Also reviewed as part of this blog’s 2012 James Bond retrospective, here.
With Daniel Craig’s debut film as the reigning Bond still tearing it up box-office-wise (currently: $129 million in the US alone, and well on track to becoming 007’s highest grossing outing), it seemed not unreasonable to return to a more psychedelic time, a time when a single film could include the finest roster of actors and writers ever assembled in one place and still end up as perhaps the most incoherent narrative film ever produced in the English language. The year is 1967, and the film is Charles K. Feldman’s production of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale.
You will often find this film referred to as a failure, a dismal failure, or the worst film of all time. Well, at least part of that can be corrected right off: fiscally, the film was a huge success. It was the most expensive film of the year, for reasons largely pertaining to its uncontrollable production history, and it was not all that profitable because of it; but even then it stands, with $42 million dollars in worldwide revenue, as the third highest grossing film of 1967, behind Disney’s The Jungle Book and the official Bond vehicle You Only Live Twice.
Of course, “failure” means something a little broader than that, and we are here…well, not to defend Casino Royale, for it is an indefensible film. Rather, we are here to consider what makes this film, in all its incoherent unfunniness, so terribly interesting. For it is interesting: perhaps one of the most interesting motion pictures of all time.
Here is the plot, kind of: I’ve seen the film four times now, and I still don’t know much of what goes on: James Bond has retired from MI6, but now that he is a brand name, the agency doesn’t want to be without a Bond to strike fear into the hearts of Russians, and so they shanghai Evelyn Tremble, a man of no significance, to be the new 007. Tremble is assigned to bankrupt the evil Le Chiffre, a bankroller for the Russian anti-spy initiative SMERSH, in a high-stakes game of baccarat. Tremble is awful, and so Bond is called out of retirement to save the free world. To confuse SMERSH, MI6 renames all of its agents “James Bond 007”. All ends with the revelation that Bond’s short and neurotic nephew Jimmy has been pulling all of the strings of the Cold War in an effort to release a gas that will kill all men over five feet tall.
How could this film happen? How could a single film have given us Burt Bacharach’s sublime “The Look of Love” and some of Woody Allen’s career-best one-liners,* as well as the worst moments in the careers of William Holden and Charles Boyer,† a Berlin subplot which makes literally no sense on its own, as an extension of the main plot, or even as a collection of images, and a performance of such check-cashing listlessness by Orson Welles as to make Transformers: The Movie seem like a valediction? For that, we could do worse than turn to its tormented production history.
This is easy to find, but the essentials: superproducer Charles K. Feldman managed to acquire the rights to Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, snatching it away from Albert Broccoli thanks to a complicated American rights loophole. Initially hoping to make a serious Bond film with Sean Connery, Feldman was denied access to the actor by Broccoli, and elected instead to make a spoof. However, scripting and casting took such an incredible time, that Feldman divided the episodic screenplay into mini-movies, each directed by a separate individual: Kenneth Hughes, John Huston, Joseph McGrath and Robert Parrish, with Val Guest more-or-less overseeing them and directing the connecting sequences.
The script itself was worked and re-worked all throughout shooting; the credited writers were Wolf Mankowitz, John Law and Michael Sayers, but none can truly say who numbers among the uncredited writers: Ben Hecht, Terry Southern and Billy Wilder are all known to have contributed, and it is generally believed that Woody Allen wrote all of his own dialogue, but nothing else.
And so, Casino Royale, the bastard child of a thousand fathers was born. I shall shortly explain why I think the film is as it is, but first, a digression: it is my contention that every film has an auteur, a voice that is primarily responsible for the film’s meaning and development, and this is person is not always the director. Alfred Hitchcock was certainly an auteur, and Howard Hawks and John Ford; but there are also screenwriter auteurs such as Charlie Kaufman; producer auteurs like David O. Selznick of Gone with the Wind infamy; actor auteurs like Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote; even make-up auteurs, as with Tom Savini and Friday the 13th. An ensemble cast can be an auteur, as we see with the Christopher Guest Stock Company. A writer and director can team up to be a single auteur and give us Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or they can war and the auteur grows out of the space between, and we have Taxi Driver. With Stephen Spielberg’s A.I. Stanley Kubrick achieved the rare distinction of being the auteur of a film made after his death.
If Casino Royale had an auteur, it would have been Charles K. Feldman, who kept the film together seemingly out of sheer will, but even he could not control the wild egos involved with his misbegotten project. Given how many of the individuals on set simply whatever they damn well pleased, it seems much better to assume that there was no auteur. Or, if I may: because it exists in despite of almost every element of its production, with nothing like a unifying voice or structure, because it seems to have come into existence out of sheer potential, a creator God outside the bounds of time, I would argue that Casino Royale the film is its own auteur, a unique moment in cinema history. It is a motion picture that exists because it exists. It is That Than Which No Greater Can Be Conceived. Casino Royale meaning is the presence of Casino Royale.
I shudder to resort to metaphysics to explain what is at heart a failed attempt at an ensemble comedy in the It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World vein, but how else can one grapple with it? And it must be grappled with, for it is after a fashion a Rosetta Stone. Over here, Orson Welles plays magic tricks with the camera, refusing to act unless he is indulged, and thus we see the road that ends in F for Fake, one of the most important and forgotten films of the 20th Century (a further aside: Welles’ tricks infuriated the film’s nominal star, Peter Sellers, who would not share a set with the other actor, forcing the production to use extensive body doubles for their scenes together). Here, Woody Allen perfects the twitty intellectual neurotic that will form the basis of his “early, funny ones,” and we must wonder what Bananas would have looked like without Casino Royale.
Even in its stolid unfunniness, the film is compelling: David Niven was once considered for the role of Bond in the Broccoli series, but was deemed too old. Casino Royale opens with Niven, the real James Bond, retiring and leaving his name and designation 007 to MI6, as he is too old. Meta-humor of this sort is commonplace to the point of sickness now, but it had to begin somewhere, and I have not found anything in the cinema earlier than 1967 that represents an in-joke of this particular variety.
The film is a disaster as a spy comedy, but even then the world did not need good Bond spoofs: the Matt Helm series with Dean Martin and the Derek Flint series with James Coburn had both seen the first entry the year before. And while those films are amusing, they’re dated and largely forgotten. Casino Royale is not forgotten. It is infamous. It looks forward and backward in more ways than anything I can name. This is no small part because of the roster of talent involved, and the shock of seeing them (“Holy fuck, it’s Jean-Paul Belmondo! Holy fuck, it’s George Raft! Holy fuck, it’s Deborah Kerr!”). But that’s the first time. For most people, there will never be a second time, but it’s so rewarding: absent the shock and confusion (most of the confusion (some of the confusion (okay fine, it’s still damn confusing))), one can start to appreciate the grace notes, not because they are amusing but because they are so arcane. What caused Peter O’Toole to show up for his cameo? Where else does that Berlin Wall set appear? What was going through Billy Wilder’s mind? How far apart were those two reaction shots filmed? More important people on all sides of the camera than any other film I can name. A precise historic moment distilled into a fever dream. The loopiest theme song of the 1960s.
Forget all you think you know of the cinema: the silent years, Russian Montage, the New Wave, Cinemascope, male gaze, film school brats, the rise of documentaries, blockbusters. Casino Royale is Film History 101.