Casino Royale (1967) *

Directed by:  John Huston and others

Starring:  David Niven, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Ursula Andress, Orson Welles

Casino Royale plays exactly like you would expect from a film with five different directors.    It's incoherent, incomprehensible, and terminally boring.      It was filmed as if the five different directors shot five different movies and all of them were mashed together into one mess.    If this was an experiment, it failed.     I'm not entirely sure there is even a plot, although I read it was supposed to be a spoof of Bond films.   

The film is very loosely based on Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel.     David Niven plays Sir James Bond, who is lured out of retirement to battle SMERSH, a criminal organization whose only function appears to be trying to destroy James Bond.      There are many beautiful women who try to kill Bond.     Then, there is the business of MI5 naming all of their agents "James Bond" to confuse and thwart SMERSH, including having one resist the charms of all seductive women.     They sure confused me, if that's any consolation to them.   

Peter Sellers shows up as another James Bond who is an expert baccarat player, taking on cigar-smoking heavyweight LeChiffre (Welles).     Not much of consequence happens there.     Niven himself seems completely ill-at-ease, as if he's not sure what to do but is too polite to ask.     Woody Allen's scenes were dropped in from a Woody Allen movie.    These account for the film's only laughs, especially when Allen was facing a firing squad and remarks, "I'm allergic to bullets," and "This is going to get you a bad letter in the Times."     Allen is genuinely funny in a film where everything else is adrift.

There is no rhyme nor reason for a lot of what goes on.     Bond is put up in a Scottish mansion full of beautiful female SMERSH assassins, one of which speaks in an inpenetrable accent and sings a lot.    Their mission?   To destroy his chaste reputation, which is supposed to be a spin on Bond's usual womanizing, I guess.    How is this funny?    How did anyone view this segment as anything other than a disaster?    Or the rest of the film for that matter?

There are a lot of chases, action, and scenes of endless dialogue which go nowhere.    The actors should've been commended for showing up day after day knowing full well they were entrenched in an ill-conceived production.     I can't imagine how Casino Royale even looked good on paper because there is no semblance of a script.    If things were done by improvisation, that's asking an awful lot of the actors involved.    If not, then they should've been.    There are many talented people in Casino Royale whose attributes were wasted in a film that had no direction or goal.     Why have five directors?    Why didn't they try making the film without a director?    The results couldn't be much worse.