Five credited directors, three credited writers, most of the famous faces of the decade, and nobody in charge. David Niven’s first half-hour is dry and funny and Burt Bacharach’s score is better than anything it accompanies; the rest is expensive noise.
Casino Royale is a James Bond film made outside the official series, and it decides that the safest thing to do with a character it cannot play straight is to laugh at him for 131 minutes. It credits five directors and three screenwriters, and takes its title and villain from Ian Fleming’s first novel and little else. The film has a good half-hour up front, a good tune underneath, and no idea what to do with most of the people in it. We cannot recommend the whole of it to anyone.
The first stretch belongs to Niven, and it is the reason to sit down. His Sir James is retired and celibate and regards the state of the service with polite horror. Four spy chiefs, John Huston’s McTarry, William Holden’s Ransome, Charles Boyer’s Le Grand and Kurt Kasznar’s Smernov, arrive at his country house to beg him back, and Niven treats them like tradesmen who have come on the wrong day. We laughed, properly, at how little he was doing: a pause before a word, a small correction of someone else’s manners. The film moves to a castle in Scotland, where Deborah Kerr, as Agent Mimi posing as a Highland widow, sets about seducing him with an accent she enjoys more than the script does. Niven fends her off with the same courteous stillness, and for half an hour this is a comedy with a plan.
Sellers arrives as Evelyn Tremble, a baccarat expert hired to break Le Chiffre at the tables, and he is funny as he usually is: small, exact, a man trying on voices. The film takes this as permission to keep changing his clothes, and Tremble spends much of his time in disguises the story never asks for. Welles plays Le Chiffre as a card sharp who would rather be doing conjuring tricks, and does several at the table. The two men are seldom in the same shot. Bill Lenny cuts their duel back and forth like a tennis match filmed from two courts, and the scene that should hold the picture together has no tension.
The money is on the screen, and some of it is well spent. Jack Hildyard shoots in flat, saturated colour, pinks and acid greens, and holds the wide frame steady while the actors fall over in it. Michael Stringer’s sets are the film’s best jokes: a spy school in Berlin built from tilted walls and painted shadows, and a villain’s headquarters of white plastic and coloured lights that looks like a department store the morning after a sale. Julie Harris and Anna Duse put Joanna Pettet and Ursula Andress in sequins from collar to hem. Under it runs Burt Bacharach, whose score is the one thing here that was finished. ‘The Look of Love’ arrives about halfway through, over the Sellers and Andress seduction scene, and for three minutes the film is calm, adult and rather lovely.
What is missing is anyone joining these pieces up. Joanna Pettet’s Mata Bond is sent to Berlin for an episode with a beginning, a middle and no consequence. Woody Allen’s Jimmy Bond is funny in his first two scenes and then parked for an hour. Daliah Lavi’s The Detainer is a name on the poster and a body on the set. Each director seems to have made his own picture with whichever actors were in the building. The second half takes a turn we will not describe, except that the last quarter of an hour throws in everyone within reach of the studio. We were bored by it, and then cross about being bored, because an hour earlier we had been laughing.
The official Bond films were already halfway to parody by 1967, and this one has nothing sharper to say about the character; it says the same things louder, with more people and larger sets. Nobody in it is bad and almost everybody is underused. Most critics have called it a mess, and it is one. But it has a first act that works and a score you will want to own. Watch until Niven leaves Scotland, and leave the rest to people who enjoy watching money being spent.
