GusF Is it my imagination or do barkeeps in Westerns always seem to be named Charlie...? Anyway, it's not on the same level as the last two absolutely hilarious films but it's still a very funny parody of the Western genre. I don't know whether, as with "Carry On Cleo", the sets were built for another film but they look almost as the good as the ones used in actual Westerns of the era, as do the costumes. At first, I thought that it would be funnier if the cast had played their roles in their natural accents but the fake American accents add to the fun.As he did in "Carry On Spying", Kenneth Williams plays against his usual type and adopts a wonderfully over the top accent as Sheriff Burke. Charles Hawtrey has less screen time than in the last two films but he excels as Big Heap, a character who, like Julius Caesar and Mark Antony in "Carry On Cleo", works so well partly because he is the polar opposite of depictions of Native American in films of the era. The contrast between his portrayal and that of his deliberately clichéd son Little Heap, played by Bernard Bresslaw, is especially funny. As in several earlier "Carry On" films, Sid James plays the role of the Rumpo Kid fairly straight and is surprisingly menacing at times! Joan Sims gets more to do as Belle than she did as Calpurnia and is as superb as ever. Her best scenes are the ones in which she is trying to seduce Marshall and in which she fights Annie Oakley for him. Jim Dale has its biggest role in the series to date as the meek and mild Marshall P. Knutt, the opposite of his character Horsa from the previous film. Kenneth Connor is absent for the first of eight consecutive films and I suspect that the role of Marshall may have been originally intended for him. Dale has good comic timing but he's no Connor, I'm afraid. The funniest member of the supporting cast in the film is certainly Jon Pertwee as the deaf and blind but well meaning Sheriff Earp. The joke would probably have gotten old fast so it was probably for the best that his appearance was quite brief. Peter Butterworth is the best newcomer on this occasion.

w22nuschler I think Carry On Cowboy could be my favorite Carry On film. Carry on up the Jungle and Carry on at your Convenience are equally great. There are four Carry On regulars that deliver their best roles from all of the Carry On films. Sid James, who is always the best part of any Carry On film, delivers a top notch performance as the Johnny Finger, the Rumpo Kid. He takes over a town and robs and kills anyone in his way. Kenneth Williams plays the mayor and he tries to stand up to Sid, but it's useless. The way Kenneth plays the part and talks is perfect. The other two leads that are perfect are Jim Dale, who plays a waste disposal man and gets mixed up for being a Marshall who cleans up the waste(bad guys). And then there is Angela Douglas, who plays Annie Oakley to perfection. She is so pretty and proper. I love the way she looks in this film. She is out to get revenge for the man who killed her father. Kenneth calls for a Marshall and they send Jim. They arrive after a failed attempt by Sid to stop them. He and Kenneth talk about the job and they finally realize he was called for the wrong job. He ends up taking the job. Angela helps him out as a perfect shot during his troubles. Joan Sims plays the saloon girl who likes Sid. Sid likes Angela when he finds her in the tub. She later finds out he is the man who killed her father and she tries to kill him. She ends up killing his partner by mistake. Angela has a very sexy scene where she is wearing a showgirl outfit and singing a sexy song. It's the highlight of the film. She has a great pair of legs. The final showdown takes place at high noon after Angela learns Jim how to shoot. He defeats them by going underground in the sewer and calling them out. They end up shooting each other, but Sid gets away with Joan Sims on a horse. Jim ends up shooting his foot as he walks away. What a solid, entertaining film. I would suggest starting with this film if you have not seen any of them yet.

Oct The theme of the tenderfoot pitched into the Wild West and cleaning it up was old by the time England's merry Pinewood pranksters tackled it.In a sense, that is the history of the USA in a nutshell: disciplining the wilderness with the aid of the greenhorn's civilisation. "Destry Rides Again" and "The Paleface" had made a joke of the epic long since-- safe to do so once the frontier was closed and tamed-- and not long before, Britain's Kenneth More had visited Hollywood to play the Limey sheriff of Fractured Jaw. Mel Brooks would go over the old ground in "Blazing Saddles" and John Cleese would uphold the law in "Silverado".Enter Jim Dale as the 1966-vintage innocent abroad: a sanitary engineer (first class), mistaken for the US marshal who can rid Stodge City of the baleful reign of terror of the Rumpo Kid. ("Rumpo" is an obsolescent Britishism for Sid James's favourite activity-- cf "tiffin" in "Carry On... Up the Khyber".) Abetted or hindered by a corruptible judge, a saloon madame, a drunken Indian, a whiskery and wheezy old Confederate colonel, a six-gun-totin' Annie Oakley and other stock figures from generations of fleapit oaters, P. Knutt does his best and worst.Scriptwriter Talbot Rothwell was now well launched on the great period of Britain's most successful and durable film comedies. Historical spoofs inspired Rothwell: Cleo, Screaming, Khyber. This one is a little different, and perhaps falls a little short.Attention to detail extends beyond the sets and mounting of the production, which always belied Carry On's "low budget" tag: the accents and horsemanship are more than adequate, the body language in the crowd scenes accurate enough to be mistaken for a Randolph Scott or Audie Murphy vehicle, and apart from Hawtrey (who is funnier for not trying to be anything but himself) the principals, like the script, stay firmly in the roles as written.This Carry On eschews anachronistic and topical gags as well as calculated flaunting of its cheapness. It lacks some of the more incongruous belly laughs and double entendres we expect from Rothwell-- although "bullocks", to be reiterated in Khyber, are harnessed here already. Babs Windsor, who turned everything into a cockney music hall romp, is replaced by the more actressy and straightforwardly glamorous Angela Douglas; Kenneth Williams depicts an old man for once, with no epicene overtones; Sid, who had often played Yanks, is conscientious about remaining in character. He does not lean as much as usual on his dirty laugh or "cor blimey", more on a priapic snorting.There is more action, less slapstick. Future stalwarts Butterworth and Bresslaw make their bows, and have not yet established themselves enough to be given a lot of personally tailored business. Running gags are displaced for plot twists. In short, this is one Carry On that leans on story and consistency more than on a string of harking-backs, catchphrases and skits to carry it through.However, there are plenty of pleasures, if also some sadness in seeing Joan Sims take a back seat to the younger glamour girls, becoming the "old bag" before Sid's very eyes. Rothwell, instead of raiding his bag of old chestnuts, comes up with some lovely fresh ones such as Judge Burke assuring Knutt that some of his best friends were lynched- "there ain't no stigma to it out here".Above all, though, this is where Sid decisively became the tentpole of the series-- in Cleo he had still contested with Williams for the limelight.Like the best screen comedians and horror stars such as Karloff, Sid can command attention without being varied in his parts or versatile in his effects; he is a very limited actor who can make his repeated schticks and tricks funnier and funnier with repetition. He is the British cinema's Lord of Misrule; it's impossible to imagine that ageing, knowing rogue playing a depressed type, failing to lift a film or not cheering up an audience. He is a life force, and when he accepted he was too old to chase skirt on the Carry Ons, they could never be the same again.

charlescorn Perhaps I have overly fond childhood memories of Carry On movies and now that I'm starting to rediscover them, I'm a bit more critical. That said, many do stand the test of time, but Carry On Cowboy is not one of them.Carry On Cowboy is a film in that category of movie in which: (1) you can't wait for it to end, but (2) it's so unbelievably bad that you assume it has just got to get better at some point, so you continue to watch. Torture!I didn't laugh once. The biggest attempt at a gag in the film seemed to revolve around Jim Dale being clumsy. The occasional example of Dale doing a poor impersonation of Norman Wisdom is bad enough (eg Carry On Doctor), but to repeat it again and again is agony. Towards the end of the movie, when Dale practices shooting a gun, was so painful to watch I half-hoped he would shoot me instead. The only selling points are the great sets and the half-decent American accents of the Carry On gang.