theme, as well as the economic reality of these films' production.

Sid's life in this half is played like a CARRY ON farce, full of repetition, coitus interruptus, double entendres, comedy gangsters and buxom ladies locked in bathrooms. The general verdict on CARRY ONs is that they are an assembly line churning out shoddy products of ever decreasing quality, concerned only with adolescent titillation (this is not my view - HENRY and CLEO at least are great films, while KHYBER is the greatest of all British satires, and the equal of Bunuel); so treating the lives of these people who must subsume their own personalities in their screen personae (even the sex scene is mediated through cinematic apparatus), locked in an evermore limiting labyrinth of personal need and public status is true at least to public perception (behind which, presumably, the filmmakers wish to delve).

The lines and jokes are fruity and excellent, the sets deliciously gaudy, the re-enactments priceless, the chronology a little wobbly, the acting a triumph (Samantha Spiro as Babs is so winning and moving she makes me totally reevaluate a figure I'd previously considered fairly margainal), but, best of all, it shows that farce, and especially CARRY ONs, have an emotional basis denied by its detractors.

The screenwriter doesn't quite believe it either though, and this fertile approach is soon abandoned as the film gets more serious, tragic, and it seeks an appropriate mode to express this, fixing on a fatal melange of social realism and middle-class Rattiganisms (so as not to alienate the film's prime-time audience). The subversion of genre that was the first half (and subverting genre and its conservative functions was what CARRY ONs were all about) becomes a conventional biopic, robbing the subjects of their breezy singularity.

Yes it's all very sad and desparing and tragic, yes the recreation of a shabby 70s Britain at the fag-end of both the entertainment industry and British society itself is expertly realised, but so is Merchant Ivory. There are lines of dialogue, which, without irony, could have come straight from an Alan Bennett parody. The despair of Williams is frequently alluded to, but to anyone unfamiliar with his story somewhat obscured.

The hilarious parody of Burton and Taylor that characterises Sid and Babs' early relationship becomes sadly literal as we go on. You certainly wouldn't know why these cheaply-made music hall quickies remain astonishingly popular and vibrant today, while their more respectable peers lie in cobwebbed vaults. After such a fun start, then, a bit of a shame.

We know that many of the actors in the long running Carry On series had personal problems - perhaps this is why they were so funny and we laughed with them not at them. This film could have only been made by people with a deep affection for the Carry On films and the actors involved. Don't expect an air brushing of history to pretend all the Carry On actors were perfect. Also this is only an interpretation of the events and characters and does not purport to be autobiographical. It is both very funny and also very sad - the two masks of comedy and tragedy. The impersonations are extremely good. The fact that Barbara Windsor was willing to take part must at least indicate approval from one Carry On cast member.