And Now, an Intermission

We have many more films to go, but first a word about what happened in 1966, between Thunderball and You Only Live Twice. Bond afficionados already know what I'm referring to.

Casino Royale is the first book in the Fleming continuity, published in 1953. It's an okay book, with an unexpectedly downbeat ending and some very nice casino scenes. There isn't a lot of action per se in it except for one motor chase and an extremely nasty torture scene where Le Chiffre whips Bond in a delicate place with a carpet beater. (More about the book when we reach the 2006 portion of this saga.)

The film and television rights were purchased by a gent named Gregory Ratoff as a six-month option in 1954, which resulted in a (reportedly very bad) television version on CBS in that same year, the first time Bond was ever seen in a visual medium. Ratoff purchased full film rights from Fleming (for $6000) in 1955. On Ratoff's death the rights devolved to his widow, who put a gentleman named Charles Feldman in charge of them. Feldman produced a few notable films, such as A Streetcar Named Desire and The Seven Year Itch, some of them for United Artists. But at the moment he was working with Columbia, who were desperate for an antidote to UA's Bond money machine. Feldman had already failed to interest Eon in a partnership deal a la McClory (and perhaps their lack of interest was due partially to McClory issues).

Despite what some people think, it's pretty clear that the film of Casino Royale was not conceived as a spoof from the beginning; it only became so when Feldman realized he could not get Connery to do it because of his Eon commitments, and that treating it as a parody was the only way he could go.

However, scriptwriter Wolf Mankowitz says that Feldman, furious at the money Eon was making, had an axe to grind against the official series from the beginning. So who knows? What's clear is that this movie could actually have been something - a consistent, comprehensible, and actually funny satire - if everything that could have gone wrong didn't go wrong, beginning with the original director walking off the set and proceeding from there. Peter Sellers, the nominal star, was at his most unreliable, and some of the stunt-casting games in this film were to try to work around the fact that they had no idea how much part they were going to get out of him at any given time. (For what it's worth, Sellers maintained that he left only when his original contract expired and was given mixed signals about how much work they expected thereafter.) Feldman could get people for piecemeal work due to his connections, but getting directors or a consistent script proved more difficult - and the film was hemorrhaging money all the while.

Eventually the tally stood at a reported four primary and two secondary directors, among them John Huston and Val Guest. Beyond the three credited screenwriters there are at least eight more who are rumored to have contributed to a script which literally changed with each shooting day, among them Huston and Guest and Peter Sellers and Woody Allen. (Allen specifically insisted that his name not appear in the screenplay credits - "Casino is a madhouse ... I think the film stinks as does my role ....")

The film is, of course, the dreadful mess you'd expect, although there are some moments, mostly at the beginning before it all falls apart, where it actually is funny. It remains a monument to squandered potential, and an anomaly in this canon. (Yet, unlike some other sites, I do consider it canonical, in its fashion. It is made from legitimately obtained rights to a genuine Fleming property, and in some ways has more claim to being a "Fleming adaptation" than, say, The Spy Who Loved Me - which, by Fleming's express demand, uses only the title of the original book.)

Around the time this essay was first being written, the rights for Casino Royale had been reacquired by MGM/Eon, amid a flurry of speculation over what they would do with them. I ended this section with "time will tell." In November 2006, it told. We'll get to how that turned out in due time.

Next page: You Only Live Twice

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This page was last changed on 2 February 2007

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