John Chard
August 10, 2016
7
Lubby-Dubby
The African jungle, and Lady Bagley is part of an expedition to hopefully find her long lost son who disappeared years before, along with her thought to be dead husband. However this is no ordinary trip, Professor Tinkle is searching for the rare Oozalum bird and expedition leader William Boosey well and truly lives up to his surname. Not only are there problems in the camp, outside is numerous other dangers. Wild beasts, wild men and tribes unheard of by human ears before.
1970 saw the Carry On team begin the decade with one of the better offerings in the franchise. Boosted by the returning Frankie Howerd and Terry Scott to join Messrs James, Hawtrey, Sims, Connor and Bresslaw, Carry On Up The Jungle sticks close to the cheeky formula that had worked in the better series entries previously (think Carry On Up The Kyber from 1968). Originally intended to be called Carry On Tarzan (the idea was scrapped for legal reasons), "Jungle" plonks a load of British odd balls in the jungle and invite us to observe how they cope. Which of course we know is not going to be very well at all. Terry Scott steals the film as a blundering Tarzan type (a role apparently turned down by Jim Dale), whilst Howerd and James get maximum humour from their polar opposite characters.
With a simple plot and carrying the series innuendo trademarks on its snake bitten … ahem, Carry On Up the Jungle is a charmingly funny series entry. 7/10
"Carry on Tarzan" or "Carry on Solomon doesn't mind"? I was never a fan of Frankie Howerd's rather unsubtle form of humour, and I found that when he appeared in these, he tended to upstage the rather gentler (though just as seedy) humour that emanated from Messrs. James, Hawtrey et al. This time around, the diamond wearing Joan Sims' "Lady Bagley" is mounting a jungle expedition to see if her long-lost baby really ended up in the belly of a crocodile alongside her husband. Meantime, a loincloth clad Terry Scott is marauding the jungle swinging from tree to tree... Might he be the one? Might she still want to know if he is? This isn't really very good. Howerd dominates with his birdwatching "Prof. Tinkle" and he rather subsumes James's dipso expedition leader "Boosey", Sims and a rather daft performance from Hawtrey's "Tonka" (trucks not chocolate?). Bernard Bresslaw is quite entertaining as their local guide "Upsidaisi" and the dialogue is the usual fayre of rhyming slang and nudge, nudge, wink, wink.... It struggles to sustain it's initial momentum, I felt, and relied too much on a star that I just didn't rate, so sorry - not that great.
