Jugando a Emmanuelle

Emmannuelle Prevert is the wife of the French Ambassador to the UK. After a separation of some time, she returns to the UK on Concorde to give it another chance. However her husband is only interested in body building and is unwilling to satisfy her very high sex drive. After much pleading, Emmannuelle goes out to see the sights of London and hopefully get some satisfaction along the way.

With the opening of the film on Concorde (spoofing Emmanuelle's own plane moment) we have the height of intelligence of this film (in the reference to that film) but a split second later we are in the territory of crude and obvious jokes starting as it continues with an erect Concorde and the predictable 'are you coming' joke. The material basically continues like this for the rest of the film, with only a very vague (and uninteresting) plot to provide a loose structure. Within this structure are hung endless sex jokes and titillating material (for the period) that started out being lame but ended up being pathetic and just plain stupid. They are totally lacking in the wit that the best of the Carry On films have, instead it is obvious and crude – there is no sparkle to the deliver, it is just plodding and lacking in anything of value.

The accents in the film are pretty awful but I think that's the point as the French people are played by English actors. Danielle is quite sexy and could almost pass as French but she can't act and her sexuality is wasted due to the tame standards required of the film (a group orgy with a football team involves her kissing each of them slightly and that's it – no nudity from her!). The rest of the cast is made up of famous Carry On stars and you can see it in their delivery that they know their glory days are gone and they are not too taken by the material, but it is to their credit that many of them still put on a brave face. Williams has no good lines to work with even if his character is amusing, Connor hams it up rather a lot but enjoys himself, Butterworth is wasted totally while Joan Sims only contribution seems to be having a crude name (Mrs Dangle). Douglas is so-so but Larry Dann is pretty rubbish which is a shame since he is supposed to be a big part of the 'plot'.

Overall, this is rubbish. I wanted to find some silly laughs in it but I found nothing of any value here. The 'jokes' are crude and obvious and there are no moments of clever writing in it at all: the Carry-On series may never have been the height of wit but this entry (oh-err missus) in the series makes some of the early films look like the pinnacle of modern humour. I love many of the Carry On movies and even I hated this one – silly, banal and a disgrace even by the less than high standards of the series.

As the 'last' carry on it is often cited as the worst of the series (Along with the awful Carry on England). There's plenty of really bad d*** jokes, theres a couple of (very) soft porn scenes and some peeping toms. On the plus side there is a rather nifty pop tune 'love crazy' sounding very 70's. Kenneth Williams puts in a good performance even though it is an embarrassing movie (Credibility wise) however the rest of the remaining (whats left of the) carry on crew don't do much. I actually enjoyed this as a 'so bad its fairly good!' movie, plus any movie that sends up the 70's porn movie genre deserves a quick look!

During the rehearsal stage for this film Barbara Windsor walked out. Who can blame her, this amusing british film series had been reduced to a pathetic joke.

Kenneth Williams and Co labour as best they can with the woeful script. The editing sloppy and a totally abysmal performance from Suzanne Danielle as Emmannuelle Pervert.

Considering the fun the "Carry ons" have given so many of us this is frankly just pathetic.

One would expect this, the last in the long line of Carry On films, to be a load of old rubbish. And while it is perhaps not Carry On heaven it is still worth a look.

It is ironic being the last in the series, that after the utterly appalling Carry on England, Emmannuelle is actually a slightly better film. Kenneth Williams is in fine nostril-flaring form, Kenneth Connor is a delight as the sleazy chauffeur and stunning Suzanne Danielle a joy to behold in her body hugging outfits. Even the snazzy 70s theme song, "Love Crazy" is quite catchy!

However, we are now at the end of the line for this series of comedy favourites and it is sad to see a now bloated Joan Sims doing not very much, an ancient Peter Butterworth doing not very much and underused Jack Douglas not falling over and making silly noises.

Also long, long gone is the series' subtle use of innuendo and double entendre. As with Carry on England, we are now subjected to nude bottoms and breasts to raise a titter among the audience. And the nose cone gag on the Concorde has to be seen to be believed!

Better than its predecessor and worth an occasional viewing but by no means one of the best. A very, very different film to Sergeant which launched the series a staggering 20 years before.

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.