Carry On films as a group made the biggest single financial
contribution to the British film industry over a number of years, their
participants were allowed to exaggerate their own comedy styles, or
camp it up as the approach later came to be termed, and included such
experienced farceurs as Sidney James,
Kenneth Williams, Kenneth Connor,
Hattie Jacques, Bernard Bresslaw
and Joan Sims.
Gerald Thomas just pointed his cameras at them when they were about
to deliver some particularly outrageous double-entendre and let the
audience and Talbot Rothwell's scripts do the rest. The brother of Ralph
Thomas, this most British of directors began his film career immediately
after World War II, as an assistant editor, progressing to editing and
second-unit direction before making a Children's Film Foundation drama,
Circus Friends (1956) as his first solo feature. Time
Lock (1957), his second film, was a tense thriller with a small
role for the young Sean Connery,
but in no time at all, the Carry Ons intervened and, to everyone's surprise
in the industry, quickly became a fondly regarded national institution.
For the record, the best of them are Carry
On Cleo (1964), Carry
On Cowboy (1965), Carry
On Screaming (1966), Carry
On Up the Khyber (1968), the dinner-party sequence at the end of
the last is superbly orchestrated and the best individual scene in any
of them. The series always worked better in costume, though audiences
seemed not to care about the 'story', however slapdash. Sometimes, as
in Carry On Abroad
(1972), elements of genuine satire could be observed to be creeping
in.
