Carry On Emmannuelle (1978)

Strong and Moving!

A lot of fun.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Don't go expecting a 'Carry On Up The Khyber', or one of the classic Carry Ons - there are a few negatives, such as the terrible animation, a poor back-projection sequence and, it has to be said, a little too much of Kenneth Williams' bottom, but it has a impressive cast and many funny moments. The 'most amorous experience' sequences - particularly Joan Sims in the laundrette and the ever-excellent Peter Butterworth's wartime reminiscence are particularly good. Barbara Windsor was said to have claimed the film as 'pornographic' and turned it down, but it is nothing of the sort, and for a so-called sex comedy, it's very conservative. I think that this is a big part of the problem people have with it, expecting either a Carry On (the humour is more blatant than any other Carry On film) or a Confessions-style sex film; the result is something in-between. The book, by Australian Lance Peters, is remarkably close to the film itself, though fortunately we are spared the sight of Mrs Dangle pleasuring herself on a washing machine (getting instead something far funnier) and a lesbian scene with the Wimbledon ladies champion! It's the last chance to see many of the Carry On greats together (also the last bow too for valued character actor Eric Barker) and is a massive step up from the previous film and series-nadir, England. And if you don't laugh when Kenneth Williams says "we couldn't find the stopcock", you probably aren't human.

The film is centred on sex. After all it was 1978. The cast look tired. No one shows any interest. There is nude scene by the nurse which is just so not carry on.The acting is terrible its a load of crap. By this time the carry ons where cremated.The carry ons in their hey day where about good clean fun. This film is so bad its embarrassing. I would be ashamed to be part of a film like this. The carry on team made them special. This film is poor sad and crude. Even Joan Sims has a crude sad unfunny name " Mrs dangle". The stories which Butterworth Douglas Sims and Connor tell about sex experiences are sad and embarrassing. Kenneth Williams is poor in his final carry on.The script is chronic.The football stadium scene is terrible it is a bad example to all. All those men Emmanuelle has sex with you would have she could have caught Sexuallly transmitted infection!!. Larry Dann is stalking her as he is in love with her as they had sex on the plane in the toilet at the beginning. Overall a sad poor crude unfunny carry on film avoid this crap!!.

By the time that Carry On Emmannuelle rolled around, the boom in smutty sex comedies in the UK reached it's zenith and the comparatively innocent double-entendres of the Carry On movies were looking increasingly dated with audiences preferring to seek out something with strong nudity and some crude laughs, rather than watch another Carry On movie in the hope that there might be a fleeting glimpse of a pair of breasts.With the Confession movies pulling in the punters, and with David Sullivan muscling into the scene with movies like Come Play With Me & Playbirds, Gerald Thomas & Peter Rogers ventured into previously unexplored territory and plunged into spoofing adult movies.The result was ghastly.Featuring only a handful of the regular cast, most of them had flown the coup by this time. Kenneth Williams only appeared in the movie as a favour to Gerald Thomas, Kenneth Conner (the unsung hero of the Carry On series in our opinion) tries to have fun with the appalling material, but just ends up making himself look foolish - a great pity. Of the others, only Joan Sims, Peter Butterworth & belated regular Jack Douglas are on hand to help tie this car-crash of a movie to the Carry On series.One joke that will have a modern audience spitting their drinks across the room involves Dino "Mind Your Language" Shafeek as an immigration officer at an airport.The saddest slight of all in this non-starter of a movie has Kenneth Conner as Leyland, the Ambassador's chauffeur, showing Suzanne Danielle around London, in a bid to get her sexually excited - driving past Nelson's Column, he starts gurning and emoting "corr", or terms along those lines. Dear oh dear...Ultimately, Carry On Emmannuelle was too tame for the Dirty Mac Brigade and too strong for those who loved the more innocent Carry On movies. No wonder this was the last regular entry in the series.

Love 'em or loath 'em, a certain indefineable Englishness could always be distilled from the Carry Ons, even the ones set in Ancient Rome or The Wild West. They started out in black and white, stable mates to Norman Wisdom and assorted Ealing comedies and wound down two decades later when the permissive society has made their nudging winking humour obsolete. Through the years, the same actors kept resurfacing parodies of silly suburban Englishness: the leathery lecher Sid James, the squeaky blonde Babs Windsor along with demure Charlie Hawtrey, bulgy eyed Kenneth Williams, repressed matron Hattie Jacques and sharp faced nag Joan Sims. It was the repetition and safeness we cherished, the over the top boooiings! and deliberately crass innuendos, Babs' bra flying off amid stretching exercises and hitting a horror-struck Williams in the face: "Oooh! Matron! take them away!" Far from being 'sex comedies', the Carry Ons are also childishly innocent. None of the villains e.g. Bernard Bresslaw as Bunghit Din in 'Up the Kyber' are genuinely bad. Sid's ear is forever being grabbed by Sims before he can do anything with Babs. All of these elements are absent from Emmanuelle and the result is painful and repulsive. Rogers' dire payment of his actors meant they had little choice but to return time and time again to Rothwell's scripts. By 1978, Sid James was dead, Charles Hawtrey sacked and Jacques (along with Windsor Davies and Terry Scott) committed to better-paying BBC sitcoms. Barbara Windsor reportedly walked out on this one and it's puzzling that her close friend Williams didn't do likewise as he'd already been burnt by the wretched 'Hound of the Baskervilles.' Peter Butterworth, Joan Sims and Kenneth Connor chip in but you know a movie is in trouble when Benny Hill's straight man (Henry McGee) is brought along to make up the numbers. Attempting to capitalise on the success of the French 'Emmanuelle' movies, the old pre-feminist and pre-pill approach to sex is junked in favour of a movie where the elderly Williams is shown copulating with Suzanne Danielle. In her role as Emmanuelle Prevert (pervert get it...? Swiftian wit,we think) Danielle attempts to find satisfaction after Williams was castrated in a nude hand-gliding incident by bedding innumerable men, while a rubbish 'disco' number plays. Meanwhile, shy mother's boy Theodore falls for Danielle and the servants recall their own lamentably unsexy brushes with the permissive society. By the time of this movie's release, the Carry Ons were already dinosaurs and the 1974 effort 'Carry on Dick' was when the series should have been wound up. Other comedies of the time 'Confessions of a...' or 'Percy' have not dated well, but the sea side bawdiness of the 1960s Carry Ons will just about make them watchable on a Sunday afternoon. Not this effort, interesting only as a cruddy little snapshot of post-sixties, pre-Aids views on sex. With Emmanuelle, the Carry Ons died although the stake had to be sharpened one last time in 1992 when the even worse 'Carry on Columbus' rose from the coffin.