Carry On Again Doctor (1969)

 "Sir, I do not object to jiggery. But I do take exception to pokery.

It's the end of the '60s. And, worryingly, the Carry On series gives us a direct sequel to a recent hit in a way which might suggest they're running out of ideas. And, well... it's a bit of a curate's egg.

Yes, the ending, with the very '60s attitude to trans issues, is of its time, and couldn't be done today. Yet there's also an innocence to it, no suggestion of overt bigotry or cruelly cynical culture war nonsense. And the whole thing, particularly towards the end, is a very well constructed farce. And a well constructed farce is not an easy thing to write.

This is also a film crammed with excellent jokes, and most of the core Carry On cast at the top of their game. Kenneth Williams, Joan Sims and Hattie Jacques excel particularly, and Jim Dale is always a damn fine lead.

And yet... all that stuff in the overseas medical mission falls flat, with cheap looking sets and one note jokes. Worse, Sid James is wasted in a relatively small and poorly thought through role. There's such a contrast between these rather poor scenes and the rest of the film, in an actual medical setting.

And this is frustrating, because the rest of the film is as good as anything the Carry On crew have ever done, with script and cast both in sparkling form. When this film is good, it's very, very good.

Carry On Camping (1969)

 "Do you know, she's been showing me how to stick the pole up!"

It's back to the contemporary world of 1969 after all of the recent historical action, and another one of the best Carry Ons here- much though the setting really does give us a proper little time capsule anda reminder of how different we were as a country backin 1969.

It can't be denied, though- the humour is great here. The gag with Mr Fiddler and the sign at the entrance to the campis simply inspired. And all the regulars are in fine form here, with the addition of the wonderful Betty Marsden, who is hilarious (as a character called Harriet Potter!) and has superb comic chemistry with Terry Scott. The dynamic from Carry On Doctor between Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jacques is revived here... even revealing that this is the exact same Matron, in a nice little breaking of the fourth wall.

But my God... it was such a different time. Wearing a suit to the cinema. The older generation still insisting on no sex before marriage despite the fact that, now that it's the '60s and the pill exists, this shows a rather irresponsible and cavalier attitude to getting married. City gents with bowler hats. Hippies!

Most of all, though, the blokes' perving attitude to sex now... aspecially the eponymous Sid and Bernie, both clearly midde aged, lusting after presumably teenage pupils of a finishing school, which is rather icky, to say the least. Then there's Peter, the hen pecked husband, who discovers at the end that the answer to his problems is to give Harriet a damn good seeing to, after which he seems to be in charge. Yep. It was a very different time.

No denying it, though- this film is very, very funny.

The Beatles- Abbey Road (1969)

It's time for another Beatles album, and this time my favourite. I know it's fashionable to rave about the later Beatles albums and neglect the earlier ones- a mistake- but this, their last album in spirit if not chronologically, Let It Be featuring a lot of older, slightly retro material- is my favourite.

It's hard to say why and say something new, though. The songwriting at this point is creative and trailblazing while still solid, with none of the out-there experimentalism of the White Album. That's not to say the album isn't full of experimentalism- the second half medley is utterly sublime- but the songwriting remains nevertheless disciplined.

We have Lennon's R&B-esque "Come Together", a reminder that, in 1969, rock music and soul music were yet to quite be separated. In "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" we have the height of Geoege Harrison's songwriting career, and a reminder of how good he was, and would have remained if he'd occasionally given that bloody slide guitar a rest in his later career.

For me, the best song on the album is "Because", although the medley runs it close. This album, though, is more than the songs that comprise it. More than any other Beatles album, it's as much a soundscape as a collection of songs. It's also the last album of theirs produced by George Martin, not the sort of man you'd expect to come up with such a forward-looking, clear yet trippy sound.

One could argue that rock music peaks here, and all that's left is to explore various side trips. Maybe I'm being a pretentious git. Regardless, I can't see how the Beatles could ever have topped this.

The Bed Sitting Room (1969)

 "Radiation's rising. Still, one mustn't grumble too much.

I'm full of sesations from this extraordinary film. It contains multitudes. It is, I admit, my only experience of a Spike Milligan (co-)script, full of irreverent absurdity, the sort which wqould later begat a less overtly successor in Monty Python.

Thetre is much more, though. Despite the very British humour that anchors everything, this is a cinematic adaptation of an absurdist play that feels like Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, which is high praise indeed. It's a post-apocalyptic world, set in the near future to 1969, with absurdity upon absurdity. Yet it's grim, in the traditions of Ionesco and Beckett. Indeed, the constant cynicism in the face of nuclear annihilation and the equally cynical, yet glorious, skewering of the British "stiff upper lip" denies us even the consolations of existentialism.

Despite this, the humour is exquisite. Realism being abandoned, we may use the setting to skewer British behaviour. Hence Arthur Lowe (genius casting) as the father, leaning heroically and deeply into another sort of comedy. I suspect, in person, over a pint, he would have been no Captain Mainwaring. Despite Peter Cook, Michael Hordern and others, his performance stands out. Beyond, even, that of Nurse Marty Feldman.

I can only urge you to saee this triumph of British comedy cinema which, deaspite its clear absurdist bent, is full of genus humour of the type one may expcct. You MUST see this film.

The Oblong Box (1969)

 "We have knowledge of things you know nothing of..."

This film is an odd yet enjoyable beast. It's an adaptation of an Edgar Poe Story, sort of, as it has pretty much no scenes or characters in common with it other than the coffin itself. This is no sea voyage along the Eastern Seaboard of the USA, but a British horror film of the late '60s with literally all the tropes that implies.

This is no bad thing.

It's 1865, and looks good, as such historical films often do, Vincent Price stars, inevitably, given the double whammy of British cinema of this time worshipping him and given him work and, of course, his association with Poe, courtesy of the great Roger Corman, having ceased but five years before.

The script is original, not Poe in the slightest, par for the course for a British horror film of the period, but it works. Both Price and Christopher Lee are amazing.

Gordon Kessler's direction is Jekyll and Hyde. His domestic scenes are ho-hum, but his scenes of horror and excitement are creative and inspired. The film centres on African voodoo, the opening scene feels- and is- quite unthinkingly racist- yet the sensitive treatment of Harry Baird's noble african character goes some way to mitigate, and the script goes some way to show colonialism as the original sin behind all of this.

This is not, perhaps, a great film. But, for those of us who love this type of horror, it is exquisite.

Easy Rider (1969)

 "I'd like to try Porky Pig."

If I'd seen this in my late teens I'd have devoured it in the same way I devoured all that old "counterculture" literature back then- Kerouac, William S. Burroughs,  Hunter S. Davies- so uncritically. Anything counterculture was cool to me back then, and I vaguely assumed to to be progressive, free thinking, an unalloyed good thing.

But I didn't. I saw the film tonight, at forty-three, much more ambivalent about a hippy movement that owed as much to right wing rugged individualism as it did to socially progressive causes. Billy and Wyatt may seem like free spirits, but their money comes from a cocaine deal, and Wyatt expresses admiration for both a poor Arizona farmer and a commune for their self-reliance in living off the land, and they end the film in a brothel before dying. Yes, the bigoted, corrupt and racist South that taunt and eventually kills them is much worse morally than they are, but these two men could easily have voted for Reagan or even for Trump if they'd lived.

Poor George (you can see why Jack Nicholson's surprisingly small but incredible performance elevated him from prominent actor to movie star overnight) is simultaneously much more intelligent (he has a clearer idea of freedom) and more naive than either of them, and probably too innocent to live.

This is a beautifuly directed film, obviously looking ahead to the Hollywood auteur films of the next decade. Surprisingly, much of it is just pocaresque rod movie stuff with as much music as dialogue. It's superbly shot, though- there's a particularly good panning shot of the peole of the commune- and the film deals with a great deal of themes- the ambivalent nature of the counterculture and the uneconsruced nature of the Deep South among them. This is a unique film, but a sublime one.  It reminds me of the literary works I mentioned above but, unlike On the Road or Fear and Loathing, it still has an appeal to this forty-three year old with long hair.

Godzilla: All Monsters Attack (1969)

"Everyone is so hard a work that they forget about the kids, huh?"

This is, appropriately enough, the 666th film I've blogged over the last nine years, and it's winderful. For completely unexpected reasons, it's the best Godzilla film I've seen so far.

Opinion, it seems, is divided between those who hate the film for its lack of focus on the monsters and extensive and for its obvious use of stock footage of the monsters on the one hand, and those who point out that this is quite clearly a sodding children's film, and a magical one at that, on the other.

This is a film about a litte boy, Ichiro, whose parents work long hours and leave him alone for hours after school (unthinkable in this day and age), and who is both obsessed by Kaiju and plagued by a bully whom he likens to Gabara. In his dreams, nicely shown as such by the type of effects that we Doctor Who fans call CSO, he flies to Monster Island and sees all the monsters, befriending little Minya. For those who comlain about Minya talking, these are dream sequences and this is a sodding kids' film, pretty much Mary Poppins with Kaiju.

I think it's a lovely, elegantly plotted and ingenious film, albeit cheap, about a little boy encouraged to fight bullies- and crooks- by a parable on Monster Island. Who'd be a kid in 60s Japan?

The Italian Job (1969)

"Tell Bridger this is a foreign job to help with this country's balance of payments..."

I'm beginning to be wary of going into a film with high expectations; it doesn't exactly enhance the experience. Take The Italian Job, a 1960s British classic, beloved of all the lads, but a film which I had somehow contrived, until last night, never to have properly seen all the way through- and I'm forty. I must have been blown away, right?

Only I wasn't, not really, Oh, it's good; the script by Troy Kennedy Martin, all those famous lines and iconic set pieces, national treasure Michael Caine's legendary performance, Noel Coward and, indeed the whole character of Bridger- an upper class Harry Grout who lords it over John Le Mesurier's prison governor; all these things are a joy to watch. Yet the film also seems to drag in places, and generally doesn't turn out to be as good as I was expecting. I wonder if I'd still feel that way, though, if not for those high expectations? I must confess that, Benny Hill's silly mugging aside, there's not much that's actually wrong with this film. Perhaps I just don't like heist movies all that much?

All the same, it's brilliantly shot on location in Turin, and the ambiguous ending is pure genius. If only the whole film was as good as its most famous scenes, but I really don't mean to imply that The Italian Job is any less than very, very good.

The Valley of Gwangi (1969)

"Fool! One day he will learn to obey the law of Gwangi, or like his brother he shall perish!"

Yes, I know- Cowboys and dinosaurs! This was not a film I could stop myself watching, especially as the dinosaurs are provided by Ray Harryhausen himself.

And it's pretty much what you'd expect. We have standard B movie plotting, characterisation and acting from a cast who, in large part, are veterans of '50s flying saucer and monster movies. We get a half-hearted romance, some conflict, some Wild West flavour, a Lost World valley full of prehistoric creatures- well, some of the more visually arresting and cinematic ones, at least- and a grand King Kong-style climax in an old Spanish colonial church. The only surprise is that the vaguely racist portrayal of American Indians you might expect is unaccountably replaced by a vaguely racist portrayal of gypsies for some reason. Oh, and Harryhausen's stop motion effects have unfortunately dated in a way his fantasy creatures in other films haven't, but they're still fun.

The film is very silly, yes, but it's played straight, well-executed and fun. I recommend beer, mind...

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)

"This never happened to the other fella!"

Well, a couple of days ago I praised You Only Live Twice to the skies and queried whether it would ever be topped. Has it, with the very next film? Well, it's impossible to say. This is an excellent film, but it's so completely unlike its predecessors that I simply wouldn't be comparing like with like.

First things first, though: George Lazenby. Well, I quite liked him. Oh, his acting is awful- his line deliveries are dull and clearly not thought through. And yet.. he hasn't got charisma exactly, but he has presence and is likeable, albeit a softer presence than Sean Connery, even when slapping Tracy across the face...! He was blatantly just cast for his looks, he can't act, but against all the odds he manages to carry the film. Never mind the very odd fact that all his lines when pretending to be Sir Hilary Bray are dubbed by George Baker...!

Speaking of George Baker, this film is extremely well-endowed (er...) with British character actors, boasting James Bree, Bernard Horsfall, a very young Joanna Lumley and Catherine Schell. But it's Diana Rigg, fresh from Mrs. Peel, who dazzled as Tracy, and Telly Savalas is similarly superb as Blofeld.

But this is a very strange Bond film. It may reassure us at the start with the reassuring faces of M, Q and Moneypenny before we see the new Bond, but it's not just Lazenby who's odd here: it may be magnificent, but this is a bloody weird Bond film. There are action sequences, yes, and bloody good ones, but they're surprisingly infrequent. Instead we get romance- we even have an extensive montage where Bond and Tracy fall in love. The middle of the film is an extensive farce sequence with a kilted Bond ("It's true!!!") and a sequence of nubile young ladies. And Bond gets married!!! The ending of the film is truly tragic, with Bond in a state of denial that his beloved is dead from the bullet of Blofeld's pet fraulein.

The sexual politics here raise a bit of an eyebrow ("What she needs is a man to dominate her" says Tracy's doting father), which is typical Bond. Otherwise, though.. c'est magnifique. Mais ce n'est pas James Bond. This is one of the finest films in the series, but one that stands aloof.

Oh! What a Lovely War (1969)

"The lights are going out all over Europe..."

The cast for this film is ridiculous. Aside from the people I've tagged at the bottom we have the Master himself, Anthony Ainley, as a British staff officer. We also have Thorley Walters, Nanette Newman, Gerald Sim, Edward Fox, Angus Lennie, Dirk Bogarde, Derek Newark, Ralph Richardson, Maggie Smith, Susannah York, John Mills and (uncredited) Jane Seymour and John Woodnutt. All in the same film. It's absurd.

This is Dickie Attenborough's epic film version of the famously improvised musical by Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop. It's a thing of magnificence but it does, of course, present a very Marxist view of the First World War. You certainly don't have to be a Marxist to subscribe to the view that this was not a "just" war but just a silly dynastic struggle between old empires, the War of the Spanish Succession with trench warfare and mustard gas; I'm not, and I do. But it certainly helps. However, this film is a strong proponent of the old "lions led by donkeys" view, an unpopular view in many quarters these days. From the arrogant xenophobia of the British officers towards their French allies to a doddering and uncomprehending Franz Ferdinand declaring war on Serbia this is not a flattering portrait of those in power.

Thing is, though, it's magnificent. As a musical (all the songs are versions from the trenches) it revels in the freedom from realism while maintaining a clever structure through the use of one family's ground level point of view and of the sinister photographer figure.

There are so many fantastic set pieces, from the British recruitment propaganda to the moving Christmas fraternisation between the British and Germans in 1914 (the top brass cancel their leave!) .But the structure, message and intricacy of the whole thing is quite something to behold. A thing of magnificence.

Battle of Britain (1969)

"So don't threaten or dictate to us until you're marching up Whitehall. And even then we won't listen."

Well, that was strangely underwhelming. I'm British. I hate the Nazis. The real, historical Battle of Britain puts fire in my belly. So why is it that this film leaves my belly distinctly cold?

What's especially surprising about this is that the film has an extraordinary cast- Lawrence Olivier is particularly superb as the drily realistic Hugh Dowding. Yet none of the characters have enough screen time, or are sufficiently fleshed out, to make a difference. Michael Caine, in particular, is wasted on a role that doesn't give him anything to do and then suddenly killed off. The only exception to all this is Curd Jurgens' charismatic general, and he's a bloody Nazi. Still, at least Ralph Richardson gets a magnificent speech in his cameo.

It must be said, too, that this film is a little deceptive in implying that Britain would have been finished if it had lost the Battle of Britain. It wouldn't. Just Google "Operation Sealion" for why. Large parts of the country are out of German bombers' air range, for a start, and there's the entire Home Fleet waiting at Scapa Flow, in an age where accurate bombing of ships was simply not a thing.

There are a couple of nice moments- I like the bit where German POWs are made to clear up their own mess- but sadly this is a film that fails to raise my patriotic heckles. A slow, meandering missed opportunity.

The Assassination Bureau (1969)

"Human life is so expendable. So easily replaced, and pleasurable."

This film gets a rough ride from critics, I feel, many of whom just don't get the understated black humour that gives the film its charm. I won't deny that the tone is at times uneven and the premise, great on paper, begins to drag a bit with the monotony of Oliver Reed's Ivan Dragomilovitch having to assassinate his colleagues one by one. But a delightfully urbane and witty Reed, a sexy, unflappable and Emma Peel-sequel Diana Rigg (I love her wardrobe!) and the hugely witty and quotable dialogue make this film a pleasure to watch in spite of its flaws. Hopefully a DVD release in Europe is not too far away; I had to rely on Netflix.

The casting of Telly Savalas to play Lord Bostwick with a blatantly North American accent is often disparaged by critics who miss the fact that the character is clearly based on Lord Beaverbrook. And there are plenty of enjoyable cameos from the likes of Beryl Reid, Roger Delgado, Warren Mitchell and George Coulouris.I thought Vernon Dobtcheff was bogey amusing as a stereotypically lugubrious Russian.

This is a gloriously cynical film, appropriate for one set in an age when war loomed, life was cheaper and it was important, if you had the means, to enjoy life as much as you could while maintaining a raised eyebrow at all times.