3 / 10
Official trailer
The Rights Problem
Casino Royale was Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, published in 1953, and its film rights had been sold separately, before the Eon Productions series with Sean Connery began. Producer Charles K. Feldman owned them, and when he couldn’t make a deal with Eon or persuade Connery to star, he decided to turn the book into a lavish, star-studded comedy.
The result is one of the strangest big-studio films of the sixties. It’s a spoof of the Bond films made at the height of Bond mania, with a budget that ballooned out of control and a production so chaotic that it’s almost as famous as the film. Fleming’s first novel wouldn’t be filmed seriously until 2006, with Daniel Craig.
I find this film exhausting. It has David Niven, Peter Sellers, Orson Welles, Woody Allen and a Bacharach score, and it squanders nearly all of them on jokes that fall flat. The waste is the worst of it, since the ingredients for a good Bond spoof are sitting right there on the screen and nobody in charge knew what to do with them. That’s a damning verdict for a film with this much money behind it.
Sir James
The plot, such as it is, begins with the real Sir James Bond, played by David Niven, living in quiet retirement in an English mansion, disgusted by the sex-and-gadgets reputation of the agent who’s taken his name. When the heads of the world’s intelligence agencies come to persuade him to fight the evil organization SMERSH, he reluctantly returns to duty.
His plan is to confuse the enemy by giving several agents the name James Bond, and the film follows many of them. Niven is charming and dignified, a stammering, teetotal gentleman who’s the opposite of Connery’s Bond, and he’s the only thread holding the film together. Fleming had reportedly wanted Niven for the role in the first place, and there’s a gentle irony in seeing him finally play Bond in a film that mocks everything the character became.
I like Niven here a great deal, and I resent the film for burying him under everybody else’s segments.
Five Directors
The film was directed, in pieces, by five credited directors: John Huston, Ken Hughes, Val Guest, Robert Parrish and Joseph McGrath, with other hands involved too. Each one worked on different segments, often without knowing what the others were doing, and several writers, credited and uncredited, contributed scenes.
You can feel it on the screen. The film lurches from one style to another, with different tones, different jokes and different characters, and it never settles into a coherent story. It’s less a film than a pile of sketches, some of them amusing, most of them not.
For Writers
Five directors worked on separate segments with little coordination, and the film never finds a single tone or story. Too many voices produced no voice at all.
A story needs a controlling vision, even when many people contribute. Without one, scenes pull in different directions, and the reader loses any sense of what the story is about or where it’s going.
If you’re collaborating, or pulling together material written at different times, decide early what the story’s core is, and cut everything that doesn’t serve it. Coherence counts for more than any individual scene, however clever. Readers forgive a dull scene in a clear story far more easily than a brilliant scene in a confusing one.
Peter Sellers
Peter Sellers plays Evelyn Tremble, a baccarat expert recruited to beat Le Chiffre at the casino, and his section is closest to Fleming’s novel. At first, his section promises something funnier and sharper than anything around it.
Then it falls apart. Sellers reportedly clashed with Orson Welles, who played Le Chiffre, and refused to be on set with him, so their scenes were shot separately. Sellers then left the production before finishing his part, and the filmmakers had to write his character out. That’s why Tremble vanishes abruptly and the plot makes even less sense than it otherwise would.
Sellers’s exit loses me for good. His section is the one stretch with a pulse, and watching it get amputated mid-story because two stars wouldn’t share a room is maddening.
For Writers
Sellers left mid-production, and his character simply vanishes from the story. The plot collapses around the missing piece.
Every character who carries part of a plot creates an obligation to the reader. If they disappear without resolution, the reader notices at once, and the whole story feels broken.
When a thread has to be cut, whether in a film or a manuscript, it still needs a real ending, even a small one, a line or a scene that closes it off. Abandoned characters leave holes that no amount of spectacle can fill, and readers remember the holes longer than the spectacle. Tremble’s disappearance is the moment most viewers give up on the film.
Orson Welles
Orson Welles plays Le Chiffre, the SMERSH agent who needs to win at baccarat to cover his debts, and he spends most of his scenes performing magic tricks at the gaming table. Welles clearly took the job for the money, and he’s enjoying himself in a detached, amused way.
His casino scenes with Sellers, shot separately and edited together, have a strange, disjointed feel. Watching a director of his stature doing card tricks in a film nobody was steering depresses me more than anything else in it. Welles was raising money for his own projects at the time, taking acting jobs wherever he could find them, and this was among the more lucrative.
The Bond Girls
Ursula Andress, who’d played Honey Ryder in Dr. No, plays Vesper Lynd, a millionaire spy who recruits Tremble, and she’s glamorous, amused and largely wasted. Deborah Kerr turns up as a Scottish widow in a bizarre castle sequence, with a thick accent and a lot of silly jokes. Joanna Pettet plays Mata Bond, Sir James’s daughter by Mata Hari, and Barbara Bouchet plays Miss Moneypenny’s daughter.
The women are there for decoration, in keeping with the era, and the film’s jokes about Bond’s womanizing are tired even by the standards of 1967.
Woody Allen
Woody Allen plays Jimmy Bond, Sir James’s nervous, neurotic nephew, and he turns out to be the secret villain, Dr. Noah, head of SMERSH, who plans to make every woman beautiful and kill every man taller than him. Allen gives a flash of his early comic persona, and a few of his lines are funny.
His scheme, involving a germ that will do the job and a bomb in his own stomach, is as silly as everything else in the film, and it leads directly into the chaotic finale.
The Finale
The climax is a free-for-all at the casino, with cowboys, Native Americans on horseback, the French Foreign Legion, a seal, parachuting American troops and dozens of characters all fighting at once, while Woody Allen’s character hiccups and the building explodes. It’s frantic, noisy, very long and almost completely unfunny, and it’s the stretch I’d cut first if anybody handed me the negative.
The film ends in heaven, with most of the cast playing harps, and one Bond descending to the other place. By then, most viewers will have lost track of who’s who and why anybody is anywhere.
For Writers
The finale throws everything and everybody into one chaotic battle, and the result is noise instead of comedy.
Escalation works when each step builds clearly on the last. Chaos without structure, however big and expensive, quickly becomes boring, because the reader can’t follow what’s at stake or who’s winning.
In a climax, bigger rarely means better. The reader needs to know who wants what, who’s in the way and what will happen if they fail.
Take those away, and even an explosion of cowboys and seals is just noise, and noise gets boring faster than anything. A small fight with clear stakes beats a giant brawl with none, every single time.
Bacharach
The one thing the film unquestionably gets right is its music. Burt Bacharach wrote the score, a delight: playful, jazzy and full of sixties swing. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass performed the title theme, and it’s a catchy, bouncy instrumental.
Best of all is The Look of Love, sung by Dusty Springfield, a smoky, sensual ballad that earned an Oscar nomination and became a standard. It’s far better than the film around it, and the main reason anybody remembers Casino Royale fondly.
The Look of Love is the one piece of this production I’d defend without reservation. Springfield sounds like she wandered in from a far better movie.
Feldman’s Gamble
Charles K. Feldman had produced What’s New Pussycat, a zany comedy with Peter Sellers and Woody Allen, and it was a big hit. He wanted Casino Royale to be a bigger, flashier version of the same thing: a parade of stars, a lot of silliness and a swinging sixties style.
He kept adding stars, directors, writers and sets, and the budget kept climbing. The film ranked among the most expensive comedies of the decade, and it earned back its money mainly because the Bond craze was at its peak. Audiences bought tickets for anything with Bond on the poster. Few of them left happy.
Mata Bond in Berlin
One of the film’s stranger sections sends Mata Bond, Sir James’s daughter, to a spy school in West Berlin, housed in a building designed like a German expressionist film, all tilted walls and painted shadows. The design is a clever visual joke, a nod to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and it looks terrific.
The sequence has almost nothing to do with the rest of the story. That’s true of most of the film. The detour is pretty and pointless, and typical of a production that seemed to value individual set pieces over any sense of where the story was going.
Sixties Style
For all its failings, Casino Royale looks wonderful in places. The sets are lavish and colorful, full of op art, psychedelic lighting and swinging sixties fashion. The casino, the Scottish castle, Dr. Noah’s hideout and the Berlin spy school are all standout pieces of design.
If you watch it with the sound turned down and the Bacharach soundtrack playing, it’s a pleasant enough time capsule of an era. It’s only when you try to follow the story that it becomes a chore.
A Mess
Simply put, Casino Royale is a spectacular failure. It had an enormous cast, a huge budget and some of the most talented people in the business, and it’s a shapeless, unfunny mess. Its jokes fall flat, its plot is impossible to follow and it goes on far too long. It’s interesting as a curiosity, a monument to sixties excess and a demonstration of what happens when a film has too many cooks. The music and a handful of scenes are worth seeing. The rest isn’t.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Its lesson is how a film with enormous talent and resources can fail without a coherent vision. Its individual pieces are occasionally amusing, and together they add up to nothing.
A story isn’t the sum of its scenes. It needs a spine, a central thread that every scene connects to, or the reader stops caring.
Before adding another clever scene, ask what it adds to the story’s spine. If the answer is nothing, it doesn’t belong, however good it’s on its own.
Too Many Bonds
I give Casino Royale (1967) a 3 because the pieces are there and the film throws them away. A great cast, five directors and a bottomless budget add up to almost no coherent story, and the only things that survive the wreck are Burt Bacharach’s music and Dusty Springfield’s The Look of Love. Watch the 2006 film instead, and listen to the soundtrack of this one.
