Carry On Henry (1971)

It is a performances centric movie

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

A curiously neglected entry, perhaps as it was made in a period when the series had generally started to go into decline, but in my view it's one of the best of all, certainly in the top three. The historical outings were usually among the team's funniest, and Talbot Rothwell provides perhaps his most audacious script with a real plot, told in his trademark puns and double entendres, but with a real abundance of panache and wit, attaining an almost poetic quality. Sid has his definitive role as Henry and it's alarming that he almost missed out due to other commitments, with Harry Secombe being considered for the part; no doubt Harry would have made a great King Hal, but it wouldn't have been the same at all. Charles Hawtrey, with much more to do than usual, gives a glorious performance as the King's 'taster' who samples much more than the food. Barely two years later he had left the series for good; surely some way could have been found to accommodate this most cherished of eccentrics. Equally memorable is Terry Scott's lecherous Cardinal Wolsey, reliable only for getting hold of the wrong end of the stick. Who could forget Barbara Windsor as Rothwell's Bettina, the best Bet to come Henry's way in years. And Kenneth Williams is a treat, snide and supercilious as the scheming Thomas Cromwell. Incidentally, the gag about S.E.T. got the biggest laugh of all on first release, as it stood for 'selective employment tax' which meant nothing a few years later, but was cause of much political argy-bargy at the time. Some vintage K.W. can also be glimpsed on an interview he gave on the set at the time, as did Sid and Terry Scott in full regalia. Joan Sims and the rest of the cast are excellent too, as is Alan Hume's photography, making HENRY look very lavish for a low budget film. Only problem is I can't watch anything about Henry and his court without thinking of Sid, Kenny and the team.

Carry On Henry tells of Henry VIII's other two wives, the ones that history forgot to mention: ample, French, garlic-munching Queen Marie (the delightful Joan Sims) and saucy blonde strumpet Queen Bettina (bubbly Barbara Windsor). When Henry (Sid James) finds it impossible to consummate his marriage to the former thanks to her terrible aroma, he seeks a quickie divorce and an even quicker marriage to the latter, but in doing so threatens to upset both the Vatican and the King of France.Historically duplicitous and hysterically on the mark, this lively Tudor romp is hugely entertaining viewing thanks to a silly script that plays fast and loose with the facts (even throwing in fun anachronisms such as a breezy jazz rendition of Greensleeves, Guy Fawkes, and the guillotine), plenty of ribald innuendo, lots of heaving bosoms, and spirited performances from the Carry On regulars, with Sid James, in particular, excelling in the role of Henry, giving arguably the greatest (certainly the most memorable) cinematic portrayal of the formidable monarch.

An unofficial tale about Henry VIII's two brief marriages between Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour.The usual crude humour of the series is reasonably neglected in preference of real wit and poignancy, the acting shows unexpected sophistication, the dialogue sharp, and even the period detail seems stimulatingly accurate in this surprisingly effective travesty of "Anne of the Thousand Days", "Lion in Winter", "A Man for All Seasons" and other British historical sagas. One of the best efforts of all concerned.

For most spoofs, the holy grail is to make so ridiculous the subject of attack that it will be impossible to take it seriously again. AIRPLANE! achieved this with the AIRPORT series, admittedly an easy target. CARRY ON HENRY may not have had quite the same effect - such is the unshakeable British obsession with the past, one of the film's main targets - but it's always nice to see that someone else found A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS and THE LION IN WINTER to be pompous tripe as well.HENRY, like CARRY ON UP THE KHYBER, is an example of a modest franchise miraculously finding an appropriate subject and creating a work of art. It may lack the jawdropping Bunuellian genius of KHYBER, but it has its own juicy pleasures. The jokes are franker than were usual at this point, but clever rather than crude, and funny when they were crude.This is also the last time the cast would be as brilliant as this - a well-oiled machine perfectly in control of the material. Kenneth Williams is aptly, hilariously Machiavellian; Charles Hawtrey is endearingly inappropriate as the brave knight and lover who undergoes all sorts of horrible tortures for his Queen - the heterosexual potency of these obviously gay stars are an uproarious counterpoint to the macho King's unsuccessful promiscuity. Joan Sims is glorious as ever as the ample, lascivious, French, garlic-obsessed Queen. But it is the godlike Sid James who rightly walks away with the film, cinema's best ever King Henry. The merging of his usual persona - the chuckling lecher who is repeatedly thwarted in his amorous endeavours (itself a remarkable comment of tyranny throughout the ages), married to a sex-mad woman he can't abide - with the portrayal of an historical icon creates satire of great depth.Whereas the aforementined, Oscar-garlanded pageants are rigidly respectful of English history, HENRY is breezily sceptical. Rather than search for continuity with the past, or examine various notions of Englishness, HENRY is very modern in its rejection of a certain kind of history, the meticulous reconstruction of a mythic past that can teach us about the present. HENRY knows that the past can only be viewed through the prism of the present, that history is a fluid, ever vanishing, entity, always reinterpreted to each generation's needs. The film quite clearly sets out its stall of bogusnes - it is based on recently discovered documents by William Cobbler - only to show how unreliable our grasp of history is; how it's always told in somebody's vested interests, at the expense of someone else.The film therefore prefigures the awesome Monty Python deconstructions of the 70s, with jokes about the Labour government, and with King's wenches who demand payment before favours, and whose fathers complain about taxation. The reduction here of English history to an aristorcratic bedroom farce is a more profound insight than any 'serious' epic has ever managed.