Manda Ver, Henry

This farce about Henry the VIII is perfect fodder for the Carry On group. This film has the core cast which made the best Carry Ons. It stars the irrepressible Sid James as the king, along with the always fun to watch Kenneth Williams as Cromwell. That duo made the best Carry Ons, they just seemed to always work well together. Add in the always welcome Joan Sims, the always bubbly Barbara Windsor and the also welcome Charles Hawtrey as Sir Roger and you know you're going to enjoy this. There have been better Carry On films, and the film carries the usual sexual innuendos and once in a while too cheap laughs, but with this cast it hardly matters. Seek this out.

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.

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.

Not the best of the carry on films but not the worst either, Sid James and Barbara Windsor still have a lot of chemistry and there's lots of references to the Tudors here (even if some are a bit out of place like Guy Fawkes and the guillotine!) It's not that memorable and I found myself a bit bored whilst watching it, but there's worse films and it's ok.

5/10: Average.

Like a well-oiled machine fully in control of the material, Carry On Henry is the typical knockabout affair you've come to expect from this franchise, offering the familiar mix of bawdy humour and slapstick, sadly, you can sense the charm slowly draining away from the series. There are corny gags galore but very little in terms of comedic momentum; it simply trundles along. However, there's much to-ing and froing around the king's devious plotting, tight-fitting bodices and Sid James truly working his end, wringing every drop of humour from a great script. It certainly helps that this is another of the more visually impressive films of the series, despite being made on a minuscule budget typically afforded to the team; it looks stunning, thanks to some well-crafted art direction and costume work, achieving an authentic recreation of the court of England's most notorious monarch, all sumptuously staged. In many ways, Carry On Henry sees a reduction of English history to an aristocratic bedroom farce, but it's still got plenty of laughs from a cast who are giving it their all, it may be fast and loose with its history but that's always been the Carry On way.