The Carry on Legacy - Carry On Sergeant (1958)

Proving that even great institutions have modest beginnings, Carry On Sergeant (d. Gerald Thomas, 1958), the first film in the Carry On series, started out as little more than an attempt to cash in on the huge success of the ITV sitcom The Army Game (1957-1961). The TV series was so popular that it had already led to its own movie spin-off, I Only Arsked!(d. Montgomery Tully, 1958). Producer Peter Rogers even went so far as to recruit two of the series' leading cast members, Charles Hawtrey andWilliam Hartnell as the titular sergeant. Hartnell, in any event, was only playing a comic variation on a character he had first portrayed in the classic wartime film The Way Ahead (d. Carol Reed, 1944).

Carry On Sergeant, loosely based on story material by the popular novelist and playwright R.F. Delderfield, was shot over a period of six weeks at Pinewood Studios and on location at the Queen's Barracks in Stoughton, Surrey, on a meagre budget of £ 74,000. The actors were paid a few hundred pounds each, but a number of them would return in many of the subsequent Carry On comedies, including Hawtrey, Kenneth Connor, Hattie Jacques and Kenneth Williams.

Although the film was a big box office hit, it is in many respects anomalous when compared with the later titles, particularly its romantic subplots and occasional sentimentality. Even the vaguely risqué story of a pair of newlyweds desperately trying to celebrate their wedding night is dispensed with surprisingly early on, in favour of fairly traditional service comedy high jinks. None the less, it introduces in embryonic form many of the themes and characters that would recur throughout the series, while many of the comic set pieces, such as Kenneth Connor's relentless medical examinations and the various training disasters, are still funny and confidently handled.

THE

MONTHLY FILM BULLETIN

Published by

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE

Volume 25, No.296, September 1958, page 112

CARRY ON SERGEANT (1958)

Training Sgt. Grimshawe accepts a bet that his last platoon of National Servicemen before he retires will pass out as Star Squad. His hopes are dashed when he meets the recruits. As training proceeds each recruit makes his own contribution to the chaos, but on the eve of the passing-out parade, impressed by Grimshawe's relatively gentle methods, they decide to retrieve their reputation. To their own and the Sergeant's surprise they win the Star Squad award.

The professional skill of William Hartnell and Dora Bryan lends some reality and humour to this conventional farce, in which all the characters come from stock. Carry On, Sergeant is a traditionally English mixture of old farcical situations, well-worn jokes, and comic postcard characters. Charles Hawtrey, as a weedy incompetent, and Kenneth Williams, as a condescending intellectual, provide some genuine laughs. The rest of the humour is either overdone or half-baked.

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The Monthly Film Bulletin was published by the British Film Institute between 1934 and 1991. Initially aimed at distributors and exhibitors as well as filmgoers, it carried reviews and details of all UK film releases. In 1991, the Bulletin was absorbed by Sight and Sound magazine.

The Ealing Greats - The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) was the second of three Ealing collaborations between director Charles Crichton and writer T.E.B. Clarke, the team responsible for Hue and Cry (1947) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953). Like those films, and Clarke's previous comedy, Passport to Pimlico. (d. Henry Cornelius, 1949), it is a piece of thoroughly good escapism.

The fantasy here is the perfect robbery - £1 million in gold bullion stolen from the Bank of England and smuggled to France in the form of Eiffel Tower paperweights - and it barely matters that, in the end, the meek master-criminals Holland (Alec Guinness) and Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway) are both captured.

Theirs is a harmless daydream, an ultimately mild gesture of defiance against conformity. For all the brilliance of their initial plan, they are finally undone by a very English failing, a lack of competence in foreign languages - Pendlebury's instruction to his French assistant not to sell paperweights from the boxes marked 'R' is misunderstood, because the English 'R' sounds like the French 'A'.

Holland and Pendlebury - both nice, gentle and unthreatening in their non-conformity (this is a crime without victims) - are light years away from the more menacing (though no more successful) gang of The Ladykillers (d. Alexander Mackendrick, 1955). Even their partners-in-crime, the Cockney professional thieves Lackery (Sidney James) and Shorty (Alfie Bass) carry not a grain of ruthlessness: they are so trustful of Holland and Pendlebury that they even risk losing their share of the profits (and presumably do).

The film gently satirises the Establishment, in the shape of Holland's unperceptive employers at the Bank, the media, and the police. The climactic car chase, in which Holland and Pendlebury almost, but not quite, outwit their police pursuers, wittily spoofs one in The Blue Lamp (d. Basil Dearden, 1950), also scripted by Clarke.

Although not as tidy in its plotting as Passport to Pimlico - we never learn what happens to Lackery and Shorty - The Lavender Hill Mob is as enjoyable as it is lightweight, and absolutely characteristic of Ealing, with its gang of likeable eccentrics who briefly challenge authority before passively accepting defeat.

THE

MONTHLY FILM BULLETIN

Published by

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE

Volume 18, No.210, July 1951, page 292

LAVENDER HILL MOB, THE (1951)

Officials at the Bank consider Mr. Holland a meek, respectable and honest employee in the modest job of supervising deliveries of bullion from gold refineries to the Bank. Mr. Holland's dream, however, is to appropriate £1,000,000 in gold bars for himself, escape from his dull boarding house existence and live in luxury for the remainder of his life. He has, over the years, conceived a plan for the actual theft, and when Mr. Pendlebury, manufacturer of souvenir articles for export, sets up a small foundry in the boarding house he realises that here is an opportunity for him to melt the loot and smuggle it out of the country. Quickly seduced into entering the conspiracy, Pendlebury agrees to transport the gold to France in Eiffel Tower paperweights: two professional thieves, Lackery and Shorty, are brought in to help. Holland and Pendlebury go to Paris to collect their booty, and discover that six of the souvenirs have been innocently purchased by a party of English schoolgirls. In their efforts to trace the girls, they incur police suspicion. Holland and Pendlebury manage to steal a police car and broadcast false messages, but Pendlebury is caught. Holland escapes to Brazil, but the law catches up with him there.

Once again Ealing Studios have produced a bright and entertaining comedy, scripted by the author of Hue and Cry, Passport to Pimlico and others. With the exception of two unnecessarily long episodes on the Eiffel Tower and at the Calais Customs Building, amusing situations and dialogue are well paced and sustained throughout. The climax is delightful.

Alec Guinness as Holland and Stanley Holloway as the rhetorical Mr. Pendlebury play excellently together; in support, Marjorie Fielding as an ardent fan of crime stories, Edie Martin as the landlady, and Sidney James and Alfie Bass as the professional thieves are particularly good.

It is interesting to note that Ealing have sensibly disregarded the 90 minutes first feature rule, and cut the running time to 78 minutes.

The Monthly Film Bulletin was published by the British Film Institute between 1934 and 1991. Initially aimed at distributors and exhibitors as well as filmgoers, it carried reviews and details of all UK film releases. In 1991, the Bulletin was absorbed by Sight and Sound magazine.