Carry On Behind

The 27th Carry On movie, (produced by Peter Rogers and Gerald Thomas), was the first film in the series without the vast majority of the regular main cast, it is also one of just two films that starred the late great actor Windsor Davis, (his other appearance was in Carry on England).

Fred (Windsor Davis), a butcher goes on a camping holiday with his best friend Ernie (Jack Douglas), which they see as a chance to get away from their humdrum lives and nagging wives. Meanwhile a Professor of Archaeology Roland Crump (Kenneth Williams), is busy working away on a dig that is in an adjacent field to the camp site, fastidiously looking for any remains of Roman life, with his new female colleague the Russian Professor Anna Vooshka (Elke Sommer), who has more on her mind than just digging for thousand-year-old pieces of glass.

I cannot consider this to be a classic instalment in the series as having Windsor Davis in the role of a large angry Welsh Sid James felt so out of place.  A lot of the gags either fell flat or were really tired. However this is a pretty good chuckle-fest, with most of the proper laughs coming from Kenneth Williams, who is by far the best character in this film. He steals the show and dominates every scene that he is in, which is a good half of the film. There are two scenes in particular in which I almost cried with laughter at his overtly camp and goofy behaviour. In the end though this is a pretty mediocre episode of the Carry On series, which is saved as I’ve already said by Kenneth Williams. Although I did enjoy watching Davis on screen, his subsequent performance in England, (which was the last true Carry-on), was far better, before this quintessential film series indefinitely fell off the page.

6/10 – Calum Roberts