Carry On Screaming **** (1966, Harry H Corbett, Kenneth Williams, Jim Dale, Fenella Fielding, Charles Hawtrey, Joan Sims, Angela Douglas) – Classic Movie Review 1132

Carry On Screaming (1966) is one of everybody’s favourite Carry On films. Harry H Corbett dons a cape and deerstalker as Detective Sergeant Bung and Fenella Fielding delights as vamping vampire Valeria Watt (‘Do you mind if I smoke?). 

Director Gerald Thomas’s 1966 comedy series episode Carry On Screaming is one of everybody’s favourite Carry On films. This hilarious horror movie spoof is a true series highspot as one of the very best in the franchise.

Replacing Sid James, who was too busy making the ITV sitcom George and the Dragon, Harry H Corbett dons a Sherlock Holmes-style cape and deerstalker as Detective Sergeant Bung who is investigating the strange and mystifying disappearance of young girls.

The regular Carry On team of Kenneth Williams as the sinister, undead Doctor Orlando Watt, Joan Sims as Emily Bung, Charles Hawtrey as Dan Dann, Bernard Bresslaw as Sockett, Peter Butterworth as Detective Constable Slobotham and Fenella Fielding as vamping vampire Valeria Watt are deliciously, delightfully and satisfyingly silly. Fielding is particularly brilliant in her second and final Carry On appearance, following Carry On Regardless (1961).

Given a near-impossible task to fill in for Sid, Corbett in his one and only Carry On role gives a reasonable star turn, but he cannot disguise the idea that the part even looks and sounds like it was tailor-made for James.

Talbot Rothwell’s screenplay provides an endless series of gags that are especially corny (‘fangs ain’t what they used to be’) this time, but, who cares, that’s all part of the good-natured, vintage Sixties fun.

Jim Dale has the crucial, fairly straight star role of Albert Potter, and Angela Douglas, Jon Pertwee, Frank Thornton and Michael Ward also star.

Also in the cast are Tom Clegg, Frank Forsyth, Anthony Sagar, Sally Douglas and Billy Cornelius.

The twelfth in the series, it was the last to be made by Anglo-Amalgamated before the Carry On moved to the Rank Organisation. Hawtrey was added to the cast at the last minute after American distributors asked for him, as he was such a hit with audiences there.

James was still too busy making the ITV sitcom George and the Dragon to star in the next Carry On movie, Carry On Follow That Camel, and suffered a heart attack in the second week of that film’s shooting schedule.

RIP the uniquely adorable Fenella Fielding, who died on 11 September 2018, aged 90, following a stroke. She said of Carry On Screaming: ‘It was slated in the press. Posh critics rubbished it. When I saw it on television later, I thought it was brilliant.’ Her 2017 memoir Do You Mind If I Smoke? is named after one of its best-known jokes. Fenella curles up on a sofa and exhales the line: ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’, after which vapour billows out from beneath her body.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1132

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