Casino Royale (1967)

Charles Kaufman, an agent turned producer, had an idea to make a James Bond film. He purchased the rights to Ian Fleming's Casino Royale--all the other Bond novels were in the hands of Albert Broccoli, whose offer was turned down. Initially Kaufman wanted Howard Hawks to direct and Cary Grant to play Bond. But instead of making a straight Bond film, he ended up making a "psychedelic movie." It's unclear if Kaufman even knew what psychedelic meant, he just knew it was popular.

The resulting film is a glorious mess. The film was directed by five different directors. There is more than one James Bond (by some count, there are dozens). The script is incoherent. Peter Sellers, who plays one of the Bonds, was fired (or quit) midway through production and had to be edited into or out of certain sequences. Yet it has its charms, particularly the sequence with, of all people, Woody Allen.

There are a lot of big-time actors in this who risk making fools of themselves. David Niven, who would have made a great Bond in the 1950s, plays a retired Bond. Leading intelligence officers from many nations, including John Huston, who directed his segment, William Holden, and Charles Boyer, ask him to come out of retirement because agents are dying and missing. He refuses until they blow up his house.

The gimmick is that Bond is replaced by other spies who take the name and number 007 (something that has been suggested to account for the fact that Bond never seems to age). Niven heads to Scotland, where SMERSH attempts to assassinate him (Deborah Kerr, a great actress, is forced to climb down a drainpipe).

The action then switches to Sellers, who is a Baccarat expert. He is trained as a new Bond, with the intention of playing Le Chiffre (Orson Welles) and beating him so that he loses a lot of money that belongs to SMERSH. Sellers wanted to play Bond straight, and is the least funny person in the film. Welles hated him so much that the two did their game at separate times.

Then comes a tedious sequence with Joanna Pettet as Mata Bond, who is supposedly Bond's daughter with Mata Hari. Considering Mata Hari died in 1917, this doesn't make much sense. Anyway, Pettet has an adventure that I've already forgotten.

The final sequence, directed by Val Guest, is the best, if only because it is revealed that the major villain is Jimmy Bond, Niven's nephew, played by Allen. Obviously Allen wrote his own lines, such as when he says to the beautiful Dalia Lavi, "We will run amok, or if you're too tired, we will walk amok." Jimmy's nefarious plot is to release a chemical that will make all women beautiful and kill all men taller than 4'6''.

The set for Allen's lair is terrific, a multi-colored series of corridors that truly makes the film psychedelic. But the ending is ruined by a farcical melee that includes cowboys and Indians and cameos by George Raft and Jean Paul Belmondo.

The best thing about Casino Royale is the score by Burt Bacharach, particularly the main theme played by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. I think I could listen to it for several hours. There are also dozens of nuble young actresses, including a very young Jacqueline Bisset (here billed as Jacky) who looks absolutely delicious.

Also on the DVD is a kinescope of the very first appearance of James Bond, a teleplay starring Barry Nelson in a one-hour version of Casino Royale. Peter Lorre plays Le Chiffre. It's pretty boring, but knowing that Barry Nelson was the first actor to play Bond can be useful during trivia night.