Goodbye to the suburban porn star

Still on sex and the obits column, I see the producer Peter Rogers also died this month, at the grand old age of 95. He got rich peddling cheap laughs. One day in 1958 he was sent a serious screenplay about the effects of military conscription on a couple of English ballet dancers. He decided to produce it as a comedy. The result—Carry On Sergeant—was the first of what became the second most successful British film series (after James Bond). There followed Carry On Nurse, Carry On Constable, Carry On Cowboy, Carry On Up The Khyber, and a couple of dozen others, all more or less exactly the same: a bunch of British comic actors, variously prune-faced, lumpy, dozy, camp or emaciated, would set off in improbable pursuit of curvy dolly birds but be stymied by ferocious martinets. Come to think of it, even the dolly birds were rather on the burly side: one recalls Joan Sims as Miss Allcock in Carry On Teacher. The joke underpinning the entire series was that in British English virtually anything can be a synonym for the word “penis.” Thus, in Carry On Henry, Sid James as King Henry VIII gets his Hampton Court—i.e., he gets his hampton caught. A man called Peter Rogers would seem to be the perfect producer for such an enterprise.

Rogers closed the door on the series after getting his hampton caught, box-office-wise, in Carry On Emmannuelle (1978), which pretty much scuttled both franchises. The nymphomaniac Emmannuelle Prevert has her way with the prime minister, the American ambassador and anyone else other than her poor put-upon husband. Key dialogue:

“Why me? You could have Tom, Dick or Harry.”

“I don’t want Tom or Harry.”

One more from the sex ’n’ obits file? Okay. The writer J. G. Ballard died last Sunday. He’s best known for the somewhat untypical semi-memoir Empire Of The Sun, but he also wrote Crash, a novella whose protagonists get sexually aroused by motor-vehicle collisions. Ballard set his book in dreary North London suburbia, but David Cronenberg’s film relocated the auto-eroticism to Toronto and even the 401. At the risk of going all art-house on you, it’s the antithesis of porn: no bumping (apart from the cars), no grinding (apart from their gears). The leading lady, Deborah Kara Unger, chugs through Crash’s innumerable sex scenes looking bored out of her skull, and with the faraway glassy-eyed expression of someone making a mental note to pick up some meringue nests at Loblaws on the way home. Cronenberg arranges Miss Unger’s private parts as if they’re still lifes, and they sit there on the screen for what seems forever, occasionally inching forward like a Honda Civic stuck in traffic on the QEW.

Maybe David Cronenberg should have stuck with Marilyn Chambers. Or maybe J. G. Ballard should have sold the rights to Peter Rogers: Carry On Crashing!