Carry On Emmannuelle * (1978, Kenneth Williams, Suzanne Danielle, Kenneth Connor, Joan Sims, Peter Butterworth, Jack Douglas, Beryl Reid) – Classic Movie Review 2379

Director Gerald Thomas’s 1978 silly softcore sequel Carry On Emmannuelle is everyone’s least favourite Carry On film and the one that finally killed off the series. It marks producer Peter Rogers’s failed attempt at a winning change in style to become more openly sexual, especially in the implied behaviour of Suzanne Danielle’s Emmannuelle, though the actress does not really bare any more flesh than other Carry On star actresses.

This sad end to the original run of 29 Carry On films (though Carry On Columbus followed 14 years later in 1992) exposes Kenneth Williams, who is forced to drop his drawers a lot as Emile Prevert, French ambassador in London. In her only series appearance, Suzanne Danielle plays his sexually frustrated wife Emmannuelle, who of course carries on seducing everybody in sight.

Though scrawny, Emile is dedicated to his bodybuilding, leaving Emmannuelle to find pleasure with everyone from the Lord Chief Justice (Llewellyn Rees) to chat show host Harold Hump (Henry McGee), as well as the Prime Minister and the American Ambassador. 

It was a mistaken bid to bring the film closer in spirit to the then popular series of X-rated Confessions of… comedies or even the Emmanuelle films it parodies. As such it was the only film in the series to gain a AA certificate from the British Board of Film Censors, restricting it to audiences of 14 and over. But the Carry On films can only truly exist in a cheerfully smutty, leering seaside postcard world of humour from the 1950s, and not in this down and dirty world of Seventies humour.

In any case, the problem is not that Lance Peters’s screenplay for the 30th in the series of Carry On films is dirty and tasteless. It is meant to be of course. The problem is that it is not funny.

However, there are a few flashes of the old vintage style, for example when the ambassador’s housekeeper Mrs Dangle (Joan Sims in her 24th Carry On) is recalling her frothy erotic encounter in a launderette. But this generally unfunny film pays the price of breaking the rule that the Carry On funsters only joke about having sex, not actually have it.

Kenneth Connor (in his 17th Carry On) as the chauffeur Leyland, Peter Butterworth (in his 16th Carry On) as the aged boot-boy Richmond and Jack Douglas as the butler Lyons are all welcome one last time. And it is good to see Beryl Reid, who stars as Mrs Valentine in (surprisingly) her only Carry On. Mrs Valentine is the mother of timid Theodore (Larry Dann), who Emmannuelle starts the film off by seducing on a flight on Concorde, though later he unchivalrously exposes her antics to the press when it turns out that she has forgotten all about him.

Also in the cast are Eric Barker in his last film as the ancient general, Victor Maddern as the man in the launderette, Howard Nelson as Harry Hernia, Albert Moses as Emmannuelle ‘s doctor, Robert Dorning as the Prime Minister, Bruce Boa as the US Ambassador and TV newscasters Tim Brinton and Corbett Woodall.

It proved Williams’s final film. He died from overdose of barbiturates on April 15 1988, aged 62. It remains a mystery whether the overdose was accidental or deliberate. He, Connor and Barker are only actors to appear in the first (Carry on Sergeant, 1958) and last (Carry on Emmannuelle) authentic Carry On films.

It is the 22nd and final Carry On score of composer Eric Rogers (25 September 1921 – 8 April 1981). And there is a song by Kenny Lynch.

Carry On Emmannuelle got Observer critic Philip French in a lather: ‘This relentless sequence of badly-written, badly-timed dirty jokes is surely one of the most morally and aesthetically offensive pictures to emerge from a British studio.’

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2379

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