7/10
An Early Carry-On
10 May 2009
Warning: Spoilers
This was the first 'Carry On' movie I saw, and watched on television.

Most of The Gang are featured, and each does a sterling job with their particular character. The movie has no particular plot; it contains a series of situations and running jokes based upon the characters themselves and their various medical conditions. The playboy with a bunion, the boxer with a fracture, and so on.

Campy Kenneth Williams plays an educated and rather snooty individual who thinks he can do anything. Reliable Hattie Jaques plays the role of matron with considerable panache. It's a fine mixture of medical humour, sexual innuendo, comedy of manners, with some great sight gags and situation comedy in the classic British 1950's tradition. There isn't a bum role in the movie. The sequence in which the drunken patients commandeer an operating theatre to remove the playboy's bunion only to get additionally hammered by laughing-gas is one of the funniest pieces of cinema. You can't help but laugh along with the likes of Kenneths Connor and Williams at full fog-horn.

It's rather a pity that the genre got 'hijacked' in the mid 1960's and subverted into the rather narrow appeal of exclusively toilet humour. Those of the late 1950's and early 1960's are definitely both the funniest and the wittiest.

Even today, 'Carry On Nurse' is great fun. It also serves to remind you how far standards of professionalism, care and hygiene have slipped in the last half-century. Today; you enter hospital at the risk of your life.
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