source: No Place Like Homicide!

What a Carve Up!

It might look like a Carry On film. It is more Cat and the Canary. What a Carve Up! is farcical murder mystery in an isolated country house. Ernest Broughton (Kenneth Connor) and his flatmate Syd Butler (Sydney James) go up to a mansion somewhere in the Yorkshire moors after the death of Ernest's uncle, Gabriel Broughton. Ernest has been invited by his uncle's creepy solicitor. At the ancestral home he meets the various eccentric Broughton family and during the reading of the will, the family members get nothing. During the night, creepy things happen and people end up dead. The remaining guests need to find the killer. The shtick between Connors and James is very familiar as they act like an anglicised Abbot and Costello. It is silly nonsense but a cast that includes Michael Gough, Dennis Price, Donald Pleasence and Shirley Eaton give the cliched script their very best. Look out from a guest cameo from a pop singer.

I caught the second half of this on TV over Christmas and had to track down a copy to see how it all began. "...Carve Up" is an odd and fairly unique clash of different styles of film: the cheap, crass, misfiring humour of the Carry On films but set in an older, classic Ealing-style story, with a creepy atmosphere more like The Cat and The Canary, The Ghost of St. Michaels, or The Old Dark House, which the Carry-On films never even bothered to try to capture. More's the pity, since this film feels almost like a signpost to a more interesting and better quality future for those movies, which never came about. Kenneth Connor is a little grating, and Sid James plays Sid James. Shirley Eaton is pretty and refined but gives a stilted performance. The rest of the supporting cast are quality, though, and mark it out above average. It's much too patchy to be a great film, or even a really good one, but it is a likeable one.

Almost any movie with the super-lovely Shirley Eaton is a good movie, and this one contrives to be both utterly suspenseful and uproariously funny. All the other players also rate as first-class -- even people like Dennis Price and Kenneth Connor who have given some disappointing performances from time to time. Pat Jackson's astute direction rates as the best job he has turned in for quite a while. He handles an especially long take with considerable expertise, while his astute choice of camera angles and set-ups creates an overall atmosphere that achieves an admirable balance between farce and horror. Contemporary audiences also enjoyed the surprise guest appearance of Adam Faith, though I guess this is now badly dated. "Who's Adam Faith?" I hear you asking. Never mind, you'll still enjoy the movie anyway!

"What A Carve Up!" plays as if it was based on a script long-forgotten inside a drawer, designed for Bob Hope or Lou Costello in the early 1940's at the latest; it runs through the spooky-old-mansion clichès (creepy butler, secret panels, money-hungry relatives, lines cut off, black cats, etc.), without putting much of a comic spin on them - so they remain clichès. There are some clever moments, but most of the film is unfunny. ** out of 4.

A lot of chuckles and sinister goings on. Unfortunately I found Kenneth Connor increasingly irritating as the film progressed. An ensemble of familiar faces and an uncredited appearance by Adam Faith, at the height of his pop fame, added to the interest.

What a great movie, laugh, jump with terror (ish) a classic story with a obvious ending but still funny. Sid James and Kenneth Connor are a great comedy pair.See how young Shirley Eaton is WOW. Nice film in the middle of the carry on's.

Spooky-looking Donald Pleasance visits Kenneth Connor to tell him that his uncle is dead and he must be present for the reading of the will. Out at the castle on the moor, there is the usual assortment of greedy relatives, Shirley Eaton, the cute nurse, and Michael Gough doing a Boris Karloff impression as the butler. Plus of course, Connor's pal Sid James, who figures he's on to a good thing. When Pleasance reads the will, however, only Miss Eaton is left anything: the pill bottles. They all settle in for the night, and then someone starts killing them all in this Old Dark House comedy. There's long been a tendency of the Old Dark House genre to indulge in comedy, and this looks suspiciously like a feature-length version of THE LAUREL-HARDY MURDER CASE, with James and Connor playing a variation on the Boys. While the mystery aspect of the movie is pretty good, the comedy is fairly standard.... but very well executed.

When I first saw this film one evening, I only watched it because I had nothing to do. By the time it had finished, I was left raging with myself for not videoing it. Although it's not really a horror movie, the atmosphere is tremendous. Right from the first scene, the viewer is drawn in, and simply cannot stop watching. Although the ending is somewhat predictable, the movie does not really suffer from this, but rather the viewer can look out for all the clues that he/she may have missed the first time. All in all, a film to be watched over and over again.