Carry On Cleo

'Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in fer me!' wails Kenneth Williams as Julius Caesar in the Carry On team's saucy take-off of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and the Twentieth-Century Fox epic which was on release in the U.K. around the same time. And 'they' did have it in for Carry On Cleo's poster, with its cheeky similarities to the one displaying Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Rex Harrison. What Shakespeare would have thought we'll never know. But as a great punster himself, much given to bawdy jokes, it's not too fanciful to suppose he would have got more than a few belly laughs from Talbot Rothwell's screenplay. As history, Carry On Cleo is not so much potted as potty. Any attempt to outline the plot is as doomed to failure as it is for Sid James's fiendishly leering Mark Antony to explain his scheme to bump off Caesar to the delectably dim-witted Cleo (Amanda Barrie) when she's bathing her luscious limbs in asses' milk. Somehow it manages to involve two enslaved Ancient Britons, Hengist Pod (Kenneth Connor) and Horsa (Jim Dale) being offered for sale by Warren 'Alf Garnett' Mitchell as one of the brothers Marcus and Spencius. They escape into the clutches of sex-starved Vestal Virgins who are, of course, destined to remain frustrated. Horsa turns swashbuckling swordsman to defeat the troops who come to get them, but it is the timid Pod who becomes the bodyguard of Caesar, who is expecting a spot of trouble from sundry knobbly-kneed Roman nobles. And so it goes on, with plotters plotting, puns flying, and lavatory jokes and double meanings being tossed around with typical Carry On happy abandon. All this and Joan Sims as Caesar's wife Calpurnia, Sheila Hancock as the henpecked Hengist's wife Senna Pod, Victor Maddern rasping 'Sinister... Dexter... Sinister' as a Roman Sergeant Major, and Jon 'Dr. Who' Pertwee as a Soothsayer. Sooth to say, Carry On Cleo is a must for collectors of Carry Ons.