Casino Royale (1967) - By Matt Singer

Film Reviews: Casino Royale (1967) - By Matt Singer
Posted on Tuesday, November 30, 2004 @ 23:10:00 Mountain Standard Time by Duane

In the mid-1960s, producer Charles K. Feldman assembled a hugely talented cast including Peter Sellers and Woody Allen for a wild, chaotic shoot and wound up with one of the most popular comedies of the decade, What's New Pussycat? Two years later, using the exact same formula and many of the same actors he produced Casino Royale, one of the most notorious bombs of all time.

Very loosely based on the first James Bond novel by Ian Fleming, this psychotically psychedelic spy spoof would surely be considered for any award offered to the best cast ever wasted on a bad movie. The list of actors in Royale is an embarrassment of riches; there are so many great performers vying for our attention, there isn't enough for most of them to do. Peter Sellers receives top billing, and takes part in the single most important scene to the film's plot, but David Niven is technically the main character, though even he disappears from the screen for long stretches of the 130 minute runtime. Orson Welles, the piece's villain, doesn't even appear until the hour-and-a-half mark, and don't expect more than a glimpse of Woody Allen until the climax. William Holden, John Huston, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Peter O'Toole all pop up in small cameo appearances.

Niven plays Sir James Bond, the famous spy, now retired after a long and proud career. He is stirred back into action by a delegation of espionage officials, including M (Huston). Agents are being murdered all over the world -- including the inheritor of the James Bond 007 monicker -- and only the real Bond can stop them. The key to the scheme hinges (in one of Royale's many unclear plot points) on the activities of a fiend name Le Chiffre (Welles), a master baccarat player. Bond and his agents (who are all renamed James Bond, "to confuse the enemy" and, no doubt, the audience) enlist the aid of Sellers, the world's greatest baccarat player, to defeat and shame Le Chiffre and undermine his plot.

Fine and good if the focus had truly been on Niven and Sellers (or just one of them -- these are already two distinct stories unto themselves), but the film keep veering off into unrelated, unrewarding subplots. Terence Cooper plays a spy groomed to resist the charms of women (since the enemy is using Bond's love of the ladies to charm him into his own death). Sir James' daughter Mata (Joanna Pettet) is recruited and assigned to infiltrate a SMERSH front. Characters come and go without motivation or explanation, and whole sections could have been removed without any negative impact to the story, and, arguably, with a positive impact to the film's success as a coherent comedy. This is likely do to Feldman's out-of-control-production, credited to five (!) different directors.

If Casino Royale wasn't so oppressively long, it could be described as uneven, since it does feature some significant bright spots. In only his third cinematic appearance, Woody Allen gives one of his career’s great forgotten performances as Sir James' nephew, Jimmy Bond. Combining his trademark rapid-fire wit with impressive physical comedy, Allen barely resembles the man who would eventually redefine the romantic comedy with Annie Hall, let alone become an American Bergman. Royale is only funny in his brief appearances, yet his scenes are so funny, you nearly forgive its mistakes. Niven is well-cast in his largely thankless role; in a more disciplined film this could have easily been a career-definer. And Burt Bacharach's bouncy score, performed by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass manages to liven up even the deadliest scene.

Feldman was lucky with Pussycat, but lightning did not strike twice. Ironically, though MGM now owns the rights to this incoherent Bond parody, it has yet to remake the film into an official Bond production. I'd strongly urge that when they do, there is only one James Bond, there are no hallucinated bagpipers, and no more than three directors.