Aside from Whirlpool, I've been on a real losing streak when it comes to movies. Although I've seen a lot of bad ones latley, Casino Royale is in a class of its own. You just look at the scren and go "what the f*** were they thinking?" And despite having four of my favorite performers ever: (Peter Sellers, Orson Welles, Woody Allen and Jean-Paul Belmondo), the film wastes all of their talent and really blows.
The movie belongs to one of the oddest of movie genres, the epic comedy. These gargauntuan bearers of mirth were popular in the 60's after the sucess of Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad Mad World. Although mostly forgotten now, it was fashionable to take an all star cast put them into a very long comedy with lots of stunt work. Not only did the genre die out, few of them seem funny today-which is certainly true of Casino Royale.
That novel was the only James Bond book by Ian Fleming not to be bought by Albert R. Broccoli, and thus was never (until 2006) shot as a straight Bond film. After Sean Connery refused to apper in the film, the producer, Charles Feldman, decided that it would work better as a parody, with five different directors (John Huston, Kenneth Hughes, Joseph McGrath, Robert Parrish and Val Guest) and lots of stars (in addition to the ones I already mentioned, there's David Niven, William Holden, Deborah Kerr, Ursula Andress, George Raft, Charles Boyer, Jacquline Bisset, and Huston himself).
But this was clearly a case of too many cooks spoiling the platter, as the move is impossible to follow and makes no sense. Everything is so confusing that it's hard to tell which director's sequence ends where. Although there are a few occasional laughs (Welles shines in a rare comedic part as a gambler and Sellers is brillant as usual), most of the film is devoted to the lowest kind of comedy. The film is sped up so that people run fast, Niven drives an old car really fast, people bump into each other, and on and on. We have a self conciously "funny" music from Bert Bacherach and Allen is totally wasted a nerd who jumps around a lot and gestures frantically, with little dialouge.
I did get to the end of the movie, although I had to split it out over the week. But I wish that this collasal waste of money had never been made (it went so far over budget that it was one of the most expensive films ever produced up to that point), and so did probably every one who was involved with it. Well, except for the producer, as it made a lot of money. But it still sucks.
Casino Royale (1967)