Outside of the monopoly that EON Studios has on all things James Bond, there are two, pesky variants that lurk just outside of the realms of the official. The second is Irvin Kirchner’s Never Say Never Again, a weird, alternate version of Thunderball that saw Sean Connery return as an aging Bond thanks to the magic of legal loopholes; but the first is an entirely different kettle of fish that still remains one of the greatest oddities the franchise has ever known.
That movie is Casino Royale and it existed a full 39 years before Daniel Craig had his nuts pulped by a rope twirling Mads Mikkelsen; but while every Bond film that exists has their eyes chiefly locked on block busting spy shenanigans (yes, even the silly ones), this version of Casino Royale aimed to take advantage of the popularity of spy flicks by ripping the ever loving piss out of them by being a raucous spoof. It’s here that things started to go spectacularly wrong, and due to enough behind the scenes issues to encompass a dozen compromised movies, the film stands as one of the greatest messes in cinematic history.
Legendary secret agent James Bond has been retired for 20 years despite his name being carried on by replacement agents, but after SMERSH has been eliminating agents from every country out in the field, the heads of various spy agencies from all around the globe flock to his mansion to persuade him to get back in action. However, this Debussy loving, stuttering recluse is pretty adamant about staying at home, so M has his mansion blown up in order to change his mind.
After the head of MI6 is killed in his own explosion, Bond gets sidetracked but SMERCH agents pretending to be M’s family who try to lure James into all sorts of sexual escapades to destroy 007s “celebrate image” but once they all fail, the agent returns to London and is promptly named head of MI6. First there, things start to get really strange as the movie starts to focus on disparate characters that seem to have little to do with the original plot.
First, there’s James’ plan to name all the double-0 agents “James Bond” to confuse SMERSH and make them highly resistant to feminine charms; but from there we meet baccarat player Evelyn Tremble, who has been hired by ex-agent Vesper Lynd to challenge SMERSH agent Le Chiffre at the Casino Royale to stop him regaining finds that he’s lost after some embezzlement.
However, from here we shift to focus on Mata Bond, the estranged child of James and Mata Hari, whom is also recruited into service to take out a SMERSH training centre that Le Chiffre is also using to gain funds.
Anyway, all these conflicting plot threads finally converge at the Casino Royale where the main arch villain is finally forced to show his face – but it’s hardly the face of evil everyone was expecting.
Until I watched Casino Royale, I genuinely believed that it was impossible to experience gaslighting from a motion picture, but since coming out the other side, I feel that this overlong rectal exam of a movie has done precisely that. When you look at the sheer talent involved both in front of, and behind the camera, you somewhat refuse to believe that Casino Royale is the muddled, chaotic and painfully unfunny movie it actually is and so I sat there, waiting for the jokes to start, for a full twenty minutes, thinking all the while that I was the problem. I mean, I knew about the unhinged production that saw numerous directors enter and leave filming like the studio had a malfunctioning revolving door and I also knew that Peter Sellers packed up his shit in the midst of shooting because Orson Welles got on his tits, but as joke after joke crashed and burned in front of my eyes, I genuinely was wondering: “ls it me? Am I just too dumb to get the jokes?”. Well, for anyone out there who has wondered the same, let me assure you that it’s not you who is the problem, and its not just a case of the movie and its humour just being “of its time”. The fact is, that thanks to its ever-changing cadre of directors that include John (Night Of The Iguana) Houston, Ken (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) Hughes, Joseph (Digby: The Biggest Dog In The World) McGrath, Robert (Fire Down Below) Parrish and Val (various Hammer projects) Guest, and some frantic editing in a futile attempt to paper over Grand Canyon-sized cracks, the movie never manages to achieve any sense of equilibrium. Every section literally feels like it’s from a different film that range from boring (the scenes at M’s Scotland home are excruciatingly unfunny), just weird and off putting. I’m not sure who thought it would be a good idea for the film to have Sellers dress like Napoleon, Toulouse-Lautrec and – of all things – Hitler for literally no reason at all, but it makes about as much sense as an extended gag involving Ronnie Corbett’s German butler whizzing around a room because his pacemaker is faulty – and that’s one if the funnier jokes.
The expansive, and admittedly impressive, cast either seem utterly confused or simply nonplussed. David Niven gives it the old college try but is swamped by the randomness of the material; Peter Seller simply eats up time by randomly slipping into Chinese or Indian accents before he’s ignominiously killed in a hallucination; Orson Welles would rather be doing magic tricks then doing villain stuff and the female cast – that contains the likes of Ursula Andress, Barbara Bouchet, Jacqueline Bisset, Joanna Pettet and Daliah Lavi tey to do the best they can as they’re shuffled on and off screen with barely any rhyme of reason. In fact, the sole two names who walk out of the farrago with any dignity are (ironically) Woody Allen as the prat-falling Jimmy Bond (“You can’t shoot me! I have a very low threshold of death!”) and Burt Bacharach, whose admittedly groovy score rightfully won him an oscar nod.
As the film careens towards its demented, cartoonish conclusion, it seems even sanity gives up the ghost and the ending finally collapses into a banshee scream of unrestrained craziness that makes the meta ending of Blazing Saddles look like the final charge in Glory. Guys painted up like Red Indians parachute in with teepees, a poisoned Allen hiccups animated rainbow clouds, seals fight on the bar, people swing from the chandelier and a roulette wheel spins through the air unleashing so much laughing gas, my decidedly unamused arse was feeling decidedly jealous. But while this sumptuously shot carnage vaguely resembles the sort of parties Caligula would probably hold if he’d lived to the swinging sixties, it still breaks that cardinal rule of cinema. You can have a horror that isn’t scary and you can have sci-fi that isn’t smart, but just can’t have a spoof that isn’t funny – and not even a James Bond or seven can overcome those odds.
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