October is here, which means the schedules on the minor channels are starting to fill up with Christmas movies and I get to bathe in that warm, soothing glow that comes from knowing I've reviewed The Polar Express already and so don't have to go anywhere near it this year round. Worry not, though, I've made sure to sprinkle this month's list of films with plenty of titles that give me the shudders.
Titles like Carry on Screaming, in fact, one of a long series of bawdy British comedies that ran between 1958 and 1992. When I was a small child, I knew for a fact that these were the funniest films ever made, chiefly because the posters told me so but also because they made my parents laugh a lot. You'd think that this would make me nostalgic for them, but would anybody ever really want to return to that sort of sociopolitical climate?
Carry on Screaming marked something of a watershed for the series, being the last to be made by Anglo Amalgamated before they moved to the Rank Organisation. It featured relatively few of the regular cast members, with only Kenneth Williams, Joan Sims, Charles Hawtrey and Jim Dale, and marks Steptoe and Son's Harry H. Corbett's only appearance. Visually, however, it's broadly similar to the rest of the films, made on the sort of shoestring budget that would later see the lower slopes of Mount Snowdon standing in for the Khyber Pass.
As is traditional within the series, the female actors in Carry on Screaming are all required to be conventionally attractive, while the male actors are - charitably put - not. Nevertheless, any married female character must be portrayed as being the stuff of nightmares, a brutal harridan whose sole purpose in life is to chastise her poor hapless husband while his friends and companions sympathise. Yes, the men's rights movement was going strong long before the little darlings even they realized they needed one.
I could rant at length about the misogyny on display here, but would you really want me to? I'd much rather forget the whole sorry fucking mess and get on with my life. I've promised to write about the damned film, though, and so I suppose I'd better give at least a thumbnail sketch of what goes on. Kenneth Williams plays a mad doctor who abducts women and turns them into mannequins which he sells to dress shops, while Fenella Fielding is his Elvira-esque and seemingly insatiable sister. Up against them are a couple of cops (Harry Corbett, Peter Butterworth) and Jim Dale as the boyfriend of an abductee.
The humour's all a bit end-of-the-pier in a way that veers between sleazy and merely cringeworthy, although the cast are seasoned pros and the slapstick elements and some of the wordplay are nicely done. The creators clearly know what the audience want, and are prepared to offer it up to them in spades.
I'm really glad we've moved on since then, though.
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