Carry On Jack *** (1963, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey, Bernard Cribbins, Jim Dale, Juliet Mills, Cecil Parker, Donald Houston) – Classic Movie Review 2377

Director Gerald Thomas’s eighth 1963 Carry On film comes from the series’s vintage era but manages to assemble only a very few of the regular team. Along with Carry On Cruising (1962), this entry features the lowest number of Carry On regulars, with only three. Sadly only Kenneth Williams (as Captain Fearless), Jim Dale (as Young Carrier) and Charles Hawtrey (as Walter Sweetly) are present and correct from the regulars.

So they join a new band of players and amusingly send up swashbuckling epics, particularly the then current Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), and the British Royal Navy in the team’s first historical period costume comedy. It is largely Bernard Cribbins’s film in the first of his three Carry On appearances as greenhorn midshipman Albert Poop-Decker, who falls for Sally (Juliet Mills, replacing Liz Fraser, in her only Carry On), even though she’s stolen his uniform and taken his place on the good frigate ship HMS Venus. Indeed, it was called Carry On Venus in America, a better title really.

Talbot Rothwell’s first script written for the series was originally called Up the Armada, but the British Board of Film Censors declined the title. Rothwell also wrote Carry On Cabby (also 1963), which was produced first. He went on to write 20 Carry On scripts.

Rothwell’s satisfactory screenplay provides lots of high jinks and lots of low comedy on the high seas, and the nice also-starring cast of Donald Houston as First Officer Jonathan Howett, Cecil Parker as the First Sealord, Patrick Cargill as Don Luis the Spanish Governor, Percy Herbert as Mr Angel the Bos’un, Peter Gilmore as Patch the pirate captain, Ed Devereaux as Hook the pirate and Anton Rodgers as Hardy help.

Also in the cast are George Woodbridge, Ian Wilson, Jimmy Thompson (as Admiral Horatio Nelson), Michael Nightingale, Frank Forsyth, Barrie Gosney, John Brooking, Jan Muzurus, Vivienne Ventura and Marianne Stone.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2377

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