Peter Bradshaw: What a Carry On!
From The Guardian 15/5/04
If Tony Blair should ever need a
diplomatic pretext for breaking with America, or even launching a nuclear
strike against it, he could do a lot worse than the recent statement by Tom
Hanks on the subject of classic British films. Publicising the Coen
brothers' remake of The Ladykillers, Hanks said: "I have never actually seen
this particular Ealing movie ... I'm certainly aware of it. I know it the
same way I know the Carry On films - I've never seen any of those, either."
Hanks is due in Cannes to launch the film next week, and he may develop his
thoughts on the Carry On films then.
In the meantime, here is what the Cannes festival jury president, Quentin
Tarantino, said this week about the lack of a British film industry: "In
Britain, in its heyday in the 1960s, every type of film was being made that
could be made ... the Carry On films weren't art, but they were funny."
Maybe Hanks and Tarantino will discuss this subject and expose their
opinions on the Croisette - oh noooo, stop it, missus.
How disturbing that when Hanks and Tarantino need an example of instantly
identifiable British film culture, they reach for the Carry On films. How
humiliating to realise that they are being polite, because they believe that
we like them, that we genuinely think they're really good. Hanks's apparent
belief in the equivalence of the Ealings and the Carry Ons may be insulting,
but we have brought it on ourselves with our incessant, tongue-in-cheek
praise for the Carry On films, expressed in a smirking sentimental-ironic
idiom that I, for one, don't blame the Americans for not understanding or
indulging.
Does Tarantino really think the Carry Ons are funny? Well, he is a legendary
movie and pop culture omnivore. But if he has watched a single Carry On film
and enjoyed it, I will kiss his ass in Macy's window - as they say in
Hollywood.
It has long been compulsory to say you adore Carry On films, just to show
you're not stuffy or priggish or politically correct. But when we say Carry
On films, we mean the clips played on TV. Or really just one single clip,
the one in Carry On Camping where Barbara Windsor's bra flies off just as
she's doing those exercises, and we cut to Kenneth Williams doing his
startled moose expression.
Come on. Be honest. When was the last time you actually sat down and watched
a Carry On film all the way through? It isn't possible without a great cloud
of irritability, restlessness and depression descending on you. Perhaps the
saddest thing was Jack Douglas, a regular in the later films. How many
people thought his convulsive, jerky arm movements were really,
tongue-out-of-cheek funny?
In his brilliant book on Charles Hawtrey, Roger Lewis recreates the milieu
of sadness and second-rateness that pervaded these films. They were
profitable for their notoriously autocratic and mean producer, Peter Rogers,
due in no small part to the fact that he paid his stars next to nothing.
Joan Sims died a few years ago, complaining to the last about the
astonishingly low fees. The women got paid less than the men: an
unanswerable charge of sexism there - though, to be fair, the same injustice
reigns in modern Hollywood. Hawtrey got paid £5,000 per picture in 1958; the
pay scale remained the same for 20 years.
None of which need matter to the audience, were it not for the fact that the
tattiness and cheapskateness seeps depressingly through on to the screen.
Lewis's book gives a list of the Carry On locations, which are a kind of
prose-poem version of Betjeman's Metroland: the Odeon, Uxbridge; the Red
Lion, Iver; Heatherwood Hospital, Ascot; Camber Sands, near Hastings. The
list is fascinating and funny - but are the movies?
The last attempt to make a Carry On, long after the series had slid into
borderline soft-porn in the 70s, was Carry On Columbus in 1992, starring Jim
Dale and Bernard Cribbins with newer stars like Alexei Sayle, Rik Mayall and
Julian Clary. It was considered a clunky disappointment, and everyone
wondered how the joyous Carry On spirit seemed to have disappeared. But the
truth was that Carry On Columbus was ghastly and embarrassing in precisely
the same way the old Carry Ons were in their day - it's just that it wasn't
possible to surround a new film with a fog of dishonest nostalgia.
"Can't we do better than this?" asked Ken Russell when his opinion of these
cheesy old comedies was canvassed. Let's hope we can. But it's only possible
if we chuck this pose that no one really believes in. So please Mr Hanks,
please Mr Tarantino, you don't have to say you love these terrible films. At
least not on our account.
Peter Bradshaw is the Guardian's film critic.
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