Carry On Spying (1964)

 "Stop messin' about..."

I keep thinking I'm still quite early on in my chronological journey through the Carry On films, but I'm further along than I's thought. This is the last of the films to be shot in black and white, but the humour is by now real Carry On innuendo... andat last we lave the lovely and wonderful Barbara Windsor, doing as she always does.

We have Bernard Cribbins again, for the last time, and surprisingly few of the usual faces. Charles Hawtrey is... well, Charles Hawtrey, while Kenneth Williams stars. Interestingly, though, Williams isn't his usual Carry On persona here, being much more the "stop messin' about" persona that contemporary audiences would remember from Hancock's Half Hour on the wireless.

And... it's perfectly entertaining, giving us exactly what we want from a fairly standard Carry On. It's riffing on the spy genre but not, as one might have expected in 1964, with a great focus on James Bond, although Dr Claw is blatantly a pastiche of a Bond villain and we get a little riff on the train scene from From Russia with Love. We also get an extended sequence in Vienna riffing off The Third Man, complete with zither, and another extended sequence in Algiers where we're presented with some vaguely orientalist stereotypes which, er, haven't aged well. Fakirs, beds of nails, snake charmers... in Algeria?!

Like all Carry Ons, this is as much a fascinating little time capsule as an entertaining little comedy- I particularly noticed a random fruit machine with an unexpected Sega logo, which I suspect is not something often mentioned in connection with this film.

Overall, thoiugh, a splendid romp. And I'm about to enter the peak Carry On period...