Carry on Spying (1964) - film review

When a top secret formula is stolen from a government laboratory, the British secret services hastily set about recovering it.  They have just 36 hours before it falls into the hands of the evil Dr Crow, the leader of a criminal organisation known as STENCH (the Society for the Total Extinction of Non-Conforming Humans).  With their best men already assigned, they fall back on their least reliable agent, Desmond Simpkins, and three trainees: Harold Crump, Daphne Honeybutt and Charlie Bind.   The four agents make their way to Vienna to liaise with field operative Carstairs, who has just witnessed the formula being passed to another enemy agent, the Fat Man.  Having failed to recover the formula, Simpkins and his team pursue the Fat Man to Algiers, where they are more successful.  But as they head back to England on the Orient Express, the four agents realise that the STENCH men have not given up.  Captured and taken to Dr Crow’s underground lair, they soon discover the downside to their profession...

The Carry On team spoofed like they had never spoofed before in this gloriously silly send up of the spy-thriller genre, mercilessly lampooning the kind of films that were proving to be their nearest competitor at the box office.   Producer Peter Rogers and director Gerald Thomas clearly had the recently released James Bond films in their sights (hence the obvious references to Dr No and From Russia With Love) but earlier spy films, notably Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), also come in for some caustic mimicry.  The film buffs will see at once that the opening credits sequence is a direct (and very cheeky) homage to the classic film noir thriller D.O.A. (1950).  Needless to say, not everyone saw the joke.  Albert R. Broccoli, the producer of the James Bond films, threatened legal action when he learned that one of the characters in the film was to be named James Bind, Agent 006-and-a-half.

The last of the Carry On films to be made in black-and-white, Spying marked something of a turning point for the series.  Two films back, screenwriter Talbot Rothwell had taken over from Norman Hudis and already he had come close to perfecting the comedy style of the classic, or middle period, Carry Ons, a style that was defined by a family-friendly mix of riotous slapstick and saucy double entendre.  Carry On Spying was the first in a straight run of eight or so of the most popular Carry Ons.

This is the film in which Barbara Windsor made her Carry On debut, and you can’t help wondering how the series ever managed without her.  Put her, Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey in the same space, and the result can hardly fail to be an explosive and hilarious cocktail.  Williams is at his most relentlessly funny in this film, adopting the snide persona that had earlier brought him to the public’s attention in his radio shows for the BBC, including the now legendary Hancock’s Half Hour.  He even gets to slip in his oft-repeated catchphrase, "’Ere, stop messin’ about" in vitually every other scene (prompting co-star Dilys Laye to slip in her immitative ad lib).  With its Keystone Kops-style denouement, Carry On Spying does get a little silly in a few places but, for all that, it is easily one of the better entries in the series.

© Chris Alderton 2009

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