Carry on Emmannuelle (1978)
Directed by Gerald Thomas

Film Review

Ooh-la-la, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time.  Some bright spark had noticed the popularity of the Emmanuelle and Confessions films and thought that a hefty dose of soft core porn dressed up as comedy was just what was needed to revive the flagging Carry On films. It never occurred to anyone, least of all the film's producer Peter Rogers, that the audience for a tawdry piece of French erotica might be somewhat different to that of the Carry On films...

Needless to say Carry On Emmannuelle was not a great success, either with the critics or the cinema-going public.  It lost more money at the box office than any other Carry On film and is widely considered to be the series' low point, in just about every sense of the word.  It wasn't until Carry On Columbus came along 14 years later and showed us just how excruciatingly bad a Carry On film could be that people began to re-evaluate Carry On Emmannuelle and reflect that perhaps it wasn't quite so bad as it seemed.  Certainly, if someone held an AK-47 to your head and forced you to watch one of these last two Carry Ons, Emmannuelle would be the one to go for, because, for all its failings, it probably won't make you want to strangle yourself with your own intestines.

The production team had evidently learned from their mistakes on Carry On England (the dullest of the Carry Ons) and made every attempt to cast as many of the regulars as possible in the main roles.  Kenneth Williams was reluctant to get involved but was persuaded when he was offered six thousand pounds (one thousand more than his usual fee).  Suzanne Danielle was given the leading female role, even though she had had next to no previous acting experience and was cast allegedly because she had been noticed by Peter Rogers during the shooting of Carry On England (she was Patrick Mower's girlfriend at the time).  Beryl Reid did such a good job in her cameo appearance that additional scenes with her and Lanny Dann were added at the end of the shoot.  Regulars Joan Sims, Peter Butterworth, Kenneth Connor and Jack Douglas are all well used and deserve some kind of award for making something of the unimaginably trite material they are given.  Without this ensemble of talent the film really would be intestine-garrotingly unbearable.

To its credit, Carry On Emmannuelle is not a bad spoof of the Emmanuelle films, but the question remains: who on Earth would want to watch a send up of a tacky soft core porn movie?  The innocent bawdy humour of previous Carry Ons has been jettisoned in favour of more explicit sex comedy of the kind that feels totally inappropriate in a Carry On film.  The experience of watching this film is not unlike that of being groped by Sooty and Sweep (or Soo, if you are that way inclined).  It just doesn't feel right, and instead of being entertained, you only feel nauseous and slightly soiled.

Whilst the performances are acceptable (even with the dodgy French accent, Suzanne Danielle is a far more attractive proposition than Sylvia Kristel, the star of the original Emmanuelle films), the one-note humour quickly becomes stale and tiresome.  Some of the gags are dragged out to almost ludicrous proportions and many are repeated ad nauseum, as if the screenwriter had been assuming the spectator had the memory of an Alzheimer's-stricken goldfish.  Just how many times do we need to see Kenneth Williams' bare bottom?  Was he running some kind of sponsored buttock-athon?   The original screenplay (by Lance Peters) was so bad that extra writers had to be drafted in to make it funny.  Just how bad was that original screenplay?

Carry On Emmannuelle was the film that finished off the Carry Ons, exactly twenty years after the series began.  Plans were afoot to make another four films (beginning with a raunchy medical comedy, Carry On Again Nurse, which might have done wonders for the sales of daffodils), but these were immediately abandoned when Emmannuelle died a death at the box office.  The series had strayed too far from its family-friendly origins and had sacrificed its mainstream audience to attract the dirty mac brigade.  Several of the key players had passed away or would do so within a few years, and the production team were by now completely out of touch with public tastes.  The Carry On style of comedy resurfaced in various television sitcoms in the 1980s, notably in the hugely successful 'Allo, 'Allo, but the Carry On films were a thing of the past.  Or so it seemed.  Christopher Columbus has a Hell of a lot to answer for...

Film Synopsis

The French ambassador, Emile Prevert, is taken by surprise when his sexy young wife Emmannuelle suddenly turns up on the doorstep of his London residence.  Realising that he can no longer satisfy his wife's insatiable sexual appetite, owing to a close encounter with a church steeple, Emile encourages Emmannuelle to look elsewhere, and she does just that.  Meanwhile, a timid young man named Theodore Valentine has become infatuated with the seductive French woman and is keen to re-enact their first amorous encounter, which took place a few days earlier, in the toilet aboard Concorde.  Alas, to Emmannuelle, Theodore was no more than a flash in the pan, and she has no intention of starting an affair with him.   Theodore is not so easily dissuaded and begins photographing Emmannuelle's illicit amorous couplings to humiliate her husband and ruin her marriage...