Carry On Up the Jungle

Like Carry On Screaming, the later and generally less respected Carry On Up the Jungle is set in the poorly defined border zone between the Victorian and Edwardian periods, but, again like Carry On Screaming, is not so much a historical satire as a parody of a genre, or at least a subgenre. One of several reasons it has not aged well is that the subgenre itself, what might be termed the "Great White Hunter" adventure, has fallen precipitously out of fashion. The best of these, by the likes of Sir Henry Rider Haggard and John Buchan, were very well written, but they rely on cultural assumptions not widely shared these days to put it mildly. Haggard's Quartermain stories are an obvious influence on Carry On Up the Jungle, as are the Tarzan stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and their various film and television adaptations. Hammer Films' "cave girl" features, the most famous of which is One Million Years BC with Raquel Welch, also seem to be referenced in the costumes of a lost tribe of Amazons.

Yeah, this is going to get a bit awkward.

The basic premise of Carry On Up the Jungle is straight out of Haggard. A band of British explorers with different motivations, their very substantial luggage carried by a train of African porters, encounter the perils of the Jungle, including cannibals, said Amazons, and dangerous wildlife represented by a very entertaining gorilla who steals every scene in which he appears.

Sid James plays their experienced guide, who might as well have been called Sid Quartermain. The expedition's ostensible purpose is to enable Frankie Howerd to find the legendary Oozlum bird referenced in real life sources from the period - which is to say the legend was real, not the physically impossible bird. It is financed by wealthy aristocrat Joan Sims, whose secret hope is to discover news of her husband and son who went missing in the jungle many years before. Howerd's assistant is played by Kenneth Connor, returning to the franchise for the first time since Carry On Cleo and basically taking on the sort of role that had been played by Peter Butterworth since then. Jacki Piper, in the first of her four Carry On films, plays Sims' lady's companion, essentially the female juvenile lead in the absence of Barbara Windsor, even if her character has more in common with the type previously played by Angela Douglas.

Then there is Bernard Bresslaw playing Sid Quartermain's faithful African friend and servant. Such characters were common in Imperial adventure stories and genuinely well intentioned. Their point was to demonstrate mutual respect between cultures and how manly friendship could reach across racial divides. These days such characters come across as what Spike Lee calls magical... er... well, the plural of a word that Spike Lee can use but your reviewer cannot. Bresslaw really deserves to be remembered for his breadth as a character actor, not least in his ability to portray a range of different ethnicities, but that is not how it works these days. Having played an American Indian, an Arab, and an Asian in previous Carry On films, he completes the set here by playing an African - complete with make-up.

Yeah, we did say about it getting awkward.

In his defence, it should be noted that it really was a different time and he would not have imagined that he was doing anything improper. Remember that The Black and White Minstrel Show was still on the BBC and quite popular. Contrary to later revisionism, it attracted few complaints at the time - at least public complaints from people to whom anyone on or in television was likely to pay much attention.

To his credit Bresslaw took his ethnic role seriously, even learning to deliver his orders to his fellow African servants in authentic dialect. The story goes that this bemused the actors playing the other Africans because they were of Caribbean origin, but Sid James, born and raised in South Africa, recognised it as Swahili. This is not entirely accurate: Swahili, a West African language or group of languages, is not generally spoken as far South as James' native land, where the "lingua franca" is Fanagalo, a derivative of the Zulu language, which is what Bresslaw used and with which James may indeed have been familiar.

Charles Hawtrey plays Sims' missing husband and Terry Scott their son, who has since grown up in the jungle into a cut price Tarzan. The part was intended originally for Jim Dale, the series' usual male juvenile lead, who would have been physically very credible in the role. However, Dale declined because the sparse dialogue, consisting mainly of grunts, seemed unintelligible to him, thus opening the way for what turned out to be the perfect casting. That the notably pale and tubby Scott was supposed to be a lean, fit, hardened man of the jungle, and had to spend almost all his onscreen time naked but for a small loincloth, is the best joke in the film.

It is also amusing to reflect that in real life Scott was three years older than Sims, who was playing his mother, and only twelve years younger than Hawtrey, who was playing his father.

The impressively built Valerie Leon, who later made a big impact in every sense in her "Hai Karate" advertisements, gets possibly her most memorable film role as the leader of the Amazons.

The part played by Howerd was written at first with Kenneth Williams in mind. Howerd is a fine substitute, perhaps the best of all the principal guest stars in the Carry On series, but to an extent his leading man presence does unbalance the film a little. The standard dynamic by this point was for James to be the comedic lead with Williams usually as an adversarial authority figure. Having James and Howerd together leads to a slight confusion over who we are meant to be watching as we have two comedic leads in very similar roles.

This is not to criticise Howerd's contribution. Screenwriter Talbot Rothwell had also written the first season of Up Pompeii! and co-written the second for him, as well as previously having written the only other Carry On in which Howerd appeared, Carry On Doctor, so he was well aware of the great comedian's particular strengths and weaknesses. As a result, Howerd's character is kept disciplined and given no opportunity to upstage the regulars. This gives us a solid team-based Carry On, but Howerd fans might feel it a wasted opportunity to have a Howerd film without letting him go full Frankie.

Although the budget was over £200,000, inflation was beginning to cut into value for money in production of the series, so Carry On Up the Jungle was an almost entirely studio based project and the paucity of location work detracts a lot from the cinematic style of the films that elevated them above most comedies audiences could simply watch at home on television. One can see a definite vicious circle being established around this time in which reduced production values led to smaller audiences leading to reduced production values. As well as being a bit shoddy, the film is also a bit sloppy in its handling of some scenes, possibly due to an absence of rehearsal or a reluctance to try additional takes when the early ones were not smooth or both. This is not to say that Carry On Up the Jungle is in itself a bad film, only that it is obvious onscreen that the franchise had passed its zenith and was very much in the down slope.

John Winterson Richards