CARRY ON SPYING (1964)
Article #828 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-21-2003
Posting Date: 11-18-2003
Directed by Gerald Thomas
Featuring Kenneth Williams, Bernard Cribbins, Barbara Windsor

A spy organization sends out their worst agent along with new trainees to recover a secret formula.

Title Check: Since “Carry On” was a whole series, and this one is about spies, I don’t know what else they could call it.

All I really knew about the Carry On series from direct experience was having seen a trailer for one of the series in the late seventies at my local drive-in (incidentally, the movie never came to the drive-in). From what I could tell, the movie was basically about women ending up in their underwear. With that fact in mind, and knowing that this one was about spying, I fully expected that it was going to be like watching THE AMBUSHERS all over again; fortunately, this wasn’t quite that bad, as their is a greater variety of humor here than there was in that one. Nonetheless, I found it only sporadically funny; outside of making the main villain a hermaphrodite of sorts, I thought there was precious little inventiveness at work here. Which is not to say that the occasional gag doesn’t strike home; there are some decent ones here. It was just painfully obvious to me that this was part of a series of movies that were churned out on a regular basis, just like the Bowery Boys were here in the USA. And I wouldn’t watch too many of these in a row; Kenneth William’s smarmy nasal delivery gets awfully tiresome after a while.