Casino Royale (1967)

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

MORE of the talent agent than the secret agent is flamboyantly evident in Charles K. Feldman’s “Casino Royale,” which opened at the Capitol and Cinema I yesterday—and that despite the fact that the screen is crawling with secret agents of all sexes and sorts. It is absolutely teeming with wild impersonators of James Bond, ranging from David Niven to Woody Allen and from Ursula Andress to Deborah Kerr. It clatters and bangs with 007’s trying to pull the all-time double-oh-cross on all future aspirants to Bond-olatry. But it is still the triumph of the talent agent, which Mr. Feldman used to be.
That is because he has made it on the premise that the more writers and directors he could put to work and the more actors he could cram into his picture, the more impressive, if not the better, it would be, and the more energy and noise would be projected by the sheer human multiplicity.
As a consequence, he had twice as many writers working on the script as the three that are named in the credits. He had six directors shooting segments of it — and so conglomerate are their efforts that you have to consult the program to tell where one left off and another began. And he has a cast of so many, at least 14 of whom are ranking stars, that the screen appears to be a demonstration of the population explosion at its peak.
Furthermore, since he wasn’t paying (Columbia Pictures was), he spared no expense in buying the most elaborate and fantastic sets and the finest outdoor locations in London, Scotland and points east and west to enclose his completely Brobdingnagian burlesque on the crazy cult of Bond.
You would think, with so much going for him, that he would harvest a residue of fun—and he does, especially in the beginning, when a quartet of representatives of Britain, the United States, France and the Soviet Union call upon the aging Sir James Bond to come out of retirement and help combat the growing power of Smersh, which has been killing off secret agents more rapidly than the automobile.
It really gets off to a fast start as Sir James, whom David Niven plays as though he were a clubmate of the latter-day urbane Sherlock Holmes, goes to Scotland to see the widow of the untimely murdered M, head of British Intelligence, and finds her running a buzzing hive of female spies. With Miss Kerr playing this fuzzy lady and Mr. Huston directing this phase (as well as playing M in the first scene), it looks as though the film is grandly launched.
And it continues to clip along nicely as Peter Sellers, who is supposed to be the world’s great authority on baccarat, is recruited to simulate Bond and confront the demon baccarat ace of the evil system, performed stupendously by Orson Welles. The game between these two in the Casino Royale, which is the only thing in the Ian Fleming novel of the same name translated to the film, is a jolly tangle of two notoriously able scene-stealers.
But all of Mr. Feldman’s scriptwriters and fortune tellers have so cluttered the rest of the film with wild and haphazard injections of “in” jokes and outlandish gags — such as having Joanna Pettet play the illegitimate daughter of Mata Hari and Sir James, or Woody Allen come on as Sir James’s nephew, Jimmy Bond, for one of his interminable surrealistic monologues—that it becomes repetitious and tedious. And since it’s based more on slapstick than wit, with Bond cliché piled upon cliché, it tends to crumble and sprawl.
It’s the sort of reckless, disconnected nonsense that could be telescoped or stopped at any point. If it were stopped at the end of an hour and 40 minutes instead of at the end of 2 hours and 10 minutes, it might be a terminally satisfying entertainment instead of the wearying one it is.