ABSTRACT
Or-for as the genre developed, the more subtitles they seemed to acquirehow the Carry Ons critical reputation masked a lively interest in the way England changed over twenty years: or, how bringing the body into comic collision with major social institutions led to some of the most positive images of women available in British cinema, and how actresses made the most of them: or, how humane sexual comedy and 1970s commercialism made hopeless bedfellows. I begin this account with Carry On Cleo, rather than attempting to examine the films chronologically, because it seems to me to embody the paradox of the series: ‘certain liberties’, as the opening credits solemnly inform us, were certainly taken with female characters like Cleopatra-construct them as sexual objects: but liberties were also available to the actresses who played them to be far more creative.
