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| What a Carry On |
| First British Carry On comedy film turns 50 |
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Nigel Watson (NigelXL5)  |
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Published 2008-07-27 23:16 (KST) |
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Fifty years ago the British Carry On comedy film series began with "Carry On Sergeant." These brash, rude films with working-class characters, often in contemporary urban situations, clashed with the cultured and polished films that film critics held in high esteem. A characteristic view of these films is provided by Iain Chambers:
"The films were naughty postcards translated into filmic narrative and a stream of sexually motivated puns. The busty blonde, the leering wide-boy, the frustrated matron, the hen- pecked husband, the camp homosexual, were a set of (frequently offensive) pub humour stereotypes in a context that was ultimately concerned not with promiscuity or licentious behaviour, but with marriage and moral stability. The humour arose from acknowledging and joking with the repressed" (1).
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FROM THE SECTION |
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| Unlike the Ealing comedies the Carry On series never pandered to good taste and, as in Chambers' quote above, the vulgarity of the humor was regarded as offensive by many (if not most) reviewers. There are several reasons for this. One major factor is that the British film industry prefers to regard itself as superior to the Hollywood production system. This has meant that British films have been associated with "realistic" settings and situations, performed in a verbal, controlled manner, by theatrically trained actors. Many of the "best" films are based on respected and well-known literary texts (e.g., Great Expectations and A Room With a View). Also, the use of carefully ordered and controlled camera movement, lighting and music is employed to give a sophisticated but not transparently obvious gloss to these film productions.
With these "artistic" aspirations of the British cinema in mind (and their acceptance by critics and reviewers) it is not surprising that
"In the film industry the Carry On series is a voluble, comic drunk who has blundered into a hushed lounge bar full of people trying to look worldly, important and wise" (2).
It is worth examining the unfavorable critical reception of the Carry On series in terms of four factors: (1) the initiators of the humor, (2) the audience for the humor, (3) the subject matter of the humor and (4) judgment of the humor.
Peter Rogers was the producer of all the Carry On films and Gerald Thomas directed them all. Although they might have been regarded as blundering vulgar "drunks," they had respectable middle-class backgrounds. Talbot Rothwell, who wrote most of the scripts, came from a stockbroking family not from the cobbled streets of some heathen Northern town!
Indeed, the main people involved in creating the Carry On films are not that different in class, education and general social upbringing from Michael Balcon and the other creators of the Ealing comedies. In the following description of Peter Rogers' motivation for making the films we can see that they are not much different from the motives of Ealing producers, writers and directors:
"The Carry On films might be seen as a shy man's defiant, rebellious thumb-to-the-nose at the hypocrisies and pomposities of daily life. Two fingers at all that he hates and fears" (3).
The Second World War had nearly as much influence on the start of the Carry On series as it did on the Ealing comedies. People from different classes had been forced to work together for a common cause and this exposure taught them many new and strange things about other people's lives, actions and motivations (this is highlighted in the 1943 film "Millions Like Us"). This shared experience, which continued in such institutions as National Service and the newly formed National Health Service, became the sites for the first Carry On films.
The humor is directed at all classes and types of people with equal malice and irreverence. All the main characters are shown to be equally "crazy" and maladjusted to the demands of society. Scriptwriter Norman Hudis drew upon his own experience of National Service life for "Carry On Sergeant" (1958), and "Carry On Nurse" (1958) was also based on personal experience and incidents. "Carry On Cruising" (1962 -- set onboard a luxury cruiser) was less successful allegedly because it did not deal with a very familiar subject for the mass audience at that time.
The initiators of the Carry On films flaunted the British film industries' sense of good taste by employing broad music hall humor that wallowed and romped with puns, innuendoes and jokes about sex. However, in Eastaugh's The Carry-On Book there is a constant reference to the fact that these films were made quickly, efficiently, cheaply and very professionally. There is an underlying feeling that they were embarrassed by their enterprise and were defensive about it even though they produced a highly successful and entertaining product.
The audience that might be expected to enjoy the Carry On films might be derided as being unsophisticated, common, dirty-minded, young and working-class. In a review of "Carry On Regardless" (1960), it was noted that the series can "probably coast along on that momentum [of popular appeal] very nicely for some time, before the public finally calls its bluff" (4). Here we can see that the reviewer thinks, or hopes, the audience will wise-up. This reflects something of the attitude of post-war film critics who believed that audiences should be educated to enjoy hard-to-understand and culturally elite forms of film.
Penelope Houston, in The Contemporary Cinema: 1945-1967 (Penguin, 1963, p. 119), calls the Carry On series cynical "hard to fool" and is "the Coronation Street public: its heroine is Ena Sharples." She believes the theater is the most progressive force in the 1960s. The audience has changed, in her view, from those who enjoyed "the grace and humor" of the Ealing comedies. Such elitism is sent-up in "Carry On Teacher" (1959), where the school play of "Romeo and Juliet" is reduced to a slapstick farce. The arid intellectualism of Alistair Grigg, the child psychiatrist, is condemned as "treacherous tripe" and history is represented by the dubiously titled book Bangs That Made History.
Puns, innuendoes and jokes about the body tend to be associated with the young, the unsophisticated and the working classes. This type of humor is indulged in by other classes but they prefer not to advertise this fact by translating it into popular entertainment forms. If the humor was so strongly working class, we might wonder how scriptwriters with strictly middle class backgrounds and outlook were able to produce the Carry On scripts.
Marion Jordan points out that critics have been "patronizing or dismissive" about these films but even she can be seen to be equally dismissive when she calls this "a lower-class, masculine" type of humor that portrays women as "goalers, sexual objects, or unnatural predator" (5). Such an attitude toward women has been conditioned as much by middle class institutions and legislation.
That roles were imposed on the working class for the sake of middle class profit is an historical factor in such a set of attitudes rather than a "natural" working class frame-of-mind. Indeed, the very producers of these lower class/working class film comedies are the middle classes. So it is their perception of what working class humor is about rather than a genuine product of the class' sense of humor. Woody Allen is as equally obsessed by sex as the Carry On films but because he frames and articulates this subject matter in a more intellectual manner (e.g., his films contain overt and covert references to novelists, philosophers and psychoanalysts) he is feted by the critics.
"Carry On Regardless" (1960) was described as a "shapeless, aimless and fearless" film that "defies criticism" (6). Such a description could be given to many of Woody Allen's comedy films, but they are in a form and language the critic can deal with. This seems to be one reason why Carry On films are ignored or derided by the critics. If they do find some of the films funny it comes as a "strangulated cry" which is "often given out by critics laughing against all the laws of sanity, reason and judgement, [and] is brought on by the gall of the puns, the flagrant cheek of the double entendres and the bludgeoning, persistent, endless audacity of the slapstick" (7).
Another reason why critics ignore Carry On films might be that they do not want to acknowledge that they are able to read and enjoy the (usually) blatant sexual aspects of these films. As Freud has noted, jokes play with elements that transcend the normal "adult" limits of reason and logic. Carry On films are aware of this factor; for example, in "Carry On Teacher," the child psychiatrist says that "practical jokes are the most valuable pointers to the inner conflict of childhood" and expresses the idea that children should fling off their clothes in order to obtain "a passport to happiness." It is therefore not surprising that he should fall in love with Miss Allcock (Carry On films, like Freud, are obsessed by the phallus, particularly "Carry On Dick" [1974]).
In the end the psychiatrist has to admit that his ideas about free expression should only be applied to other children and not to his future offspring (this seems to reveal that the producers of Carry On films do not wish to encourage any interpretation of any deep meanings into their jokes or stories even though they can supply fertile sources for such readings). The film constantly questions the advantages of using the cane but it never quite resolves this issue.
What it does do is use a simple idea to string-out a battle between the "innocence" of infancy and childhood when sex is regarded without guilt (the children have pornographic pictures that even shock the caretaker) and the repressions of adulthood (these are portrayed by Mr. Adams, whose inhibitions cause him to become a clumsy fool who ends up falling through a chair seat rather than in love until he can summon-up the courage to fight his repressions).
The complexity of the verbal and visual wit used in Carry On films -- as is Mr. Adams' fall through the chair -- is easily ignored because we can easily "spot the joke." At this superficial level, we still have to bring into action quite an array of information from beyond the text and a knowledge of "common" jokes and humor. For example, Miss Allcock's declaration that someone has "Taken the pea" when she tries to blow her whistle is only funny when we are aware of the expression "taking the piss." Even this joke is more complex when we consider the whistle as a phallic object being handled by Miss Allcock. The joke becomes more disgusting when we consider the oral function of the whistle and the possible sexual connotations of the joke, which were fully explored by Linda Lovelace a decade later.
The critics repress the implications of such humor on the grounds of good taste (pardon the pun) in terms of cinematic style and subject matter, but "Kind Hearts and Coronets" (Ealing Studios, 1949) was also said to lack visual style (as do many comedies) and its subject matter (the murder of the "father") is far more dangerous than a flash of Barbara Windsor's breasts.
Sometimes the critics employ the same type of double meanings as Carry On films to show their dislike for them. A review of "Carry On Spying" said, "This spoof on James Bondery looses a few random and very limp satirical shafts, but is for the most part content to stick to routine" (8).
This kind of judgment "proves" the superior intellect and reasoning power of the reviewer. He or she has been conditioned to understand that the uneducated are the sort of people who should enjoy this type of humor. Norman Hudis disliked "Carry On Cruising" because, as previously mentioned, it did not deal with a familiar situation. As the Carry On series continued and drifted away from realistic and contemporary settings and situations, we come to recognize the characters as the familiar elements that frame everything else and who turn "reality" upside-down. Freud observed that the pleasure of jokes is that they rely on this type of "recognition of the familiar" (9).
In their judgments of Carry On films, the critics do not want to acknowledge their own familiarity with the unconscious power of the humor, the frantic cartoon-like energy of the characters or any other aspect of them. That the films are meant for the masses and are not worth studying seems to be their argument even though the very coat of film production means that all feature films have to appeal to some form of mass audience, or a minority audience that can always be relied on to turn out.
The Ealing comedies tend to confirm the virtues of the balanced middle ground between the working and upper classes, whereas the Carry On films tend to make every class of person a target for its humor. As we have seen, the Ealing comedies do ridicule and extract humor from people who try to go beyond their "true" social position. They can temporarily enjoy a fantasy about a higher social stature, but in the end they are brought back to earth. In the same way Carry On films play with ideas of breaking social conventions and codes of behavior but in the end roaming playboys get married, or the unfaithful husband returns to his wife, or a diverse set of individuals (mainly through luck) become a socially useful team ("Carry On Sergeant," "Carry On Constable" and "Carry On Cruising" are examples).
At heart both types of comedies are concerned with the problem of how different people with varying individual desires cope with restrictive social institutions, conventions and morals. To conclude, there is not a vast divide between the two types of comedies in terms of their initiators and their underlying articulation of "escapist fantasy." However, the overt subject matter of the humor and its blunt presentation in Carry On films, along with assumptions about the type of audience this is aimed at, for a long time alienated reviewers and critics from considering them in anything more than a superficial manner.
Today, the Carry On films no longer look as rude and crude as they did on their first release and the intervening years have dipped them in a coating of nostalgia for older viewers and quaintness for newer ones.
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References
1. Chambers, Iain, Popular Culture, Metheun, London and New York, 1986, p. 110.
2. Eastaugh, Kenneth, The Carry-On Book, David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1978, pp. 41-42.
3. Estaugh, pp. 24-25.
4. Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 28 No. 328, May 1961, pp. 63-64.
5. Jordan, Marion, 'Carry On … Follow That Stereotype' in British Cinema History, James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds.), Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1983.
6. Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 28 No. 328, May 1961, pp. 63-64.
7. Eastaugh, p. 41.
8. Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 31 No. 367, August 1964, p.134.
9. Freud, Sigmund, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Penguin, London, 1976, p. 170.
Additional References
Goldstein, J. H., and Paul E. McGhee (eds.), The Psychology of Humor, Academic Press, New York and London, 1972.
Hamer, Robert, and John Dighton, Kind Hearts and Coronets: Classic Film Scripts, Lorrimer Publishing, London, 1984.
Walker, John, The Once and Future Film, Methuen, London, 1985. |
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©2008 OhmyNews
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