Film Review
Ooh-la-la, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Some bright
spark had noticed the popularity of the
Emmanuelle and
Confessions films and thought that
a hefty dose of soft core porn dressed up as comedy was just what was
needed to revive the flagging Carry On films.
It never occurred to anyone, least of all the film's producer Peter Rogers, that the
audience for a tawdry piece of French erotica might be somewhat
different to that of the Carry On films...
Needless to say
Carry On Emmannuelle
was not a great success, either with the critics or the cinema-going
public. It lost more money at the box office than any other Carry
On film and is widely considered to be the series' low point, in just
about every sense of the word. It wasn't until
Carry On Columbus came along 14
years later and showed us just how excruciatingly bad a Carry On film
could be that people began to re-evaluate
Carry On Emmannuelle and reflect
that perhaps it wasn't quite so bad as it seemed. Certainly, if
someone held an AK-47 to your head and forced you to watch one of these
last two Carry Ons,
Emmannuelle
would be the one to go for, because, for all its failings, it probably
won't make you want to strangle yourself with your own intestines.
The production team had evidently learned from their mistakes on
Carry On England (the dullest
of the Carry Ons) and made every attempt to cast as many of the
regulars as possible in the main roles. Kenneth Williams was
reluctant to get involved but was persuaded when he was offered six
thousand pounds (one thousand more than his usual fee). Suzanne
Danielle was given the leading female role, even though she had had next to no
previous acting experience and was cast allegedly because she had been
noticed by Peter Rogers during the shooting of
Carry On England (she was Patrick
Mower's girlfriend at the time). Beryl Reid did such a good job
in her cameo appearance that additional scenes with her and Lanny Dann
were added at the end of the shoot. Regulars Joan Sims, Peter
Butterworth, Kenneth Connor and Jack Douglas are all well used and
deserve some kind of award for making something of the unimaginably
trite material they are given. Without this ensemble of talent
the film really would be intestine-garrotingly unbearable.
To its credit,
Carry On Emmannuelle
is not a bad spoof of the
Emmanuelle
films, but the question remains: who on Earth would want to watch a
send up of a tacky soft core porn movie? The innocent bawdy
humour of previous Carry Ons has been jettisoned in favour of more
explicit sex comedy of the kind that feels totally inappropriate in a
Carry On film. The experience of watching this film is not unlike
that of being groped by Sooty and Sweep (or Soo, if you are that way inclined). It just doesn't feel
right, and instead of being entertained, you only feel nauseous and
slightly soiled.
Whilst the performances are acceptable (even with the dodgy French accent,
Suzanne Danielle is a far more attractive proposition than Sylvia Kristel, the star of the original
Emmanuelle films), the one-note
humour quickly becomes stale and tiresome. Some of the gags are dragged out
to almost ludicrous proportions and many are repeated ad nauseum, as if
the screenwriter had been assuming the spectator had the memory of an
Alzheimer's-stricken goldfish. Just how many times do we need to
see Kenneth Williams' bare bottom? Was he running some kind of
sponsored buttock-athon? The original screenplay (by Lance
Peters) was so bad that extra writers had to be drafted in to make it
funny. Just how bad was that original screenplay?
Carry On Emmannuelle was the
film that finished off the Carry Ons, exactly twenty years after the
series began. Plans were afoot to make another four films
(beginning with a raunchy medical comedy,
Carry On Again Nurse, which might
have done wonders for the sales of daffodils), but these were
immediately abandoned when
Emmannuelle
died a death at the box office. The series had strayed too far
from its family-friendly origins and had sacrificed its mainstream
audience to attract the dirty mac brigade. Several of the key
players had passed away or would do so within a few years, and the
production team were by now completely out of touch with public
tastes. The Carry On style of comedy resurfaced in various
television sitcoms in the 1980s, notably in the hugely successful
'Allo, 'Allo, but the Carry On
films were a thing of the past. Or so it seemed.
Christopher Columbus has a Hell of a lot to answer for...
© James Travers 2009
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Gerald Thomas film:
Carry on Columbus (1992)
Film Synopsis
The French ambassador, Emile Prevert, is taken by surprise when his
sexy young wife Emmannuelle suddenly turns up on the doorstep of his
London residence. Realising that he can no longer satisfy his
wife's insatiable sexual appetite, owing to a close encounter with a
church steeple, Emile encourages Emmannuelle to look elsewhere, and she
does just that. Meanwhile, a timid young man named Theodore
Valentine has become infatuated with the seductive French woman and is
keen to re-enact their first amorous encounter, which took place a few
days earlier, in the toilet aboard Concorde. Alas, to
Emmannuelle, Theodore was no more than a flash in the pan, and she has
no intention of starting an affair with him. Theodore is
not so easily dissuaded and begins photographing Emmannuelle's illicit
amorous couplings to humiliate her husband and ruin her marriage...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.