Gerald Thomas (1958)
The title in this case is a phrase used naturally in the national service camp that provides the film’s setting. When this first Carry On was made, no one had any idea that it would become a series – although it’s striking that Gerald Thomas and the producer, Peter Rogers, as well as plenty of the cast, were in from the start. The opening credits refer, rather mysteriously, to ‘Carry on Sergeant by R F Delderfield’, with a subsequent screenplay credit for Norman Hudis and John Antrobus. According to Wikipedia, the script was based on a stage play called The Bull Boys by Delderfield (best remembered now as the author of the novels A Horseman Riding By and To Serve Them All My Days, successfully dramatised on the BBC in 1978 and 1980 respectively). The film is slightly interesting as a piece of social history (national service was discontinued in 1960) and more than slightly interesting as the start of something big in British screen entertainment, even though it’s inept and, for the most part, unfunny.
As IMDB explains, ‘Sergeant Grimshaw wants to retire in the flush of success by winning the Star Squad prize with his very last platoon of newly called-up National Servicemen’. (That summary doesn’t make clear that Grimshaw has never yet won the prize in all his years in the army.) The platoon he’s saddled with suggests a lost cause: its members include Kenneth Williams as a snooty university graduate; Kenneth Connor as a hypochondriac who’s into psychoanalysis; Gerald Campion (well known at the time as TV’s Billy Bunter); and Charles Hawtrey as Charles Hawtrey (his character is called Peter Golightly). The squad must be comically incompetent and must end up winning the prize that Grimshaw yearns for. You might expect some plot invention that sees them triumph by a series of outrageous flukes but nothing of the kind: once they know what it means to Grimshaw, they simply pull themselves together and prove themselves completely capable. I guess that in 1958 it may not have seemed a logical impossibility for the likes of Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey to pass muster.
The platoon also includes Bob Monkhouse as a young man who gets his call-up papers during his wedding breakfast and whose devoted bride (Shirley Eaton) follows him to the national service depot and works in the NAAFI canteen there. This sub-plot is perfunctory, to put it mildly, and it’s virtually abandoned by Gerald Thomas and the writers in favour of an uncertain romance between the weakling Kenneth Connor character and Dora Bryan as another NAAFI girl. You wouldn’t expect Monkhouse, notoriously self-aware as a stand-up, to be a good actor and he isn’t: his quick thinking is the most expressive part of him – you see him working out how to deliver a line well ahead of time. He seems incongruous in this band of no-hopers: when the army captain (Eric Barker) asks Monkhouse his name and number, then asks him to give the number backwards, he can’t – but you think that’s exactly the kind of thing Bob Monkhouse would manage with ease. The unfunniest person around is, however, Kenneth Connor, who’s given the lion’s share of the comedy business and makes such a meal of it that he excludes any possibility of laughter.
The performances that work fall into two categories essentially. There are people who are simply good comedy actors – like Bill Owen, Norman Rossington and, especially, Dora Bryan. There are also people like Williams, Hawtrey, Hattie Jacques (although she’s no great shakes on this occasion) and Eric Barker, who give pleasure in anticipation of what they became in the Carry On series. Grimshaw is played by William Hartnell, a few years away from TV immortality as the first Doctor Who. Hartnell is comically accomplished but too quietly believable most of the time – not enough of a martinet and not sufficiently frustrated with his men. Yet the film’s ending, which seems meant to be genuinely heartwarming, rather vindicates Hartnell’s approach. The cast also includes Terence Longdon and Terry Scott. All in all, you end up feeling relieved that the Carry Ons fairly soon stopped trying to be pleasantly amusing and turned into dramatised seaside postcards.
24 December 2011
