Casino Royale (1967)

Occasional fun for the 60's lover, but completely incoherent as entertainment. I should confess that as a young kid I did love the film, just as I loved _What's new Pussycat_, and when I got a little older I became a guilty admirer of _The Blues Brothers_ and _1941_. So I am sucker for the comedy epic/ celebrity ensemble.

However, _Casino_ is simply over the top at being over the top. It seems impossible to create a successful film with 5 directors and 10 writers (not including Ian Fleming, but including Ben Hecht, Joseph Heller, Terry Southern and Billy Wilder !!). The story lacks even a real protagonist; Niven and Sellers trade places in that role. When they run out of story, pie fights emerge, or fusillades of bullets, or tremendous explosions.

The film is certainly not without its merits. Like _What's New Pussycat_ they did manage to corral some of the most beautiful women of the time together in the same film. When Andress is not speaking, as in the "Look of Love" sequence or in Seller's "shampoo" dream she's truly breathtaking. Allen is always funny, and Welles does a pretty good turn as le Chiffre. The Bacharach score and Herb Alpert open and closing sequences are memorable.

As a DVD extra, the American dramatic version of _Casino Royale_ (1954) is included on the DVD, which predated Connery by 8 years!!

Fmovies: This was the Bond title unable to be used by the filmmakers of the regular Bond film series, until the end of the century (they finally got to it for the restart in 2006). So, the intent here was a spoof of the then-wildly popular Bond/spy mania of the mid-sixties. Of course, this wasn't the first such effort; others already began the "Our Man Flint" duo film series and "The Man From UNCLE" on TV was in full swing, not to mention "Get Smart." So, how to outdo them? Get five top notch directors. Get as many sixties stars as possible. Get everything but the kitchen sink (literally, in the over-the-top climax). The original intent was to have each director do their own little mini-movie spoof - an anthology; they ended up editing everything together into one so-called film. A heady brew and, predictably, largely incomprehensible. In addition, actor Sellers, the nominal star, left before completing all his scenes, so his personal trajectory is less than smooth - as if a scene is missing, naturally. If you pay very close attention, you might be able to follow about 50% of the plot, but do you really want to put so much effort into watching a comedy?

Some of this editing is quite clumsy: the first pre-credits scene, a short one, features Sellers, as if the producers are pointing out to us that he is indeed in this movie (he doesn't show up again until 40 minutes later). Welles doesn't show up until the 80-minute mark. The first sequence concentrates on Niven, the real James Bond. He's in retirement but is forced back into a weird plot by the heads of all the world's spy agencies. This first half-hour, except for the scene with the lions, is slow and mostly stupid, not funny-stupid as intended, involving Kerr and a lot of dull fun at the expense of the Irish, for some reason, and painfully obvious joking about Bond's sexual magnetism. There's also one sly poke at the real Bond film series and its gadgetry; apparently, that Bond, of "Goldfinger" and "Thunderball" fame, is actually a replacement for the pure spy played by Niven, who looks down at the concept of gadgets. Things start to pick up a bit later, with the intro of several femme fatales, played by some of the most ravishing starlets of the sixties: Andress of "Dr.No" fame, Bouchet as the new Moneypenny, Lavi and Pettet as Bond's daughter, Mata (why Pettet did not become a major star is baffling to me). Much of the non-plot involves Niven taking over M's operations and naming a bunch of other agents James Bond to confuse the enemy - SMERSH (lifted straight from the books). We finally do see similar plot lines to Fleming's novel, involving villain heavy Le Chiffre (Welles) and one of the Bonds (Sellers) dueling at cards (Baccarat - dramatized differently in the 1954 TV version, yet eerily similar).

Curiously, it's not Sellers who provides the more amusing scenes in this confusing fest, as we would expect. No, that honor falls to Woody Allen, as Bond's nephew, and Welles in his brief scenes conducting some off-the-cuff magic show. Allen's highlight is his very first scene, involving the firing squad. Allen, previously seen in "What's New,Pussycat?," now proves to be one of the most natural comedians for the silver screen. His mannerisms and body movement recall some of the great comedians of the silent era, Chaplin & Keaton, especially evident in the scenes where he can't speak (a mental block whenever Uncle Bond is around). Famous starl

What a horrible, horrible film!!!

"Casino Royale" must truly be one of the worst films ever created. At least it must be the worst ever misuse of a great cast: Peter Sellers, David Niven, Woody Allen, Orson Welles, Deborah Kerr...

Some bad films actually become tolerable or even funny just because they are so bad. "Casino Royale" cannot even accomplish that. It is just an embarrassing failure to tell a lame, confused story about a lot of people named James Bond.

Casino Royale fmovies. I remember watching this as a kid and it was funny, but I can't for the life of me remember why now.

I have seen some stinkers, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Loose Shoes, Bloodsucking Redneck Vampires...and this one is every bit as good.

Yes, it is dated, but the problem is deeper. It really looks like they just chopped up a bunch of scraps of skits and random junk from the bottom of the inspiration pile and called it a movie. And it succeeded mostly by false pretenses. It had enough big marquee names to make people go to the theater thinking they were actually going to see them acting in a movie. Wonder how many of these folks were embarrassed to see their name hooked to this film.

It fails on so many levels, BUT it did take enough people in to pay out well.

What a mess of the royal proportions - such a great cast (Peter Sellers, David Niven, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, Ursula Andress, Deborah Kerr, and Jean-Paul Belmondo), the James Bond's story, plenty of beautiful (and I mean it) girls, the music by Burt Bacharach, most famous sets - but the movie is almost totally unwatchable. It started funny enough - at Sir James Bond's (David Niven) home where he was approached by four international agents that forced him to come out of retirement and head up the operation against the evil organization SMERSH. His mission is to destroy Topple LeChiffre (Orson Welles} at the baccarat tables where he never loses and wins a lot of money to supply SMERSH. Then, the movie becomes silly, stupid, pointless, and (what is the worst) not funny. Only Woody Allen, (as Bond's incompetent nephew, Jimmy Bond) brilliant as usual has appeared in two scenes and made them silly and hilarious. I think that "Casino Royale" (the way it was made) illustrates the fact that bigger is not always better - overlong and overblown, written and directed by five or more writers and directors, it brings to mind an old saying, "Too many cooks spoil the broth".

OT: the abbreviation SMERSH really existed during the WWII. It means "Death to the Spies" in Russian.

To watch this movie, one must understand something that many appeared to have missed. Chiefly, the mish-mashed, ridiculous, over-blown insanity of it is the entire point. It is this that it aims for, and this that it achieves. It is not really a story, so much as every conceivable joke that could be thought of, thrown into an editing studio and spat out the other end as gold. This movie will challenge many who cannot break-out of the mold of needing a firm plot and some commonsense, but in this regard it is much like a comedic version of a David Lynch film, and I enjoyed Twin Peaks: The Movie even if I still don't get it.

So watch this for the crackling one-liners, ridiculously pretty women, lurid sets and the most completely unself-conscious approach to making a comedy that I have ever seen. It goes beyond funny, and becomes a matter of being shocked into admiration for the sheer silliness of it all. And the fun of trying to explain it to someone afterwards is immeasurable.

"So then the flying-saucer kidnaps Mata Hari and James Bond's love-child, and then James Bond who's David Niven and James Bond who's Woody Allen face-off, and meanwhile James Bond is being tortured with insane hallucinations and someone has snuck into his delusions with a machine-gun bagpipe and through all this Deborah Kerr was a French Scotswoman!"

Much less a true story than very funny surrealist art. Like Salvidor Dali meets The Pythons, but odder. And lots of great satire and stuff, too. See it. Now. If only to broaden your horizons.