Carry On Don&t Lose Your Head parodies the adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel with crinkly cackling Sid James as master of disguise the Black Fingernail & Jim Dale as his assistant Lord Darcy He must rescue preposterously effete aristocrat Charles Hawtrey from the clutches of Kenneth Williams& fiendish Citizen Camembert & his sidekick Citizen Bidet (Peter Butterworth) The Black Fingernail is assisted in his efforts to thwart the birth of the burgeoning republic by the almost supernatural stupidity of his opponents who fail to recognise the frankly undisguisable Sid James even when dressed as a flirty young woman What with an executioner who is tricked into beheading himself in order to prove the efficacy of his own guillotine it&s all a little too easy As usual no groan-worthy pun is left unturned or unheralded by the soundtrack strains of a long whistle or wah-wah trumpet This is pretty silly stuff even by Carry On standards with most of the cast barely required to come out of first gear & an overlong climactic swordfight sequence hardly raising the dramatic stakes Most of the humour here resides neither in the script nor the characterisation but in the endlessly watchable Williams& whooping nasal delivery (occasionally lapsing into broad Cockney) & the jowl movements of the always-underrated Butterworth --David Stubbs