Carry on Jack (1963) - film review

After eight years, Albert Poop-Decker finally achieves his dream, to serve as midshipman in the British navy.  The year is 1805 and the navy needs men like Albert, to protect Britain from the French and Spanish.  But before he can join his ship, the Venus, he is waylaid by a tavern serving maid, Sally, who knocks him out, steals his clothes and disappears.  When he comes to, Albert is rounded up by a press gang and taken to the Venus, where he finds that Sally has convinced the inappropriately named Captain Fearless that she is the real Poop-Decker.  When Sally tells him that she borrowed his identity so that she could join her childhood sweetheart in Spain, Albert agrees to keep her secret and accepts his lowly position as a deckhand.  Whilst at sea, Lieutenant Howett begins to resent his captain’s leniency towards his crew and decides to take his place...

The eighth of the Carry On films is something of an oddity and marked quite a radical departure from what preceded it.  Not originally intended as a Carry On film, and with only two of the Carry On regulars in leading roles (Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey), it was presumably given its title as a marketing ploy, misleading an unsuspecting audience into thinking they were in for another bout of Carry On madness.  The ploy must have worked because the historical send-up would become a staple of the Carry On series in later years.

Whilst some consider it to be one of the weaker entries in the series, Carry on Jack is an effective parody of the kind of seafaring adventure film that had become hugely popular in the late ’50s, early ’60s.  It manages to spoof both the crowd-pleasing buccaneer swashbucklers and Mutiny on the Bounty, the Marlon Brando epic that was released the same year.  Whilst the jokes are few and far between, the film has far more in the way of a storyline than most of the Carry Ons and its production values are surprisingly good, especially when you consider that the film was made on a shoestring budget.  The film’s main strength is its cast. They may not be Carry On regulars, but Bernard Cribbins, Donald Houston and Juliet Mills are all terrific in this film, making up for the below par contributions from Williams and Hawtrey.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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