Not much......and you'd need tweezers and a microscope to pluck out still watchable moments in this notorious James Bond mega-spoof.
This isn't a movie born of writers and directors, though there's six credited directors and possibly a phone book full of uncredited writers who worked on it. The true auteur behind "Casino Royale" was high-powered talent agent Charles K. Feldman. This legendary wheeler dealer managed to snag the movie rights to the one Ian Fleming Bond novel that somehow eluded Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, the producers of the Sean Connery Bonds.
With the entire world consumed with Bond-mania, Feldman decided not to make an actual movie out of 'Casino Royale'......instead he convened a three ring cinematic circus.....multiple directors, untold amounts of writers, a huge cast of international stars.....all of these elements then randomly thrown together in a series of barely connected set-pieces lampooning all the usual Bond tropes, gorgeous girls, karate fights, car chases, explosions and idiotic secret agent gimmicks. A recipe for a nuclear level disaster....130 minutes of senseless, shapeless gobbledegook that, for sheer filmmaking folly, has rarely been equaled......
But did we mention Bond-mania? Arriving a few months before the next hotly anticipated Connery Bond, "You Only Live Twice", "Casino Royale", rotten to its very core, still made some big box office bucks anyway. As a counter-attack in June, United Artists triumphantly emblazoned their "You Only Live Twice" posters with the slogan 'Sean Connery IS James Bond!' This didn't sit well with Connery, already unhappy with his type-casting and itching to break the chains of his Bond-age.....which is exactly what he did for a few years......
Watching 'Royale' again, we struggled mightily to find something we could still enjoy.....if nothing else, it increased our admiration for British director Val Guest. Out of the director platoon deployed to make this movie, Guest took on the impossible assignment of linking the other directors' sequences together to try to make a coherent whole....they might as well have asked him to sculpt a replica of London using jello.....
Here's a the quick breakdown: The Scottish countryside stuff at the beginning, with David Niven and Deborah Kerr......beyond tedious, it takes over twenty minutes to set up a lame pun for Kerr to deliver. Then we lurch into long, long scenes with Peter Sellers and Ursula Andress......Andress sounds comatose and Sellers had crawled so far into his own ego that he appeared disconnected from any film he starred in. Even for chaos ringmaster Charles K.Feldman, Sellers became too problematic.....Feldman fired him, which did no damage to the continuity of the movie since it had no continuity of any kind to begin with. ....
But wait.....by law of averages, we stumbled on a watchable part, the Berlin 'school for spies' sequence. The superstar here was production designer Michael Stringer......with his East Berlin bathed in deep red and his spy school done up in expressionistic Cabinet of Caligari twisty shapes. And while we're in this brief generous mood, a word of praise for Burt Bachrach's bouncy, jokey score.....he's the only creative contributor to the movie who displayed an honest sense of humor. We wish the music could have been applied to a better film......
The rest of it.....a plunge into Bond spoof hell, a well long sucked dry by dozens of competing imitation tongue-in-cheekers. Woody Allen looks positively agonized as he desperately improvises his own dialogue while intentionally bumping into things. Mercifully, the movie puts everyone out of their (and our) misery with its throw-in-the-kitchen-sink finale.....the casino brawl featuring cowboys on horseback, parachuting disco Indians, the Keystone Cops, barking seals, a bubble machine and George Raft and Jean Paul Belmondo. Woody Allen,in a way, a living symbol of the film, self-detonates, blowing him and the cast to smithereens.
As a backhanded compliment, we'd consider "Casino Royale" as a glowing tribute to the Connery Bond films. Those films held moviegoers' imaginations and world popular culture in such a powerful grip that a bloated atrocity like Charles K.Feldman's Bond circus seemed inevitable. And some 30 years later, Mike Meyers sifted through the wreckage of the '67 'Casino Royale' and other similar misbegotten Bond wanna-be's to craft his Austin Powers spoofs. But unlike the massive crew recruited by Feldman, Meyers remembered to make his movies funny.......
So the BQ bids a final farewell to 'Casino Royale', we doubt we'll ever torture ourselves with it again.....unlike Scotch and wine, the passage of time hasn't made it any better than it was in 1967. 1 star (*)......it still stinks.
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