CASINO ROYALE
1967
Directed by John Huston, Ken Hughes, Val Guest, Joe McGrath, and Robert Parrish
Written by Wolf Mankowitz, John Law, Michael Sayers, Ben Hecht, Joseph Heller, Terry Southern, Billy Wilder, and Woody Allen ("based on" the novel by Ian Fleming)
I should not declare Casino Royale—the first James Bond movie I ever saw, even though in the strictest sense it isn't one—completely inexplicable, though it's also true that it doesn't seem like it should be able to exist. Eon Productions' adaptations of Ian Fleming's Bond novels had struck the film industry like a bomb with Dr. No; by 1967, it was striking like Thunderball. Being popular, they'd naturally already given rise to a number of knock-offs, including light-hearted spoofs, for, like the action genre that the Bond films themselves were pioneering, parodies were likewise coming into their own in the 1960s. Yet one of those spy movie spoofs, released just a few months before You Only Live Twice, would be Casino Royale itself, so that the adaptation of Fleming's own first Bond novel would be burlesqued, treating us to the meta spectacle of James Bond making fun of himself, while quite potentially degrading the brand, so if Fleming can be excused by virtue of having been dead for several years, the obvious question would be "how the hell did Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman ever let it happen?" The obvious answer is that they had no ability to stop it, and to the extent they made efforts to do so, they only created the conditions for the Casino Royale we got to coalesce out of the primordial soup of the 60s. I've already described some of Fleming's pre-Eon attempts to put Bond on-screen, so you'll recall the film rights to his first novel had been sold apart from the rest. By the 60s, they'd wound their way to one Charles K. Feldman. Feldman originally intended to work with Eon, and adapt the novel straight, or as straight as was feasible. (It seems unlikely that a fully faithful adaptation of Fleming's genuinely-grounded first Bond book could've been wholly satisfactory to either audiences or to its own makers in an immediate post-Goldfinger world; even Eon's own 2006 Casino Royale, where getting back-to-basics was the point—for to do Casino Royale faithfully, I think it would need to be the explicit point—still punches it up considerably.) But Eon was haughty, as was Sean Connery, and the demands they made were, effectively, a dare to just try doing Bond without them.
I don't believe history backs this up, but if Feldman was insulted by his treatment, and Casino Royale was his revenge, it'd fit the facts just as well. It is known, anyhow, that Feldman, bereft of any hope of adapting Fleming's deadly-serious Bond book properly, swung as far in the other direction as possible instead; hence a spoof. Yet we have to concede that he did make his Bond movie without them, for while Feldman and his studio partner, Columbia, spent so much money in the process ($12 million, more than would be spent on a "real" Bond until 1977) that they must've wondered if they'd been too bold after all, it worked out for them: the Bond name and the sheer curiosity of it ensured that Casino Royale was a decent-sized success, albeit one dwarfed by Thunderball and You Only Live Twice on either side of it. Unfortunately, so far we've only scratched the surface of Casino Royale, and let's make it clear right now: however many layers one peels off this onion, its mystery is never truly dispelled.
Still, in the broadest strokes, Feldman's Casino Royale, as a parody of a big-budget action film series, slots fairly readily into the whole continuum of megaproduction comedies that had become one of the defining trends of English-language filmmaking in the 1960s; and which, as a subgenre of film comedy generally, inevitably replicate the problems with all film comedies in the 60s, namely either striking the right chord of zany, and they're really good, or striking the wrong chord, over and over for up to three and a quarter hours, so they're intolerable. As a producer, Feldman's most important experience was with the latter kind, in the form of 1965's What's New Pussycat?, which essentially presented a blueprint for Casino Royale—constant 60s sex farce, mostly of the irritating variety—as well as something of a repertory stable of actors in Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, and Ursula Andress, although it's also true none of them are in this movie that much (despite the first and last playing "James Bond" and "Vesper Lynd" in Casino Royale), and Sellers is the single biggest reason it is the way it is. The legends in that regard are many, their only common thread being that Sellers is an asshole in all of them. My favorite is that Sellers, megalomaniacally, actually was determined to play Bond for real, and thus he worked himself up into a production-long tantrum, some of which I might guess remains in the film, specifically when (as I perceive it) he starts improv'ing dipshit "Eastern" homilies to recite in a caricatured voice in cutaway shots that he correctly guessed they couldn't simply discard (though I don't know if that was a safe bet considering how, ahem, distinctively this film is edited); there is also the matter of his feud with a co-star, Orson Welles, which is documented sufficiently by the movie itself to be more than only "legend." But whatever it was, somewhere in the middle of all this, Sellers just walked, leaving half a film that Feldman had to somehow use, even though it was objectively unusable, because he'd already spent too much money to stop.
And there's the rub: even before this (the chronology of Casino Royale's production is impenetrable), Feldman already had at least two directors, but ultimately five would be credited, Joe McGrath, Robert Parrish, John Huston, Ken Hughes, and Val Guest, each doing a different Bond, played by a different actor, like an anthology, but not. (The new script was likewise a communal experience.) This solved the problem of their vanished lead, Feldman having sent out an emergency call to every actor in Europe, disguised as an invitation to attend a star-studded party of a movie shoot, so that Casino Royale became a more bloated, more excessive film than when it was only a Sellers vehicle, or at least that impression is hard to deny when the first proper scenes appear to be nothing but an excuse to give William Holden, Charles Boyer, Kurtz Kasznar, and Huston himself their cameos, followed up with a Deborah Kerr performance that's too involved to be called "a cameo," but too embarrassing to want to call it anything else. As the film speaks for itself in this respect, its five directors were left almost entirely to their own devices and their own whims. In theory, Guest was coordinating their efforts. In practice, the sum total effect of Guest's oversight is that I don't think that there's anywhere in this 131 minute movie where a dead character shows up again*, or an actor is unaccountably teleported from one story thread to another. Though somebody either didn't know Joanna Pettet had gotten a hugely different haircut in between sequences, or they didn't care.
That the multi-threaded plot is even followable is not a completely trivial accomplishment, but it remains the case: the Casino Royale that slouched its way into theaters in April 1967 is completely broken anti-cinema. It was possibly screwed with after its premiere, inasmuch as there are reports of a parody of the Bond "gun barrel" opening with Sellers, though if that footage existed, it's long gone. What we have before us, then, in lieu of the Bond formula's opening sequence, is probably more apt, a aggressively unintelligible clip that—I believe only notionally, in that we don't actually see this footage again—comes from much later in the film, regarding Sellers's neophyte spy character, Evelyn Tremble, going by "James Bond," being accosted in Berlin by his contact, who shows his "identification" behind an obstruction in such a manner that it appears he's flashing Sellers his penis. From there, it's on to the credits sequence, and this is more comparable to a Bond film inasmuch as it is a credits sequence, though the comparison goes no further: it's a bunch of names and functions with type fancifully rendered as semi-mobile statuary, usually feminine (so there is that connection, though it's grotesque and Gilliamesque), slightly animated by Richard Williams and somewhat more similar to the credits sequence he did for What's New Pussycat? Using more clips from the movie (they fill the interior of closed glyphs), the principal effect is to emphasize what a mess its production obviously was, endlessly listing the names that constitute its cast (with three different categories: stars, co-stars, and guest stars) as well as the ones that constitute its directorial and photographic teams. (Only one editor, Bill Lenny, is credited, to which I say, "that's frighteningly plausible.") Even those clips spoil the ending. A wordless-for-now theme song courtesy of Burt Bacharach plays, which sounds like library music in service to the idea of "a lark" (it shall frequently reemerge from a score which is akin to being stuck in an elevator for 131 minutes), and so you can't say the first few minutes of Casino Royale are ever lying to you, every single thing going to reinforce the idea that what you're watching is expensive, and complicated—and potentially enjoyable!—but not so much "a real movie."
Oh boy, the plot. As a summary, despite the convolutions of an ensemble cast, it could possibly seem more straightforward than it ever feels while you're watching it. My summary will not allow you such complacency. So: spies from every nation are dying all over the world, and, with the major intelligence agencies' belated realization that they're under attack from some unknown adversary, they've teamed up to beg the intercession of the god of spies, James Bond (David Niven), which is to say, the real James Bond, not the oversexed killer whom MI6 latterly gave his name and double-0 number. Bond has been in retirement for many years, having left the service in regret over his betrayal of his great love, Mata Hari, implicitly the goddess of spies, which is one freakish thing for a film made in 1967 to attempt—I don't even necessarily hate it, but it feels like the post-modern, late-20th/early-21st century approach of a Warren Ellis or Alan Moore that ought to have been vastly more distracting to a more proximate audience who would absolutely be asking, "wait, did you just say James Bond was in World War I?"—but anyway, he's not apt to come out of retirement now. However, through some stratagem that M (Huston) has hatched, or else through some scheme of the adversary's, either way through the film's most outrageously bad shot-to-shot storytelling (it has been established that Huston directed the opening Niven-centric half-hour-or-so), Bond's house gets blown up, and M dies, and in recognition of their ancient friendship, Bond springs into... paying respects to his widow, who's been replaced by evil horny lady spy Mimi (Kerr), while his castle has been occupied by M's "daughters," a coterie of subordinate evil horny lady spies nominally between the ages of 16 and 19.
Look, basically it's just an unsuccessful prototype version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail's Castle Anthrax sequence that's three times as long, though the intentions are slightly different. On one hand, the idea is satirizing how Bond is a sex addict, and how this Bond transcends that, and that's a cognizable idea; on the other, it is solid evidence that in 1967 you could still be legitimately racist to the Scots, since that's what 75% of its jokes are (even if, technically-speaking, Bond's enemies are in Scotsface), so the only thing that makes this make sense to me is that they really wanted to insult Connery by way of his whole country. Niven, incidentally, was one of Fleming's early wishlist choices for Bond; it is entirely impossible, from this film, to determine why that was besides "a personal acquaintanceship." There are differences between Fleming's Bond and Eon's, yes, but this is some kind of radically distinct anti-Bond monkish nerd, though it speaks to Casino Royale's slapdashery that this characterization lasts only as long as this sequence, and very shortly (by which I mean "what feels like three hours later") Niven's Bond will be all-but-openly hitting on his own daughter. For now, Mimi falls in love with Bond because he's so impassively masterful in this film's tedious way, and thus betrays her employer, ensuring that Bond survives their assassination attempts. Following a redundant but cool-enough car chase, the movie actually starts, as the enemy's repeated attempts to kill him convince Bond to accept the invitation to take over MI6, whereupon our monkish nerd welcomes himself back to the office by kissing Moneypenny Jr. (Barbara Bouchet; and this isn't the daughter I referred to, though it's slightly implied she could be another one) full on the mouth. Even then, the real "what the fuck" concerns Niven's affectation of a stutter, which so far has been a significant part of his performance, and which he now decides, in dialogue, to abandon, for things have gotten far too urgent for such time-wasting frivolities. So what was a minor irritant, alongside all the major irritants, throughout the entire half hour/several day-long prologue is now made, in what I assume was another director's hands, only set-up to a halfway-amusing surrealist gag about eliminating what sure seemed like it was going to be salient feature of the film. I mean, I'm on your side, unknown sequence director, but I'd say that completely exemplifies Casino Royale, except this time we're lucky enough to have gotten a punchline actually explaining it.
This is taking too long. So: Bond, to confound his secret enemy, declares that all agents of MI6 are now James Bond (this was evidently the sole surviving element of Billy Wilder's screenplay draft), and this is also damned weird, though it plays better today now that we've had six actors all very hypothetically playing the same James Bond, which makes it a prescient satire instead of just a reaction to Sellers fucking everybody over. Anyway, we get the completely superfluous Bond (Terence Cooper) in a wan sequence where the joke is supposed to be "Bond punches a bunch of female MI6 agents in the face, for training purposes," but it won't develop this Thunderballesque shock comedy to a sufficient place of absurdity to actually be funny. I think (I might be wrong) another James Bond (Daliah Lavi) shows up here at the judo range with Cooper, though her femininity is no bar to her taking the name and number, too. Indeed, for the most important Bond, Bond Sr. seeks out his child with Mata Hari, Mata Bond (Pettet), in Indonesia, declares her 007, and sends the daughter of the greatest spies of all time to her mother's alma mater in Berlin, a dancing/espionage school, in a bid to undermine the gambler and pimp Le Chiffre (Welles), an agent of their secret enemy. On the other prong of the same mission, baccarat geek Tremble (Sellers, recall) is approached and seduced by Bond Sr.'s intermediary, James Bond, nee Vesper Lynd (Andress), whereupon Tremble too is dubbed "James Bond," gets handed off to Q (Geoffrey Bayldon) even though Feldman couldn't have owned those rights and is lucky Eon didn't sue him, and is forthwith sent to bankrupt Le Chiffre in what, in comparison to everything else, almost resembles the plot of the novel. This goes poorly, like in the plot of the novel, and while Mata does succeed, she's kidnapped by a flying saucer that appears in London, rendering her to the secret base beneath the Casino Royale (this, uh, does not resemble the novel), where she and everybody else meets the mastermind behind it all, Jimmy Bond (Woody Allen), Bond Sr.'s dissatisfied and neurotic nephew, who has established SMERSH (because it sounds silly if you don't know what it means, but also because Feldman definitely didn't have the rights to SPECTRE) to enact his will, which is to take over the world with robot doubles in order to more expediently unleash a precisely-engineered plague that will 1)make every woman beautiful and 2)kill all men over 4'6", leaving Jimmy Bond as sole ruler of all pussy.
I cannot claim absolutely that Allen wrote his own evil scheme, though I expect he did, and he did write all his own dialogue (the only place the scheme is referenced besides the words of his major scene partner, Lavi), which is very obvious given that Allen is the only figure in the movie who's consistently funny, at least in any way that doesn't require you to invoke art comedy surrealism (why, he's got some genuinely great exchanges, of which "They said Eistein was crazy"/"That's not true, nobody ever called Einstein crazy"/"Well, they would've if he'd carried on like this" is the best). He honestly might be the only figure whose participation actually entirely overlaps with a parody of a Goddamn James Bond movie, in that his climactic scenes all take place amidst sets that production designer Michael Stringer has ensured will effectively parody groovy 60s super-spy tropes (not least Ken Adam's tropes, but not limited to them); meanwhile, Jimmy Bond is a pretty great send-up of Bondian world-beaters, and hell, it is the Goldfinger plot, only it entails blowing up more sexually-appealing men instead of gold (it's also confusingly-amusing that SMERSH is virtually all-female except for Jimmy himself, sufficiently that I somewhat despise myself for fankwanking this stupid movie in order to make sense of his henchwomen as an initial cohort of experimental plague "victims" whom Jimmy has secured the loyalty of by turning them all into "top broads"). Even Allen's disconnected introductory scene is a hilarious send-up of the idea of the quintessential nebbish playing James Bond.
Unfortunately, rather more of the movie is a send-up of the idea of Peter Sellers playing James Bond, and hating it, and, either as an outgrowth of that hatred or simply because it was his nature, being mostly obnoxious, though I guess we can be more sanguine about it on the other side of 1997 given that it planted the seed that grew into the Austin Powers movies, as it turns out that Casino Royale was somehow Mike Myers's most fundamental Bond touchstone. Inevitably, the movie is never more fractured than when it's focused on Sellers, to the extent that scenes that Sellers wouldn't have even personally been in, like the elimination of 006, still weren't actually filmed, so we just have Lynd dumping some random body out of her penthouse and the sheer nonsensicality of that is the joke; the same attends to scenes Sellers is supposed to be in, like the absent one detailing his capture by Le Chiffre, its function somewhat fulfilled by B-roll of Sellers unaccountably getting into a racecar and speaking stupidly in what might or might not be a Pink Panther reference. It becomes an actual fever dream when Sellers is face-to-face—more as a matter of editing than reality—with Welles, not so much because their enmity for one another meant that any shot with both Tremble and Le Chiffre is likely to involve a body double, but because to keep Welles happy, whichever director was in charge of that ego had to accede to his demand that three minutes of Casino Royale would be Le Chiffre doing magic tricks directly at the camera. These are magic tricks which they cut into anyway, so just, like, fucking whatever. (Then it becomes a fever dream, diegetically, as the probably-still-couldn't-be-in-a-movie-in-1967 sexual torture of James Bond becomes an outlandish psychedelic mindfuck instead, shading inexorably into more anti-Scots humor rendered as a nightmare, though apparently real as Tremble does die; Le Chiffre does as well, at the hands of SMERSH agents who burst through his own CCTV screens because, well, at this point, why not?)
The better news is that the complete fragmentation of the film's production means that, except for the the total drag of Huston's opening, it's never miserable for long. It is only occasionally actually good, but it's challenging in an almost-pugilistic way that a $12 million crowd-pleaser really ought never be, and the combative nature of even many of the bad scenes is still invigoratingly bad, whereas the holes within holes of the scene-to-scene plotting can make you feel like you're going crazy in a way that I would describe as "fun." There simply weren't any limits, so that even second-unit director Richard Talmadge, who oversaw the wacky-ass ending of What's New Pussycat? and was again handed the brief of doing a 60s comedy finale but now with tenfold the resources, clearly wasn't given strict instructions, so that when it comes time for "Bond's army to storm the lair" it's stock-footage from Westerns that becomes cowboys punching gamblers which becomes Native American paratroopers, solely because the phrase, "Geronimo," can be turned into a Tex Averyesque pun.
Meanwhile, there are "actually good" things. There's Allen, as noted (and I do kind of love the way they end the movie—it's some kind of joke, possibly even intentional, that the sole effective heroism in the entire film arises from Davi's distressed damsel Bond, who's in the movie for about three minutes), and even more, there's the matter of Pettet's Mata Bond's middle sequence, which is arguably an unidentifiable third category, but whatever it is, it's the movie's best sustained go at being compellingly wrong, starting with how Pettet's participation is inaugurated with a full-on dance number in Indonesian style that the movie is taking so completely seriously that Stringer had to build a whole stagey set to accommodate the camera choreography, and whichever cinematographer it was (possibly Nicholas Roeg) is shooting it absolutely for real, with lush shadow and carefully-applied chiaroscuro. It just flies off into the wilderness from there, so that while I don't know who directed Pettet's sequence, Stringer must've been its chief author, given that the point of it more than anything else is to production design an expressionist vision of gray West Berlin grimly clinging to life against an East Berlin entirely constructed out of crimson, more like an editorial cartoon than a movie set, but it is a movie set, supplemented by the full-on haunted house nonsense in the dance-espionage school captured in dizzyingly distinctive, split-diopter-heavy photography and made "funny," or whatever, by the perversity of its principals (Anna Quayle's headmistress and her cyborg (?) familiar played by Ronnie Corbett) and the whole concept of an apolitical school for sexy blackmail. Pettet is also obliged, for no fully-necessary reason, to spend this entire sequence running around in her Javanese dancer costume, and as I saw Casino Royale as a very young lad, it all has the tang of "formational sexual memory," which I guess doesn't hurt it even if I also can't add that to the "good" column. But then, Casino Royale doesn't care whether you think it's "good," and the way it accidentally parodies Bond is kind of, honest, intellectually exciting: because while the "real" Bond films had themselves already become all about individual artists (editors/second-unit directors, production designers, stunt coordinators) pursuing their own ideas somewhat independently but all pointed in the same direction to achieve the same goal, Casino Royale is about how a Bond movie, or any movie, can take the same approach and fly right the fuck apart. And I appreciate this about it. No, it's not a good movie, but that might be because it isn't a movie in the first place, and while I still don't like it, I've seen it as often as any Bond, and I'm sure this won't be the last.
Score: 5.01/10
*And I might be wrong, because this might be exactly what happens with Jaqueline Bisset's small role, though it depends on whether she died, which is quite unclear.
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