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Carry On England (1976)



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How can I possibly explain the sheer horror of how bad Carry On England is? It is so exhaustively unfunny that I wonder if it can make other things unfunny just by placing them in proximity. It was such a disappointment that it was pulled from theaters three days after its opening.

What went wrong? The writers must take most of the blame, for writing a script without any jokes that actually work. They were reasonably accomplished screenwriters that had written some good movies before, but they were not experienced in this kind of comedy, and it's all too clear that they had no idea what they were doing. The film doesn't even feel like a Carry On film. Whether they were trying to do something different on purpose or were simply unable to follow the formula, I don't know. Either way, they botched the job in a big way.

One of the big changes is that it isn't really an ensemble. One of the reasons the Carry On films were so successful is that the movies were spread out over several different characters. If one character didn't work, that was okay, because there were so many others to pick up the slack. But Carry On England is The Kenneth Connor Show. There are lots of other characters, sure, but they essentially all play straight men to Connor. There is no other source of comic tension. Bizarrely, only a few other Carry On regulars appear -- Jack Douglas, Joan Sims, and Peter Butterworth -- but they all play tiny, tiny roles with nothing to work with. Why bother to cast them at all?

Connor's character is a military captain, who takes over as the commanding officer of a co-ed air defense base. He spends most of the movie trying to keep the men and women from co-mingling. Of course he is repeatedly outwitted in ways that cause him to lose his pants or get covered in mud and worse. The gags consistently fail, partly because the movie is always sacrificing normal, logical behavior for them. Funny: guy loses his pants, gasps, seeks the nearest cover, and glances around to make sure nobody saw him. Not funny: guy loses his pants but keeps marching along, because he hasn't noticed he's lost them. See what I mean? If we can't believe it, we're not going to laugh at it.

The vague plot similarities to Carry On Sergeant only remind us how much better this series used to be. William Hartnell's Sergeant Grimshawe was a real person. So were his recruits, idiosyncratic though they each were, and the humor emerged organically from the clash of personalities. In Carry On England, there are no personalities at all, just warm bodies acting out what looks like comedy but doesn't much feel like it.

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