Carry on Cleo (1964) - film review

Hengist Pod and Horsa are two Ancient Britons who enjoy a peaceful life between hunting the odd Brontosaurus and knocking out the occasional labour-saving invention, such as the square wheel.  Then the Romans arrive and, with a bit of gratuitous Veni, Vidi, Vici, start mucking everything up, acting as if they owned the place.  It wouldn’t be so bad if they just came for a week or two in the summer and did the usual bit of rape and pillaging that most tourists got up to.  But no, this Latin lot had to stick around and build roads and public baths all over the place, spoiling the countryside and playing havoc with the property market.  In no time at all, Hengist and Horsa find themselves in a cart bound for Rome, to be sold at auction by that respectable firm of slave traders, Marcus et Spencius.  Meanwhile, Julius Ceasar returns to Rome, having endured the most miserable time in Britain.  Why anyone would want to invade such a backward, Godforsaken country is beyond him.  And look at the thanks he gets when he comes back home, jeered at and taunted by an ungrateful rabble.   The philistines.  But the mob are not the only ones who are displeased with Ceasar; there are those in the Senate who are even now plotting to bring about his downfall.  Anxious to know what the future has in store for him, Caesar decides to consult the Vestal Virgins, unaware that his bodyguard Bilius intends to carve him up there.  Fortunately for the emperor, Horsa and Hengist have chosen the Temple of Vesta as their hiding place after their miraculous escape from the slave market.  Horsa defeats Bilius and his guards single-handedly, before hiding just as Mark Anthony, Caesar’s best friend, turns up.  Hengist takes the credit for saving the emperor, who shows his gratitude by making him his bodyguard.  Realising that he needs to do something drastic to secure his position, Ceasar sends Mark Anthony to Egypt to make an alliance with Ptolemy, enabling the latter to depose Cleopatra, the all-powerful queen of the Nile.  Things do not go as planned.  The instant he sets eyes on Cleopatra, Anthony falls under her spell and into her bed chamber.  In the history of the world, there has never been a more beautiful woman and, what is more, she has a shocking asp.  Unable to resist what Cleopatra offers, Anthony conspires with her to kill Ceasar so that he can take his place.  With her brains and his beauty (or some such combination of words), they can hardly fail.  History is for the writing and Mark Anthony intends that his will be the pen in the inkpot...

Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me!  With these immortal words, screamed hysterically by Kenneth Williams at the camp highpoint of his career, Carry On Cleo justly earned its place in the affections of millions and its status as one of the comedy greats of British cinema.   The tenth entry in the series marked a new high for the cast and crew.  With the Carry Ons now a national phenomenon, loved by the public (but loathed by the critics), all of the contributors were at their creative peak, working to make this a comic triumph against which all future films in the series would be measured.  Only a handful of subsequent Carry On films would be anywhere near as good as this.

Although it may originally have been intended as a generic send up of the lavish sword and sandals epics that Hollywood was churning out by the cartload at the time, Carry On Cleo quickly became an obvious parody of one particular film, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963) the megabucks blockbuster that came close to bankrupting Twentieth Century Fox.  Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had played the ill-fated lovers, Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, in that film, but many would argue that Amanda Barrie and Sid James did a far better job in its Carry On spoof. 

Certainly, Barrie’s dotty Cleopatra, wallowing in a bath of asses’ milk and fluttering her eyelashes in a way that cannot fail to ignite the libido of her admirers, is a more memorable creation than Taylor’s.  And Sid James (Oh, blimus) looks as if he is having far more fun than Burton.  Add Kenneth Williams, Joan Sims and the other Carry On stalwarts into the mix and it’s obvious which is the more engrossing film.   Interestingly, Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra furnished Carry On Cleo with most of its sets and costumes (the ones that had been left behind in England when the production on that epic moved to Italy), which accounts for the unusually high production standards on this film.

Much of the credit for the success of Carry On Cleo is down to one man, its screenwriter Talbot Rothwell, who, by far the best writer on the Carry On films, worked on the most highly regarded films in the series.  Perhaps more than anyone, it was Rothwell who defined the classic Carry On film, achieving a satisfying and popular mix of slapstick, wordplay and bawdy humour, without slipping into the coarseness and puerile humour that would mar the later entries in the series.  In Carry On Cleo, Talbot is at his most inspired and turns in one of his funniest scripts, sprinkling the expected crop of naughty double entendres and humorous pratfalls with some more sophisticated jokes, including a few that only students of the Classics are likely to get.  Cheekily, a caption declares that the film is based on a story by William Shakespeare.  One suspects that the Bard may have been flattered.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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