Carry On Emmannuelle (1978)

Like another reviewer said, the song "Love Crazy" at the beginning is a great song and the best thing about this filthy film. Most of the other Carry on films are naughty fun, but not filthy. This film starts out with Emmanuelle going down on a guy in the bathroom and then we see Kenneth Williams bare butt in his room. Ugh! Another minus for me is the fake french accents they both use. Man, they are awful. Joan Sims and Kenneth Connor & Peter Butterworth play the help at Kenneth Williams home. Jack Douglas plays the butler. Kenneth is an ambassador and Emmanuelle is his mistress/wife. We see more of Kenneth's butt again, ewww! She basically goes around flaunting her body and sleeping with everyone. She then asks the hired help to describe their wildest affairs. This is more waste of film. I read Barbara Windsor walked out on this film because it was too risqué. She was right. It's also not that funny. Emmanuelle continues to sleep with every guy she sees, exposing her butt a couple of times. Her body is OK, but the french accent is annoying. She is upset her husband does not care about her exploits, so she bangs the whole soccer team, one at a time. An ex-lover decides to write an article about her affairs and she admits it's all true. She and Kenneth do it at the end and she gets pregnant and has a bunch if kids. That's it. I give it a 3 and that's partially for the great theme song. This is the worst of the Carry On films. Yes it's worse than Carry on Columbus because at least that film had Jim Dale and the sexy Sara Crowe.

A late period Carry On film, this one stars Suzanne Danielle in her debut performance as Emmanuelle, the wife of an ambassador (Kenneth Williams) and her very sexual ways. She becomes a member of the mile high club and, once in London, seems to bed down any man who breathes. I know its a send up of the Emmanuelle films, but it doesn't quite have the zaniness and laughter of a Carry On film. Ms. Danielle is attractive and often scantily clad, but you really don't care after a while. Kenneth Williams does his best, and he is always good, but the film doesn't really keep your interest. You miss the late Sid James, who passed away before this film was made, he could have made it a better film. Not the worst Carry on, but unless you are a Carry On completist, I don't recommend it.

Carry On Emmannuelle (1978) * 1/2 (out of 4) British comedy has Emmannuelle (Suzanne Danielle) going to stay with her upper class husband and having to teach all the workers what it means to be sexual. I recently bought a "Grindhouse 20-Film Collection", which features ten double-features and this film was shown with the one above but I guess the company didn't watch the film before including it. If you're wanting any sleaze or trash then you're not going to find it here but there are a few funny moments but a lot of the comedy is so far over the top that it comes off very force and juvenile. This was my first film from the "Carry On" series, which started in 1958.

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.