Very disappointing...

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Better than most people think

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Sidney James triumphs in the part of a lusty town councillor in the dull seaside town of Fircombe. Barbara Windsor shows us her assets, Bernard Bresslaw is in drag (again), Kenneth Connor excels in his role of the bumbling Mayor and Jack Douglas twitches his way through the entire film. What's not to like? The lazy, dowdy Mayor's wife is Patsy Rowlands's best part in the series and June Whitfield's performance is sublime. Definitely a one to watch.

Carry On Girls (1973) was the 25th entry in this staggeringly long-running British comedy film series. Many don't seem to hold 'Girls' in much regard, but I really like it. The Carry On's were beginning to slide in popularity at this stage; whereas at one stage at least two or three Carry On films were made per year, by 1973 the production rate had slowed down to just once a year.Charles Hawtrey (who had been disposed of after his drunken antics on the Carry On Abroad set and after continual disagreements with producer Peter Rogers over wanting his name elevated above the title which no Carry On star was ever rewarded), Kenneth Williams and the formidable Hattie Jacques are all sorely missed, but there is surprisingly enough fun, laughter and games to enjoy throughout.In 'Carry On Girls', the typically thin plot is centered around a tacky, end-of-pier beauty contest which immediately faces opposition from the town's women's lib action group, led by Councillor Prodworthy, played marvelously by June Whitfield. Sid James organises the contest and lets the girls (which includes Margaret Noland and Wendy Richard) stay at the hotel run by his girlfriend, Chloe (Joan Sims) for free! Sid's eye soon strays onto the bubbly Barbara Windsor whom arrives on a motorbike in complete tomboy mode, yet reveals a far more glamorous, feminine side when taking part in the first promotional photo shoot.The film's climax is where it really scores best with the beauty contest ending in complete disaster. The girls costumes are all laced with itching powder, the floor is made slippery leading the contestants to tumble down on to the stage and to top if off Councillor Prodworthy turns on the sprinklers that soaks the entire audience. This is followed by a fun go-kart chase as Sid James flees all of the enraged customers who all demanding their money back after having been soaked in the theatre. Barbara Windsor is hot on Sid's trail on a motorbike. The last scene sees Sid James and Barbara Windsor riding merrily along a motorway on Barbara's scooter. Silly but great fun.The cast are all on top form, though any scene which Sid James and Barbara Windsor share raises a smile and a laugh with their undeniable chemistry shining through. This is really Sid and Babs film.Yet again, Joan Sims is underused and unfairly pigeon holed into a supporting performance which she plays straight and efficiently, where as Kenneth Connor plays the town's bumbling Mayor, a blatantly incompetent and pompous figure whom causes some amusement though is mainly the butt of a joke. Playing opposite Connor, and inadvertently stealing any scene she's in, is Patsy Rolands, whom has a far meatier part in this Carry On and comes into her own. She plays the Mayor's frustrated and down-trodden wife to utter comic perfection and her character rebels in the end joining forces with June Whitfield's team of women's lib group.Lovable giant, Bernard Bresslaw pops up as Sid James sidekick in organising the beauty contest. The scenes where he dresses in drag, deliberately to attract attention from the media in a bid to drum up publicity and generate interest in the contest, are quite hilarious! The sultry Valerie Leon plays his dowdy fiancé who reluctantly ends up joining the beauty contest in the end and is transformed into the glamorous and stunning beauty she always truly was/is. For some odd reason, however, all of Valerie Leon's lines are dubbed over by June Whitfield! Bizarre! Then there's Jack Douglas bubbling away in the background as the hotel porter, William. His nervous twitching is something of an acquired taste, and while Douglas is clearly a talented performer who fit in nicely in the 70s Carry On's, it can become tedious and just annoying at points.All told, I definitely consider 'Carry On Girls' a classic entry in the series and a highly enjoyable one at that.

Watching "Carry On Girls" recently, for the first time in many years, made me realise what a strange decade I grew up in. (I was a teenager in the seventies). In 1953 (to say nothing of 1943 or 1933) a film like this would never have got past the British Board of Film Censors, and in 1963 would probably only have scraped through in bowdlerised form. By 1983, however, humour like this was already starting to look a bit passé, and in 1993 (to say nothing of 2003 or 2013) would have been regarded as sadly outdated (as well as offensive to women). In 1973, however, they did things differently. The story concerns a beauty contest held in the seaside town of Fircombe and the efforts of a group of feminists to disrupt it. (The name "Fircombe" was probably intended as a double-entendre in itself, but someone obviously got cold feet and told the cast to pronounce it "Fir- coom", with the second syllable rhyming with "room". The alternative pronunciation "Firk'em" was presumably too near the knuckle). There is something very seventies in that storyline in itself. Beauty contests were big news in the seventies, but although they are still held in Britain few people take much notice of them- not the television channels, not the tabloid press, which once covered them avidly, and not the broadsheet press, which once equally avidly thundered against them in the name of women's equality. Even feminists no longer feel it worthwhile to disrupt them. The "Carry On" films relied heavily on character-based humour, featuring as they did a team of "regulars", several of whom played essentially the same character in every film they appeared in. These included:-A lecherous, dodgy Cockney wide-boy, generally played by Sid James and often named "Sidney" in his honour. Here James plays the appropriately named Sidney Fiddler, the organiser of the contest. (For those not conversant with British slang, "fiddler" literally means a violinist, but in colloquial usage can also mean "cheat" or "swindler"). A saucy Cockney trollop, invariably played by Barbara Windsor. Windsor and James were lovers in real life, and their characters (as here) are often portrayed as being romantically involved. It was a running joke in the series that Windsor was an irresistibly gorgeous sex-siren, although the idea of this rather plain actress as a beauty queen might strike some people as the only funny joke in this film, especially as some of the other contestants, notably Margaret Nolan and Valerie Leon, are genuinely attractive. Leon's character is another comic stereotype, the dowdy, severe-looking secretary who inevitably turns out to be a real beauty when she takes off her spectacles and lets her hair down. A formidable female battleaxe, normally played by Hattie Jacques, but here by June Whitfield as Councillor Augusta Prodworthy, the leader of the protesters. Rather unusually for a seventies feminist, Mrs Prodworthy is played as an upper-middle-class grande dame; Whitfield seems to have modelled her portrayal on Margaret Thatcher. A camp and effeminate character, normally played by Kenneth Williams or Charles Hawtrey, but here Williams was unavailable and Hawtrey had been sacked from the series the year before, apparently because of his heavy drinking. Jimmy Logan steps into the breach as a television presenter named Mr Gaybody, occasionally mispronounced as "Gayboy". (An early example of the word "gay", in its modern sense, being used in a British comedy context). A pompous but ineffectual character played by Kenneth Connor. (Mr Bumble, the mayor of Fircombe). A blowsy middle-aged nymphomaniac played by Joan Sims. (Hotel manageress Connie Philpotts. The object of Connie's lust is Sidney Fiddler, which suggests just how desperate she must be). A dull, frumpy woman played by Patsy Rowlands. (Mrs Bumble). In the early episodes of the "Carry On" series the humour was very traditional; in "Carry On Constable" from 1960, for example, the scriptwriters were still trying to get laughs out of a man slipping on a banana skin, a gag which was probably corny even in the days of Laurel and Hardy. Between the early sixties and the early seventies, however, a revolution had taken place in British comedy. Banana skins were out, sexual humour was in. Apart from screamingly obvious puns and innuendo, there is not a lot of verbal humour. Topics such as breasts, bottoms, effeminate men, butch women, toilets, men losing their trousers, donkeys defecating on a hotel carpet and dirty old men lusting after nubile young dolly birds were all assumed to be automatically funny. The scriptwriters did not need to strain themselves to come up with amusing jokes involving breasts, bottoms, effeminate men, butch women, toilets, men losing their trousers, donkeys defecating on a hotel carpet and dirty old men lusting after nubile young dolly birds. They merely assumed that they only had to mention such matters for the audience to fall about helpless with laughter. Perhaps in 1973 this sort of thing was regarded as the last word in sophisticated wit and audiences really did fall about helpless with laughter every time Kenneth Connor's trousers fell down or Patsy Rowlands made mention of her weak bladder, or when Margaret Nolan sneezed and her swimsuit flew open, revealing her cleavage. I don't know; I didn't see the film until the late eighties, by which time the "Carry Ons" were assumed to have gone the way of the dodo – we didn't realise that their last hurrah, "Carry On Columbus", was just around the corner- and this sort of humour was starting to look like the last word in crass vulgarity. If anything, it looks even crasser today than it did then. 4/10 (A mark which would have been lower but for the fact that some of the cast, notably Whitfield, do show evidence of some genuine comic talents).

The opening scene of the beach at Fircombe while amusing in itself, unfortunately provides a suitable metaphor for the film - insipid and washed out. It is actually not as corny as most of the others in the Carry On series, but maybe because of that doesn't really deliver much fun. It's a fair bet that the title will appeal to fans of the Benny Hill show but those looking for attractive females in bikinis and miniskirts, while they will see some in this, will probably enjoy some of the other titles in the series, such as "Carry On Abroad" or "Carry On Up the Jungle" more. The emergence of early 1970s feminism is used as a plot device which seems rather self-defeating.