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Starring: Kenneth Williams, Shirley Eaton, Joan Sims
Director: Gerald Thomas
Running Time: 86 mins
Carry On Nurse is a British film and the second in the Carry On series. In a hospital, a men’s ward causes chaos for the staff, getting involved with the nurses while drunkenly deciding to carry out their medical operations themselves.
No matter how much I try to love the Carry On movies, I just can’t seem to find the enjoyment in them. Carry On Nurse, much like many other films in the series, is a fairly harmless, easy-going and silly comedy, but I just didn’t find it funny in the slightest.
Through its thirty-one films, the Carry On series did change and evolve, but at this early stage – Nurse is just the second in the series – the comedy was heavily slapstick-based, with little of the same crazed wit that marks some of the better Carry On movies.
As a result, if you don’t buy into the film’s brand of slapstick from the start, it’s difficult to get into afterwards. The humour is simple, predictable and very repetitive, revolving around the antics of a mischievous group of male patients in a hospital ward.
Although the film hints at some of the bawdier comedy that Carry On is well-known for, censors and customs of the late 1950s means it’s nowhere near on the level of the series’ later films. In that, this movie feels really quite tame.
Without that risqué edge to it, Carry On Nurse is a generally underwhelming comedy, failing to capture a chaotically entertaining atmosphere full of laughs.
It’s frustratingly slow, it’s far from manic, and it just isn’t that hilarious. There are very few chuckles, let alone bigger laughs, making the film an unnecessarily taxing watch.
Overall, I wasn’t much of a fan of Carry On Nurse. A classic of the Carry On series it may be, but with underwhelming and repetitive slapstick that struggled to make me laugh, I can hardly call it a great comedy. So, that’s why I’m giving it 6.0.
