Carry On Cowboy (1965)

Several years before Mel Brooks took his satirical talent and inflicted on the western genre in Blazing Saddles, the Carry On troupe blazed that trail ahead of him in Carry On Cowboy. It's interesting to me to hear British players doing American accents because I get an idea of what we sound like to them.Elements of Destry Rides Again, The Paleface, and with a High Noon type finale are present in Carry On Cowboy. Sid James plays that dastardly outlaw the Rumpole Kid who killed sheriff Jon Pertwee. The good citizens of Stodge City ask for a US Marshal to be sent, but what they get is a sanitary engineer named Marshal P. Nutt played by Jim Dale.Though his qualifications in law enforcement are slim, Dale gives it a go and fortunately has sharp shooting Angela Douglas playing Annie Oakley and as in love with Dale as Wrangler Jane was with Captain Parmenter on F Troop. As they would say across the pond, jolly good show. And do we really sound like that.

The theme of the tenderfoot pitched into the Wild West and cleaning it up was old by the time England's merry Pinewood pranksters tackled it.In a sense, that is the history of the USA in a nutshell: disciplining the wilderness with the aid of the greenhorn's civilisation. "Destry Rides Again" and "The Paleface" had made a joke of the epic long since-- safe to do so once the frontier was closed and tamed-- and not long before, Britain's Kenneth More had visited Hollywood to play the Limey sheriff of Fractured Jaw. Mel Brooks would go over the old ground in "Blazing Saddles" and John Cleese would uphold the law in "Silverado".Enter Jim Dale as the 1966-vintage innocent abroad: a sanitary engineer (first class), mistaken for the US marshal who can rid Stodge City of the baleful reign of terror of the Rumpo Kid. ("Rumpo" is an obsolescent Britishism for Sid James's favourite activity-- cf "tiffin" in "Carry On... Up the Khyber".) Abetted or hindered by a corruptible judge, a saloon madame, a drunken Indian, a whiskery and wheezy old Confederate colonel, a six-gun-totin' Annie Oakley and other stock figures from generations of fleapit oaters, P. Knutt does his best and worst.Scriptwriter Talbot Rothwell was now well launched on the great period of Britain's most successful and durable film comedies. Historical spoofs inspired Rothwell: Cleo, Screaming, Khyber. This one is a little different, and perhaps falls a little short.Attention to detail extends beyond the sets and mounting of the production, which always belied Carry On's "low budget" tag: the accents and horsemanship are more than adequate, the body language in the crowd scenes accurate enough to be mistaken for a Randolph Scott or Audie Murphy vehicle, and apart from Hawtrey (who is funnier for not trying to be anything but himself) the principals, like the script, stay firmly in the roles as written.This Carry On eschews anachronistic and topical gags as well as calculated flaunting of its cheapness. It lacks some of the more incongruous belly laughs and double entendres we expect from Rothwell-- although "bullocks", to be reiterated in Khyber, are harnessed here already. Babs Windsor, who turned everything into a cockney music hall romp, is replaced by the more actressy and straightforwardly glamorous Angela Douglas; Kenneth Williams depicts an old man for once, with no epicene overtones; Sid, who had often played Yanks, is conscientious about remaining in character. He does not lean as much as usual on his dirty laugh or "cor blimey", more on a priapic snorting.There is more action, less slapstick. Future stalwarts Butterworth and Bresslaw make their bows, and have not yet established themselves enough to be given a lot of personally tailored business. Running gags are displaced for plot twists. In short, this is one Carry On that leans on story and consistency more than on a string of harking-backs, catchphrases and skits to carry it through.However, there are plenty of pleasures, if also some sadness in seeing Joan Sims take a back seat to the younger glamour girls, becoming the "old bag" before Sid's very eyes. Rothwell, instead of raiding his bag of old chestnuts, comes up with some lovely fresh ones such as Judge Burke assuring Knutt that some of his best friends were lynched- "there ain't no stigma to it out here".Above all, though, this is where Sid decisively became the tentpole of the series-- in Cleo he had still contested with Williams for the limelight.Like the best screen comedians and horror stars such as Karloff, Sid can command attention without being varied in his parts or versatile in his effects; he is a very limited actor who can make his repeated schticks and tricks funnier and funnier with repetition. He is the British cinema's Lord of Misrule; it's impossible to imagine that ageing, knowing rogue playing a depressed type, failing to lift a film or not cheering up an audience. He is a life force, and when he accepted he was too old to chase skirt on the Carry Ons, they could never be the same again.

Stodge City is a typical town in the Old West but with an old sheriff and feckless mayor it is wide open to more powerful men. Spotting this, the Rumpo Kid moves in and takes over. No lawman is available to take the place but the Department of Internal Affairs assigns a Marshall Knutt to clean the place up. Sadly Marshal P. Knutt is not actually a Marshall – just a plumber with an unfortunate name. However with a young lady stuck on revenge by his side, Knutt decides to do the best he can to help the town.Starting out with some good gags, this entry in the Carry On series looks like it could have been great fun until it gradually slides into a rather plodding affair that is amusing at times but is never really that funny. Part of the problem is the plot, it is neither the good type that the better CO films have or the freewheeling collection of sketches in others. Instead it tries to be the former but comes off rather messy and a little distracting by just how unengaging it is. This shouldn't really be a problem of course, but the fact is that I wasn't laughing enough not to notice this problem. There are a few good lines and it is consistent in the use of slightly rude puns and such that will please fans of the series without really drawing any big laughs.The cast are enjoyably silly as always but here the terrible accents highlight that they are trying (and failing) in their performances. Pretty much every single attempt at an American accent is awful and only occasionally do you not notice it – and even then it is because it has lapsed into the actor's normal voice (most noticeably Douglas). James could have done with better material but he is a fun, rowdy character and makes for a good central figure. Conversely Dale is not as good. He plays his usual role well enough but he is too bland and wishy-washy to compete for our interests with James. Williams, Hawtrey and Butterworth are all amusing in supporting roles but Sims is lumbered with too few good lines and too much of the clunky plot and, unsurprisingly, Bresslaw is the "big tall man in ethnic face paint". Aside from her accent Douglas could have brought real pluck to her role but she has no spark or energy and simply goes through the motions when she could have done so much more.Overall this is an OK Carry On film. I enjoy some of the series but Cowboy was far from being one of the best films. The plot doesn't work but more damning is the lack of good laughs. A scattering of funny moments and good lines keep it going but the material is never that strong. The cast are still worth watching thanks to a couple of reliable faces but even they struggle and aren't helped in the least by the fact that almost none of them can do an American accent worth a cent.

I wasn't sure if Carry On Cowboy was going to be English tourists to the American west or not.Well, it wasn't. I wanted to compare it to the Doctor Who episode "The Gunfighters" but to tell the truth, that wouldn't be fair.This was actually good. No reason why the American accent, western or otherwise, should be difficult for these skilled masters of the language to duplicate.Kenneth Williams was lost however in his mayor. Shockingly interesting to see him delivering such a performance, but they should have done more like Carry On Cleo and allowed the caricatures they portrayed to still shine through.Or better yet, do some mock-up of the dialects like "Allo, Allo" used to do.Then it was extremely funny for Hawtrey to not attempt anything different when doing the native chief. As an American, I can point out one cliche that was inaccurate. When Williams was shocked at the dancehall girls. That was always a man of the cloth, never a politician. But then I suppose he was sticking to the Kenneth Williams' Carry On persona, wasn't he?Sid James really surprised me with his western speech. I was waiting for some "oy" or "look 'ere, mate" to slip out, but either it never did or I wasn't paying attention. Jim Dale looks like Michael Palin. That was half who I thought it was when he was in "Carry On Spying".And then there was that monster of a scene-stealer again, the soothsayer from "Carry On Cleo" this time as the sheriff. What a talent this underrated fellow, Jon Pertwee, was. Best known for a sci fi tv show, a good one, yes, but still. As I sit with just one more "Carry On" that I possess on DVD to review (I've already watched it), I can say that for some odd reason "Carry On Teaching" was my fave, perhaps because it was the first one that hit me funniest and raised my expectations, whether they were met or not, I can honestly say I didn't know what to expect here.Well, on to the last Carry On film in this set: Carry On Screaming.