Taraparain Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Bessie Smyth Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Parker Lewis It's been 8 years since the last user review, so I thought I'd contribute if I may. I was pleasantly surprised by Cor, Blimey! as it made a decent attempt to highlight the affair of Sid James and Barbara Windsor. I didn't realize Sid was South African, and this explains the South African white accent lilt. I would love to have seen Sid in Carry on Zulu or something like that, kind of a homage to his home country I guess.Barbara Windsor herself appeared at the end of this episode in a surprise scene. Quite touching.

daryl-57 In the sequence near the end of the film before Sid James is about to go on stage in the play The Mating Season his dresser says she 's been offered a job on the new bond film You Only Live Twice. This is wrong because this is in 1976 and you only live twice was made in 1966 or 1967, probably the film The spy who loved me would of been more likely. Bad research here, when Sid James goes on stage he dies this was a true incident. The dresser before he dies on stage writes a note and leaves presumably to work on the film. This was an interesting film but how true it was in general is open to question. The dresser is introduced at the start of the film when Sid James is filming Carry on Cleo. The main plot of the film is Sid James affair with Barbara Windsor.

stevehogan1605 Having just watched the film I have to agree in parts with the bottom two contributors in that the inaccuracies in the film are a let down. I sat there and laughed when they used Bresslaw in place of Scott for the Henry scene.That said, what a superb film. Don't be fooled, as one of the other contributors said for Barbara Windsor to put herself in the film gives it an air of accuracy.It is a homage to those characters it portrays. Too often a film biopic will show someone completely different to the truth. This film gave it warts and all. Superbly acted by the front three and a game of spot the carry on stars throughout. I'd echo a shame that it couldn't show some of the other principle characters in depth but I suppose when you've got ninety minutes you go with what you can.Very amusing to see the Goldfinger characters, in particular as Shirley Eaton had been a carry on actress.You could only feel despair for Williams, a tortured soul hiding behind a screen of caustic veneer. Sid James character starts as a dirty old man who it soon shows as someone of very little repertoire other than the same parlour trick to seduce. The caravan incident is straight out of Carry On although I think the connotations of Ronnie Knights hard-man are far too camp and weak.Overall though, massively enjoyable. Those who found this disturbing should take off those rose tinted glasses.

alice liddell The opening half of this film dramatising the affair between two of Britain's best and best-loved comedians, Sid James and Barbara Windsor, is a wonderful marriage of form and content, and a lesson to anyone who dares to make period dramas. From the cheeky title and CARRY ON-style credits, we know we're in for a treat that will not betray its subjects with deadly respectability.This half is filmed like a CARRY ON, with the central romance between Sid and Babs diffused by innuendo-laden bits of business featuring Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey et al. There is one stunning shot at the beginning where the vast Roman ampitheatre through which a soldier walks is revealed to be a tiny model, pointing to the themes of reality and appearance that will be the film's theme, as well as the economic reality of these films' production.Sid's life in this half is played like a CARRY ON farce, full of repetition, coitus interruptus, double entendres, comedy gangsters and buxom ladies locked in bathrooms. The general verdict on CARRY ONs is that they are an assembly line churning out shoddy products of ever decreasing quality, concerned only with adolescent titillation (this is not my view - HENRY and CLEO at least are great films, while KHYBER is the greatest of all British satires, and the equal of Bunuel); so treating the lives of these people who must subsume their own personalities in their screen personae (even the sex scene is mediated through cinematic apparatus), locked in an evermore limiting labyrinth of personal need and public status is true at least to public perception (behind which, presumably, the filmmakers wish to delve).The lines and jokes are fruity and excellent, the sets deliciously gaudy, the re-enactments priceless, the chronology a little wobbly, the acting a triumph (Samantha Spiro as Babs is so winning and moving she makes me totally reevaluate a figure I'd previously considered fairly margainal), but, best of all, it shows that farce, and especially CARRY ONs, have an emotional basis denied by its detractors.The screenwriter doesn't quite believe it either though, and this fertile approach is soon abandoned as the film gets more serious, tragic, and it seeks an appropriate mode to express this, fixing on a fatal melange of social realism and middle-class Rattiganisms (so as not to alienate the film's prime-time audience). The subversion of genre that was the first half (and subverting genre and its conservative functions was what CARRY ONs were all about) becomes a conventional biopic, robbing the subjects of their breezy singularity. Yes it's all very sad and desparing and tragic, yes the recreation of a shabby 70s Britain at the fag-end of both the entertainment industry and British society itself is expertly realised, but so is Merchant Ivory. There are lines of dialogue, which, without irony, could have come straight from an Alan Bennett parody. The despair of Williams is frequently alluded to, but to anyone unfamiliar with his story somewhat obscured. The hilarious parody of Burton and Taylor that characterises Sid and Babs' early relationship becomes sadly literal as we go on. You certainly wouldn't know why these cheaply-made music hall quickies remain astonishingly popular and vibrant today, while their more respectable peers lie in cobwebbed vaults. After such a fun start, then, a bit of a shame.