The “almost unwatchable” James Bond movie the director hated: “It’s so bad”
Surely it isn’t that difficult to make a decent James Bond movie.
There are certain boxes that you have to tick, and a basic template to stick to. You need a decent leading man, a very suave one, to play 007. You need some incredibly attractive women to either seduce him, or try to kill him, or both. And you need a cool, fast car, preferably packed with gadgets.
Aside from that, what else do you need for your Bond shopping list? You need a series of set pieces that it doesn’t look like he’ll be able to escape from, but then he will, because whichever bad guy has captured him has decided to leave him to it rather than just shoot him in the face. You also need a scene in which someone with only one letter for their name either tells him off or shows him a series of inventions underground that could kill people, like an exploding stapler.
Also you’ll need to relocate for a while to somewhere far flung and exotic so that the film crew get a free holiday, a selection of killer animals like crocodiles or snakes, a pointless British man who meets Bond at an airport to put him in a taxi but then isn’t heard of again for the rest of the movie, and some kind of scene in a casino where Bond can ask for his special cocktail and ask questions before beating up the in-house security.
See? It’s simple. Doesn’t matter if it’s Moore, Connery, Brosnan or Craig playing Britain’s most famous secret agent, it’s a tried and trusted recipe that should be reasonably simple to follow to some success. Well, that is not what happened back in 1967, at the height of the swinging sixties, when some inexplicable decisions were taken and the result was the original full-length Casino Royale, a disastrous attempt by the owner of the film rights to the book to parody their own franchise, with predictably abject results.
The project was in trouble almost from the off, with various different writers and directors attaching themselves to the spoof, which basically revolved around the idea that Peter Sellers would play the main version of Bond, but then all other MI6 agents, be they male or female, would also be called ‘James Bond 007’ in order to confuse the enemy, and presumably, the audience. Unfortunately, Sellers wanted to play the role straight and was upset at the attempt to make it a comedy.
Somehow the makers managed to draft in actors of the calibre of David Niven, Orson Welles and Ursula Andress to appear in the film, and the soundtrack was actually a surprise hit, no doubt thanks to the fact they brought in Burt Bacharach to write it, who promptly won an Oscar nomination for ‘The Look of Love’. The movie, though, was eventually just a ragtag collection of different segments sewn together, and critics were not impressed at all.
Martin Campbell, who directed the more modern Casino Royale in 2006, Daniel Craig’s first outing as Bond, summed it up when he said: “Five different James Bonds and five different directors. It’s almost unwatchable. I couldn’t get through it. It’s so bad.”
The original Casino Royale did manage to do reasonably well financially, probably because the demand for Bond was so high at the time, and indeed just two months later, a proper 007 film was released, Sean Connery’s You Only Live Twice. Also, if you’re an Austin Powers fan, you’ll find pretty much every piece of inspiration contained within.
