By the time Carry on Cowboy (1966) went into production in July 1965, the series was the proverbial well-oiled machine. The franchise had gone to color with Carry on Cruising (1962) and original screenwriter Norman Hudis was swapped out for Talbot Rothwell but otherwise moviegoers knew exactly what they were in for with each new film: a comic scenario laid against a familiar backdrop, played by a revolving cast of rubber-faced character actors eager to do anything for a laugh. Many of the Carry On crew had honed their comedic chops in the military. Series regular Kenneth Williams had spent his wartime service in Calcutta as a cartographer and was later assigned to the Combined Service Entertainments Unit. Scenarist Rothwell had been a Royal Air Force Pilot, shot down over Holland early in the conflict, and confined to a German prisoner of war camp for the duration; while creating comedy sketches for camp concerts, Rothwell met fellow POW Peter Butterworth, who studied acting after the war's end and made his Carry On debut in Carry on Cowboy, as the sardonic sawbones of the prairie hamlet of Stodge City.
Radio and stage comic Sidney James later allowed that Carry on Cowboy was his favorite of the series. Like his costar Jim Dale, James took an intensive course in horseback riding in the stables of Pinewood Studios and spent his down time twirling his six-shooter on his index finger; keeping in character, James enjoyed bushwhacking his costars by poking them from behind with the barrel of his prop revolver. (Shooting the film by day, James spent his evenings on the stage of the London's Saville Theatre, starring in The Solid Gold Cadillac with Margaret Rutherford.) Though the production's first official day of shooting, July 12th, was a rain out, spirits were buoyant throughout principal photography (which ended on September 3rd). Director Gerald Thomas played a practical joke on actor Bernard Bresslaw, also making his Carry On debut; learning that the 6'7" actor was afraid of heights, Thomas had Bresslaw scale a tree on location at Buckinghamshire's Black Park and, when he had settled precariously on a branch, called lunch.
In addition to shooting around the unpredictable British weather, director Thomas also had to find creative ways to make the British countryside look like the American frontier. Over the course of six weeks, art director Bert Davey constructed a complete western town on the Pinewood backlot, bookending Stodge City's main drag with tall buildings to obscure panoramas of what resembled moors more than desert flats. A patch of lowland heath in Surrey's Chobham Common made do for the outskirts of Stodge where a tribe of hostile aboriginals (led by Charles Hawtrey's unabashedly effeminate chieftain) attacks a stagecoach. Director of photography Alan Hume (a specialist in color, who had shot Hammer's The Kiss of the Vampire [1963] and the Amicus anthology Dr. Terror's House of Horrors [1965]) and editor Rod Nelson-Keys worked with short ends to cobble together a persuasive setpiece, in which plumber hero Dale is shown up by vengeance-minded heroine Angela Douglas. Not nearly as flint-hearted as her character, Douglas (also making her series debut with Carry on Cowboy) reportedly had to down a double brandy to film her one song, and be pushed out in front of the camera by costar Joan Sims.
The popularity of the Carry On films created schisms within Peter Rogers Productions, fracturing loyalties and dividing the team. With the change in distributors after the horror spoof Carry on Screaming (1966) from Anglo-Amalgamated to the Rank Organization, the series brooked copyright issues related to its brand, the result being that three films - Don't Lose Your Head (1966), Follow the Legion (1967), and Up the Khyber (1968) - were released without the identifying prefix (and, later, with all proprietary issues sorted out, retitled for the sake of continuity). Time and tide would have a more deleterious effect on the series. The increasing permissiveness of cinema through the decade and into the next would render redundant the franchise's reliance on innuendo and wordplay, while the retirement or deaths of key players stripped later Carry On films of recognizable personality. Stage and TV spinoffs followed but the series was suspended after Carry on Emmanuelle (1978), the thirtieth go-round. An expensive reboot, Carry on Columbus (1992), drew critical jeers but out-grossed the combined take of both John Glen's Christopher Columbus: The Discovery and Ridley Scott's 1492: Conquest of Paradise, released the same year.
Producer: Peter Rogers
Director: Gerald Thomas
Writer: Talbot Rothwell
Cinematography: Alan Hume
Editor: Rod Nelson-Keys
Art Direction: Burt Davey
Music: Eric Rogers
Cast: Sid James (Johnny Finger/The Rumpo Kid), Jim Dale (Marshal P. Knutt), Kenneth Williams (Judge Burke), Joan Sims (Belle), Charles Hawtrey (Big Heap), Angela Douglas (Annie Oakley), Bernard Bresslaw (Little Heap), Peter Butterworth (Doc), Percy Herbert (Charlie, the Bartender), Jon Pertwee (Sheriff Albert Earp), Sydney Bromley (Sam Houston), Davy Kaye (Undertaker).
C-93m.
by Richard Harland Smith
Sources:
Fifty Years of Carry On by Richard Webber (Random House, 2008)
The Official Carry On Facts, Figures, and Statistics: A Complete Statistical Analysis of the Carry Ons by Kevin Snelgrove (Apex Publishing, Ltd., 2008)
Carry On Actors: The Complete Who's Who of the Carry On Film Series by Andrew Ross (Apex Publishing, 2011)
Sid James: Cockney Rebel by Robert Ross (JR Books, Ltd., 2009)
Kenneth Williams: Born Brilliant - The Life of Kenneth Williams by Christopher Stevens (John Murray, 2011)
The Kenneth Williams Diaries by Kenneth Williams, with Russell Davies
