Casino Royale

The Mission
The world's pre-eminent spy organisations unite to coax the original James Bond (David Niven) out of retirement. An organisation known as SMERSH are killing off all the best spies and it's up to Sir James Bond to put an end to it. M (John Huston) orders the bombing of Bond's mansion in order to force him his co-operation and is accidentally killed in the resulting explosion. Bond takes over as the new M and recruits the talents of six new agents who are all also designated as 'James Bond', including master Baccarat player Evelyn Tremble (Peter Sellers) - who is sent to Casino Royale to take on SMERSH agent Le Chiffre (Orson Welles).

Jimmy Bond Yo!
Where do I start? David Niven plays a retired gentlemanly Sherlock Holmes-like Bond with a slight stutter. He bemoans the modern pretenders to his name as "joke shop spies" and seems to be a bit shy of women (!) There are about six or seven other James Bonds featured throughout the film... Peter Sellers is fairly nondescript as the Tremble-James Bond and his sequences form a large part of the film without always making complete sense (actually, a lot about this film doesn't really make sense). Woody Allen's version of James Bond makes for the most neurotic and inadequate of spies, and is pretty just Woody Allen doing his usual schtick. Newcomer Terence Cooper plays a typically debonair version of Bond who undergoes extensive training in order to become less of a womaniser (a joke at the expense of Sean Connery's Bond). To make things even more confusing, no less than four female spies are also given the codename of 'James Bond' throughout the course of the film.

Villainy
At first glance, Le Chiffre seems to be the villain of the piece (he certainly is in the novel). It pretty much just amounts to an extended cameo appearance from Orson Welles though, which is a shame as Orson Welles would've made a great serious Bond villain. Le Chiffre is a big gambler, and (much in the same vein as Goldfinger) cheats when playing cards. Welles plays him as a cigar-chomping king of the casino, showing off with magic tricks as he wins round after round.

At the risk of spoiling this awful film, Woody Allen's James Bond turns out to be Dr Noah, the master-villain behind everything. It's pretty much just an excuse for some of the comedian's comic routines at the expense of James Bond cliches. The very idea of Allen playing a supervillain is nearly enough to get a laugh on it's own, and it's probably worth mentioning that the two or three scenes where Allen appears are the only genuinely funny bits in the whole film.

Ronnie Corbett plays an Oddjob-ish henchman role as Polo, a kind of cyborg-butler who has unrequited feelings of love for both Mata Hari (Bond's former girlfriend) and her daughter, Mata Bond.

Buddies and Babes
John Huston plays a Scottish M, and appears alongside a representive of the CIA (played by a smirking William Holden), the KGB (Kurt Kasznar) and French Intelligence (Charles Boyer). These are pretty much just cameo appearances. A lot of this film is made up of just cameo appearances.

Ursula Andress plays a femme fatale of sorts, but she's even worse an actress than she was in Dr. No, and her line delivery is as awkward as ever. Deborah Kerr hams it up as a SMERSH agent posing as M's widow, overegging her Scottish accent and generally embarrassing herself. Her character falls for Niven's James Bond in the tradition of previous Bond films.

There's also Moneypenny (Barbara Bouchet), who gets a 'James Bond' codename, and Mata Bond (Joanna Petet), James Bond's sari-wearing daughter to Mata Hari. There's far too many other 'Bond girls' to mention, the film really goes over the top and it's hard to keep track of who is who, and it doesn't really seem to matter that much.

Locations
Casino Royale mostly takes place in the UK and Scotland. Scotland is treated like a foreign land with an exotic culture ala Turkey in From Russia With Love or the Bahamas in Thunderball. The filmmakers seem to think it's funny to have ladies dancing around in a stupid manner whilst wearing kilts and making weird sounds.

Gadgets and Tricks of the Trade
The Woody Allen Bond has explosive cigarettes. Niven's Bond slingshots a homing beacon in order to lead an explosive bird back to the enemy. The Peter Sellers Bond has a Union Jack pullover with a communicator hidden in it, a TV watch, and a whole host of other gadgets that he doesn't get to use.

Licence to Kill
I didn't keep track of this as the film was all over the place. The most bizarre kill of the film would have to be when the Peter Sellers James Bond is subjected to hallucinogenic torture and is suddenly shot dead by his fellow agent (Ursula Andress), a 'creative' decision neccessitated by the fact that Sellers was fired mid-way through the making of the film.

Quotes
MISS GOODTHIGHS: I'm Miss Goodthighs.
EVELYN TREMBLE: I can see that.

WOODY ALLEN JAMES BOND: You can't shoot me! I have a very low threshold of death. My doctor says I can't have bullets enter my body at any time.

How Does It Rate?
Terrible. The very un-Bond like introduction seems to point at this being more of a 60s pastiche than a direct Bond parody... Casino Royale is very much an all-star swingining 60s comedy spoof. Directed by five or six directors and featuring actors who hated each other so much that one of them had to go (Sellers and Welles), it makes very little sense beyond being a series of loosely linked sketches. In fact, a lot of the Peter Sellers footage seems to be out of context and squeezed into the film for the sake of using as much footage of him as possible... I don't really understand why we have to see him putting on a variety of bizarre costumes, or why he sometimes affects an Asian accent. It's just weird and pointless.

The film tries to be a comedy but it lacks the focus to be an effective James Bond parody... it pokes fun at Scottish accents, Bond's gadgets and the idea of every woman falling for Bond, but it also features a lot of shameless hamming and an incredibly poor ending. At the end of the day it's just a boring and unfunny mess with severe pacing issues and an uneven tone. James Bond fans will hate it (with good reason) and there's very little to recommend it as anything other than as a time capsule of 60s pop culture and a who's who of 1960s celebritydom.

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DIRECTOR: Val Guest, Ken Hughes, John Huston, Joseph McGrath, Robert Parish, Richard Talmadge
WRITER/SOURCE: Script by Wolf Mankowitz, John Law and Michael Sayers. Based on the novel by Ian Fleming.
KEY ACTORS: David Niven, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Ursula Andress, Orson Welles, John Huston, William Holden, Joanna Petet, Daliah Lavi, Deborah Kerr, Charles Boyer, Kurt Kasznar, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Terrance Cooper, Barbara Bouchet, Jacqueline Bisset, Ronnie Corbett, Geoffrey Bayldon, Vladek Sheybal. Cameos and uncredited appearances from Peter O'Toole, Richard Burton, Geraldine Chapman, Burt Kwouk, Angelica Huston, Stirling Moss, Jack Gwillam and George Raft.

RELATED TEXTS:
- The novel Casino Royale by Ian Fleming (the first James Bond novel), on which this film is only very vaguely based on.
- Casino Royale had previously been filmed as an episode of the TV series Climax!, featuring Peter Lorre as Le Chiffre.
- The novel was eventually given a serious big screen treatment in 2006 as Casino Royale, starring Daniel Craig as James Bond.
- The two main James Bond films that this 1967 version of Casino Royale references are From Russia With Love and Goldfinger.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated Best Song Oscar (The Look of Love).
BAFTAs - nominated Best Costumes.