Carry On Jack was the 1963 offering from a team which had, by then, become a repertory company with special guests dropping in for a dose of innuendo. "What's all this jigging in the rigging?" demands Kenneth Williams, this time playing a ship's captain, and the scene is set for 90 minutes of ribaldry involving cross-dressing, press-ganging and plank walking. The plot scarcely matters. It's set after the Battle of Trafalgar and the sea is awash with Spanish galleons and pirates as the British navy sets about defending its shores with as much incompetence as possible. Sally, a barmaid at the Dirty Duck (Juliet Mills in feisty principal boy mode), knocks Bernard Cribbins on the head and steals his uniform so that she can go in search of her childhood sweetheart. He is promptly press-ganged and they end up on the same ship. Williams, on the brink of his ascendancy as a star turn, just about keeps the mannerisms under control enough to build the character of the naïve and neurotic captain. Familiar Carry On faces on top form include Charles Hawtrey and Jim Dale, while Peter Gilmore--in his pre-Onedin Line days--appears as a pirate. Peter Rodgers' script is not quite vintage Carry On but the jokes keep coming and it's all good, clean fun. On the DVD: This was one of the first Carry On films to be made in colour. The print is in reasonable condition. The picture quality, apart from a couple of scratchy scenes of sailing ships that were probably drafted in from stock footage, is fair, as is the sound. But apart from the scene index there are no extras on the disc. Given the cult status of the Carry On films, and the wealth of documentary material which has been made about them and their stars, you'd think something extra could have been offered with the DVD releases to make them a more worthwhile alternative to the video. --Piers Ford
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