Carry On Spying

I expected you to be a man... or a woman.

The 9th in the Carry On series, and the last to be filmed in black and white, is one of the best. It finds the gang kind of biting the hand that feeds them, Pinewood. The home of James Bond was also the home of the Carry On mob, so with Peter Rogers, Gerald Thomas and Talbot Rothwell spying an opportunity to spoof 007, they did so, whilst also revelling in the chance for some film noir dalliances, notably The Third Man.

The cast is this time headed up by Kenneth Williams, Barbara Windsor (making her Carry On debut), Bernard Cribbins and Charles Hawtrey. They are four less than stellar operatives for British Intelligence tasked with retrieving a top secret formula that has been stolen by STENCH...

The world is at the mercy of "STENCH" - a criminal entity set up to rid the world of something or other. Scraping the bottom of his agency barrel, the chief of MI6 must depend on the hapless "Simkins" (Kenneth Williams) to retrieve the situation and so together with his triplet of inexperienced trainees, they have to thwart the evil intentions of the menacing "Dr. Crow" (think of a larger version of Rosa Klebb). As you'd expect, the rest of this parodies just about everything from the "Man from U.N.C.L.E." to "007" via "The Third Man" - we even have some zithering! Along the way, a bit of romance blossoms as "Crump" (Bernard Cribbins) falls head over heels for "Honeybutt" (a first outing for Barbara Windsor) - she has a photographic memory ...