Читать книгу The Complete A–Z of Everything Carry On - Richard Webber - Страница 9

1955

In August, Sydney Box commissioned R.F. Delderfield to write a film outline with the working title, National Service Story. The treatment was delivered but the project was abandoned in September.

1956

The Rogers and Thomas film partnership, as producer and director respectively, began in earnest with the release of Circus Friends for the Children’s Film Foundation.

1957

The National Service story was revisited and, in January, Sydney Box again commissioned Delderfield to prepare a screenplay, later titled The Bull Boys. When Box was unable to interest a financial backer, Rogers took the basic premise of conscription and decided to develop a comedy.

He approached Associated London Scripts for a scriptwriter to pen the screenplay. Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes turned down the chance but, in September, fellow writer John Antrobus was commissioned to complete a script for £750. Unfortunately the script didn’t meet with Rogers’ approval and he asked Norman Hudis, a contract scriptwriter, to pen a comedy screenplay based on national service for a fee of £1000. Hudis delivered a script blending comedy with pathos, a rich example of the style that had become one of Hudis’ most coveted trademarks.

1958

Permission was granted by the War Office for the film to be shot at the Queen’s Barracks, Guildford. Filming started on 24 March, initially with interior shots at Pinewood, and continued until May. The final production cost of making the film was under £78,000. By this time, Norman Hudis was already working on the next script, Nurse, delivering the first draft in June. Filming began on 3 November and was scheduled until 12 December. But even before the film was released, Peter Rogers was thinking ahead to Teacher, Constable and Regardless; for the first time, it was clear the foundations for an on-going series were being put in place. The final cost of making Nurse was £82,500, but before the year was out, scriptwriter Norman Hudis had already delivered the first draft of his screenplay for Teacher.

1959

Nurse was released in March and, like Sergeant, became a box-office hit in the UK: it also sold well abroad, particularly America. By March, the next production, Teacher, was already under way. Joan Sims, Hattie Jacques, Kenneth Williams, Kenneth Connor, Charles Hawtrey and Leslie Phillips were back, and now the basis of a Rogers-and-Thomas’ repertory company was forming.

A welcome introduction to the cast was Ted Ray, playing Mr Wakefield, the stand-in head at Maudlin Street School. Sadly, it was to be his one and only Carry On, much to Peter Rogers’ disappointment. With the children, including Richard O’Sullivan, recruited from London’s Corona Academy, location shooting took place at the Drayton Secondary School, Drayton Gardens, West Ealing, and was completed by 10 April. Filming, however, had begun back on 9 March at Pinewood with internal shots in Wakefield’s study.

The film was released in August, just as Hudis put the finishing touches to the first draft of his Constable script, which was based on an idea by Brock Williams. Filming began on the streets of Ealing on 9 November.

While the film saw Leslie Phillips make his last appearance in a Carry On until, thirty-three years later, he reappeared in Columbus, Sid James made his debut. He became the anchor for many of the future films, a pivotal point around which storylines revolved. Filming at Pinewood was completed by mid-December.

1960/61

Constable was released in February and Hudis began work on Regardless, which he’d later class as his least favourite script. A seven-week filming schedule ran from 28 November until 17 January 1961, with the film’s release in March. Peter Rogers registered the title, Carry On Cruising, subsequently to become the sixth in the series, with the British Film Producers’ Association in March 1961, by which time he’d already received a story treatment, initially entitled Carry On At Sea, from Eric Barker. The treatment was delivered by the summer of 1961, but although Barker was to receive a credit on the closing titles when the film was eventually released, it was, again, Norman Hudis who put pen to paper and wrote the screenplay, which was delivered to Rogers in December.

1962

Cruising was the first in colour and the last to be written by Hudis, who, on the back of Nurse’s success, would be invited to America, where he’s become a prolific screen writer. Although he continued to write for the British screen, and later completed an unmade script for Spying, most of his subsequent work was in the States.

Filmed between 8 January and the middle of February, Cruising was released in April. Despite its title, no cruising on Mediterranean waters took place: instead, filming was contained within Pinewood, except for scenes of a liner leaving port which were filmed by a small camera unit. A new face to the Carry Ons, although he’d worked for

Rogers and Thomas previously, was Lance Percival. He’d originally been considered for a more minor role, but was offered the part of Wilfred Haines when Charles Hawtrey’s dispute over billing resulted in his declining a chance to appear in the film.

1963

Hawtrey was back for Cabby, which had a working title of Call Me A Cab. Talbot Rothwell delivered the final draft of his first Carry On screenplay in January, which was based on an original idea by S. C. Green and R. M. Hills, who’d go on to write for such shows as The Roy Castle Show, Frankie and Brucie, Those Two Fellers, According to Dora, The Frankie Show and, in Hills’s case, latterly, Carrott Confidential. Sidney Green and Richard Hills had originally been commissioned to write a screenplay entitled Call Me A Cab, back in the summer of 1961, but by November 1962 Rothwell, who’d already completed a script for Rogers which would eventually be adapted into Jack, was brought in to turn the idea into a Carry On film. The film was shot between 25 March and 8 May, and after post-production formalities were complete, Cabby was released in June.

For the next Carry On picture, Rogers and Thomas returned to the draft script Talbot Rothwell had submitted prior to penning Cabby. It began life as Poopdecker, R.N., before moving through other working titles, namely Up the Armada, Carry On Mate, Carry On Sailor and, finally, Carry On Jack.

Rogers explored the possibility of using library material from Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. or The Crimson Pirate, both released during the 1950s; initially it appeared costs would be prohibitive but although a deal was arranged with Warner Brothers, no footage was ultimately used. The first of Rogers and Thomas’s period pieces, the cast for Jack included some new faces, such as film veterans Donald Houston, Cecil Parker and Juliet Mills, all making their one and only Carry On appearance.

Filmed between 2 September and 26 October, Jack was released in the UK before the end of the year, by which time Talbot Rothwell was concentrating on Come Spy With Me, the working title for Carry On Spying, the final entry filmed in black and white. Rothwell – in collaboration with his friend Sid Colin – prepared a screenplay that was a parody of the successful spy movies, most notably the Bond pictures, that were receiving rave reviews during the period; but if events had turned out differently, a Norman Hudis script would have been developed. Hudis completed a draft screenplay in February 1963, spotlighting a group of secret agents who penetrate an atomic plant disguised as CND supporters before taking part in a CND demonstration themselves. Rogers rejected the script, but it wouldn’t be the last time Hudis’s work was considered for future Carry Ons.

1964

Spying, which launched Barbara Windsor’s Carry On career, was made between 8 February and 13 March and released in June. Within a month of hitting the big screen, the cast were back in period costume, this time in the days of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra for Carry On Cleo, the tenth in the series and Rogers and Thomas’s twenty-first joint production. After completing the action between mid-July and the end of August, the film received its UK release in November. It was well received around the world, especially Australia, where its success was confirmed by various sources, including the managing director of Australia’s Greater Union Theatres, who stated that in most cinemas it had beaten pictures such as Lawrence of Arabia and El Cid, taken more money than any other Carry On and broken numerous box-office records throughout the country.

1965

The first draft of Rothwell’s screenplay for Cowboy was completed by March, but after script discussions with Rogers and Thomas, changes were made and a revised screenplay delivered by 11 May, two months before filming took place at Pinewood Studios and on location, with Surrey’s Chobham Common and Buckinghamshire’s Black Park replicating the Wild West. The final wrap was on 17 September, day thirty-nine in the schedule, with the film’s release in November, weeks after Talbot Rothwell typed the final word of his next screenplay, Carry On Screaming!

1966

For Screaming!, Fenella Fielding returned for her second and final appearance in a Carry On, playing the vampish Virula Watt; Harry H. Corbett, meanwhile, earned £2000 per week playing Sidney Bung; Rogers was delighted to have Corbett in the cast, an actor he’d wanted to work with for some time. With filming completed by the end of February, Screaming! was a summer release.

By early autumn, production was under way on Don’t Lose Your Head. It was originally released, as was the next production, Follow That Camel, without the Carry On moniker. When Peter Rogers left Anglo Amalgamated and teamed up with Rank, the new distributors were conscious of releasing future films from Rogers and Thomas under the brand of a competitor. It was only after takings for the two pictures were noticeably lower that the prefix was hastily reinstated.

Filming for Don’t Lose Your Head took place between 12 September and 1 November and the picture, concerning two aristocrats who rescue their French counterparts from the guillotine during the country’s revolution in the late eighteenth century, was released in time for Christmas.

1967

Although he’d become an integral part of seven Carry On films by 1967, the hard-working Sid James was unavailable, due to an earlier heart attack, when it came to casting Follow That Camel. Most of the big players, though, were free to step into period costume for the Foreign Legion adventure. After a run of successful parts, Jim Dale was once again in the thick of the action, this time playing Bo West, in a film based loosely on Percival Christopher Wren’s novel, Beau Geste.

Rank, the new distributor, wanted an American face in the film, believing it would boost sales across the pond and Phil Silvers, alias Sergeant Bilko, was drafted in. But no longer a huge draw in the States, his inclusion did little for the film’s success Stateside, while the actor’s style and vaudeville background wasn’t compatible with the traditional Carry On make-up.

Filming began on the 1 May, and in addition to utilising the back lot at Pinewood, the cast travelled, for the first time, beyond the environs of the studio – all the way to the Sussex coast, for location work at Rye and Camber Sands.

The film was released in September, just as the Carry On gang returned, after twelve films, to the hospital wards. Always a popular theme, Carry On Doctor (made between 11 September and 20 October) boasted the first of two film appearances for Frankie Howerd. With Rogers’ wife, film producer Betty Box, responsible for the successful Doctor films, Peter Rogers sought his spouse’s and John Davis’s (then the chief at Rank) permission to use the title.

When the film was released in December, Carry On fans were delighted to see the return of Sid James, albeit in a lesser capacity, as bed-bound patient Charlie Roper. After his enforced exclusion from the previous picture, James was recovering from his heart attack and accepted a less strenuous role, which he joked was the easiest he’d performed during his lengthy career.

1968

Long-distance location filming was rare in the Carry On world: outside of the immediate vicinity, the furthest the team had travelled was to the Sussex seaside for Follow That Camel. For the next film, Up The Khyber, they were on their travels again – this time to the mountains. But instead of the Himalayas, cold and wet Snowdonia was picked to represent the Khyber Pass. A favourite with both Rogers and Thomas, filming began on 8 April and was completed by the end of May. So realistic was the film’s setting, Rogers and Thomas received letters from war veterans convinced they recognised locations at which they’d served.

There was a September release for Up The Khyber and an autumn shooting schedule (7 October-22 November) for Carry On Camping, another favourite of Rogers and Thomas – and millions of fans, too. It’s become common knowledge that the adventures under canvas weren’t filmed in the holiday season but October and November in the grounds of Pinewood. While the cast shivered in their summer gear, the mud was sprayed green to represent grass. Despite such hardships, the team – which included Barbara Windsor and her famous flying bikini top – turned out one of their best overall performances.

The script, once again, was supplied by Tolly Rothwell, although he’d originally embarked on a Camping script back in 1966, before it was postponed in favour of Follow That Camel.

1969

Camping was released in February and followed quickly by Again Doctor, the last time we’d see Jim Dale in a Carry On before the critically slated Columbus, some twenty-three years later.

Rothwell’s draft script wasn’t entirely satisfactory so he rewrote it and delivered the amended version by the end of January. The screenplay raised a few questions from Rank’s legal adviser, Hugh J. Parton, who, realising Rothwell had written a rejected Doctor in Clover script for Betty Box, queried whether much of Frederick Carver’s dialogue was so reminiscent of Sir Lancelot Spratt (portrayed by James Robertson Justice in the Doctor films) that it was an intended parody. Concern was also expressed over the Medical Mission and slimming cure sequences, which Parton thought he’d read before, perhaps in Rothwell’s Clover script or in one of author Richard Gordon’s books. Worried about copyright infringement, he raised the points with Rogers in February.

Filming began on 17 March and continued until the beginning of May, shooting on F, C and G stages at Pinewood, with location work in Maidenhead. It was released in August, by which time Rothwell had nearly finished Up the Jungle, which carried a working title of Carry On Jungle Boy. When Dale declined the chance to play Jungle Boy, the part was offered to Terry Scott, while Jacki Piper became the first performer to be placed on contract by Rogers and Thomas. Making her debut as Joan Sims’s assistant, June, in the film, she’d appear in Loving and At Your Convenience before a cameo role in Matron. Howerd was back for his final Carry On, which was shot between 13 October and 24 November.

1970

Up the Jungle hit the big screen in March, and within weeks James, Hawtrey et al. were back at Pinewood filming Carry On Loving, which began life as Carry On Courting. Rothwell had started working on the script back in October 1969, but once he’d submitted the final draft, filming began on 6 April and was completed by mid-May.

Loving was released in September, while the cast were back in period costumes for Carry On film number twenty-one – Henry. With Sid James in commanding style as Henry VIII, and impressive sets and locations (including Windsor Great Park and the Long Walk) on view, this richly produced film was a welcome addition to the series. Rothwell had initially been working on Carry On Comrade (later changed to Carry On At Your Convenience, although it also carried the working title of Carry On Working) before the project was cancelled – albeit temporarily – and the scriptwriter was commissioned to pen this medieval romp, which was shot between 12 October and 27 November.

1971

After the release of the latest period piece in February, Talbot Rothwell returned to his lavatories and bidets for At Your Convenience, which reunited Richard O’Callaghan and Jacki Piper. In draft form, the script started out as Carry On Working, but by the time filming began on 22 March the title had changed. The cast travelled to Brighton Pier for some fun at the fair between Monday 3 and Wednesday 5 May and a good time was had by all, but when the film was released in December it met with a lukewarm response from audiences and took several years to recoup its original production costs, perhaps resulting from the way the film portrayed unions and shop stewards. But if audiences didn’t rush to watch At Your Convenience, normal service was resumed with the next offering from the Rogers/Thomas production line because it was back to the world of starched uniforms and stethoscopes with Carry On Matron.

The script was the work of Talbot Rothwell again, but could easily have been original writer Norman Hudis if a proposed contract, originated in November 1969, had been executed. By then, however, Hudis was based in the States and for Rogers to have employed the writer on Matron while he was resident in the US would have cost his budget an additional fee, payable to the Writers’ Guild to fund its pension and health benefits. Following correspondence between Rogers’ office and the Guild, the contract was cancelled and Rothwell hired instead. Talbot’s contract was issued in May and the script delivered in August. All the familiar faces were recruited for this enjoyable slice of traditional Carry On fare, filmed between 11 October and 26 November; the finished product hit the screens the following spring.

1972

By the time Matron was released in May, filming had begun on the twenty-fourth Carry On. With package holidays becoming increasingly popular in Britain, it was time for Rogers and Thomas to turn their attention to the sun-seeking adventures of a bunch of oddballs thrown together by circumstance. Filmed between 17 April and 26 May, Abroad became one of the genre’s strongest entries and Charles Hawtrey’s swan-song. It was the last time he’d appear in a Carry On. Meanwhile, location work, which June Whitfield, making her second appearance in the series, thought might take place in sunnier climes, ended up being in the grounds of Pinewood. The furthest the cast travelled was Slough to film scenes showing trippers climbing on to the coach taking them to the airport.

1973

It was off to Brighton again for location work on Carry On Girls (originally discussed as Carry On Beauty Queen) which went into production on 16 April. The first day’s filming involved scenes where Larry (a rather green photographer played by Robin Askwith) is asked to take some snaps of busty model Dawn Brakes (Margaret Nolan) on Fircombe beach. Filming was completed by 25 May and the picture released in November. The highly successful Carry On London! stage production, which kicked off in the autumn, put paid to thoughts regarding a second Carry On that year, which had become the norm.

1974

A return to period comedy for the only big screen production in 1974. Sadly, it would be Sid James’s last appearance, as well as Rothwell’s final script. When the writer became ill before completing the screenplay for Dick, producer Peter Rogers stepped in and completed the script himself. Meanwhile, Jack Douglas, as Sergeant Jock Strapp, played his biggest role to date. The idea was based on a full-length script submitted by Lawrie Wyman and George Evans, but it was regular scriptwriter Talbot Rothwell who, for £10,000, was commissioned to write the screenplay, brought to life by the cast between early March and mid-April. The film was released in July.

1975

While the Carry On Laughing television series was being screened on ITV, Carry On Behind brought together a group of regular faces and some occasionals. With Sid James touring Australia in a play, and Barbara Windsor performing her one-woman show in New Zealand, two of the most popular performers were missing. The cast, however, still boasted such names as Kenneth Connor, Kenneth Williams, Peter Butterworth, Joan Sims, Bernard Bresslaw and Patsy Rowlands, with new faces including Windsor Davies and German-born actress Elke Sommer, delivering a well-crafted performance as renowned archaeologist, Professor Anna Vooshka.

The screenplay, written by Dave Freeman, was equally innuendo-laden as his predecessor’s output; Freeman had originally submitted a script titled Love On Wheels back in 1973, which was later altered to Carry On Carrying On, before finally becoming Behind by the time Freeman delivered the screenplay in January 1975. The film was shot between mid-March and mid-April and released in December, and although many argue that the Carry On series had lost its way by this point, Behind was an amusing piece of work continuing in the same vein as those which had gone before.

1976

By the time the cast of Carry On England had fallen in during May, Sid James, the linchpin of so many films in the series, was dead. While performing in a production of Sam Cree’s The Mating Game in Sunderland, he collapsed and died – he was sixty-two. Such a loss would inevitably cast a shadow over the production when the cast arrived at Pinewood.

Filming began on 3 May until 4 June, and despite some familiar faces in the cast, including Kenneth Connor, Joan Sims, Jack Douglas and Peter Butterworth, a clutch of new faces were placed in prominent roles, such as Patrick Mower and Judy Geeson. This, combined with a script written by David Pursall and Jack Seddon, experienced in their field yet new to the Carry On series, resulted in a different style of film, unfamiliar to many fans of the genre. For me, it’s the most disappointing of all the Carry On pictures, and upon its release in October, England failed to satisfy the cinema-going public and was removed from the schedules by some cinemas days after receiving its initial viewing. It would be some time before the film clawed back its production costs.

1977

In That’s Carry On, Rogers and Thomas offered a nostalgic trip back in time celebrating those golden moments from their catalogue of films. The compilation, with an original screenplay by Tony Church, was introduced by Kenneth Williams and Barbara Windsor, and contained all the classic scenes you’d ever want to see. After Gerald Thomas and editor Jack Gardner spent nearly six weeks choosing the best sequences, they sat down in a theatre to check their selections, only to find the film ran for six hours. Eventually they streamlined the output and although it didn’t initially set the world on fire, the film has over the years become a welcome and valued addition to the Carry On library, reminding fans of the halcyon days when Norman Hudis and Talbot Rothwell’s scripts had audiences rolling in the aisles.

1978

That’s Carry On was released in February, and the thirtieth film, Emmannuelle, went into production in April. When the original script by New Zealand-born Lance Peters was far too blue, experienced television writer Vince Powell was hired to tone it down. With many of the true Carry Oners entertaining audiences in the sky, and some regarding the film too smutty to be classed as a Carry On, Kenneth Williams, Jack Douglas, Joan Sims and Peter Butterworth were the only regulars present. Playing alongside Williams as his wife, Emmannuelle Prevert, was newcomer Suzanne Danielle, a mere fledgling in the world of film. But her portrayal was expertly executed, a performance defying her lack of big-screen experience.

Filming between 10 April and 15 May was followed by a November release, but the film’s ‘AA’ certificate meant it was no longer classified as family viewing, thereby losing a sizeable proportion of the audience normally associated with Carry On films.

The absence of so many of the faces audiences had become accustomed to, and a script which, although offering innuendo and double entendres, lacked the flair of Hudis and Rothwell’s work, Emmannuelle failed to revive the magic one had come to expect from a Carry On. Some critics regarded the film as pornographic, which is far from the truth, but the sexual connotations were rather more obvious and blatant than anything before, and the film lacked the feel-good factor which had pervaded its predecessors, with the exception of England.

1992

Fourteen years after Emmannuelle, the thirty-first Carry On went into production. The nuts and bolts of this movie are covered in a later chapter, together with details of various aborted projects in the preceding years, but Columbus was a pallid attempt to rekindle Britain’s affections for the Carry On-style movie; sadly, it fell short of the markers set by the others and failed to capture the repertory-company atmosphere one came to expect, and want, from such films.

P. S.

Now, of course, yet another Carry On film is in the pipeline. At the time of writing, London is in production, but only time will tell whether it will prosper or sink without trace. Watch this space!

Illustration © Keith Turley