atomicgirl-34996
I've been spending the last 20 years in vain trying to sit through all of Casino Royale and give it a fighting chance. Try as I might, I just can't, and this is coming from someone who sat through Manos: Hands of Fate and Plan 9 from Outer Space.Before I rip into it, let me say what's good about it. The cinematography, costume and sets are drop dead gorgeous and perfectly encapsulates the height of "swinging sixties" fashion and the look of movie musicals before cinematography adopted the ugly, dark, muddy look of the 1970s. The soundtrack, by Bacharach, is exemplary.Okay, with that out of the way, this is by far the worst of the so- called "zany" style of comedy that was so popular at the time. It's abysmal, even worse than What's New, Pussycat, even worse than Skidoo. The thing about those last two films is that even though they were bad, they were at least coherent and had some watchable scenes. Casino Royale is completely random from start to finish and so incoherent as to be unwatchable. It was like the movie was shot right after the writers scribbled notes on toilet paper during one of their brainstorming sessions. I'll give you an example of how incoherent it is. In the very first scene, James Bond is talking to M on the front lawn of his mansion when suddenly, the bad guys blow it up. Then M's toupee flies off in a stupid gag, showing that he's bald. But then in the next scene, Bond is going to M's widow to give her his toupee. So M's toupee hadn't just blown off in that first scene. He had also been killed. How? When? The movie never says. It jumps from that scene to the very next one when Bond is comforting M's widow. The entire film plays like this, as if key scenes connecting one scene to the next or explaining important plot points necessary to understanding the story were missing. What passes for comedy is just stupid, cheap, sick, sleazy or juvenile. The worst joke of the movie is when Bond gives M's grieving widow his toupee and she tells one of her daughters to put it with one of the other "hair-looms" (get it? huh? huh? hair-looms! because it sounds like...ah, never mind...). There is also a lot of stupid mugging for the camera, stupid accents, stupid everything.Another thing that's terrible about this movie is the sleaziness. I know that "hot babes" and spy films went hand in hand in the 1960s. However, the sexism was so extreme in this movie it made Matt Helm movies look enlightened by comparison. Case in point: James Bond is invited to take a bubble bath with one of M's hot daughters. So here you have this much older Niven taking a bath with this nubile young woman, who keeps touching him all over and acts like she's two seconds away from grabbing his junk. But that's not the worst part. The worst part is that she asked him to join her because he reminded her of her father, M, and she and her father would take bubble baths like this together all the time. It was like the writers were so hell-bent on having this sleazy scene that they didn't care that they were basically suggesting that there was an incestuous relationship between M and his daughter. A similar thing happens later when Bond meets Mata Hari's daughter and looks mesmerized as she dances practically naked in front of him. As it turns out, she is his daughter, too!Oh, it gets worse. Practically every woman is scantily clad; the ones who aren't are making out with the male characters or trying to sleep with them. In one scene, James Bond tells Moneypenny's daughter, "Your mother did her best work at night." Shortly afterward, we see her in a see-through teddy going down a long row of men in her bedroom, kissing them one by one to find a recruit for some stupid "AFSD" project.I'd forgive all of this sleaze if the movie was at least passable. But it's so, so bad on every level imaginable except for the visuals and music that it's just difficult to sit through. You may hear people try to convince you that it's some kind of cult classic or misunderstood film or has its charms or whatever, but please...I've seen my share of cheesy, bad films. Manos: Hands of Fate, The Oscar, A Bucket of Blood...they were bad but were fun to watch and had coherent story lines. This movie was a dog's dinner.
Mort Payne
I remember loving this film years ago. Unfortunately, it has not aged well. The humor does not work. Aside from a few near misses, the jokes rely on blindingly obvious innuendo and over-padded wackiness (with Benny Hill style musical accompaniment, which gets annoying very, very fast). The women in the story are sex objects to the extreme. The script makes the sexploitation flicks of the early 70s look feministic. Most of the female "actors" were worse than amateur, but they were pretty, and each of their characters was in desperate search of a man to use them sexually. This hit a low when Bond's daughter implied an attraction to her father. Disgusting. Peter Sellers, once considered a genius, is more difficult to stomach every time I see him. The sound of his voice and his high-toned-grease accent are like nails on a chalkboard. I think what makes him even harder to take in this is that he was trying to play his part seriously (no kidding, folks: he wanted this to be an action flick, starring himself). The cinematography looks like it was done by a rich film student: very slick but laughably overdone. One scene cuts back and forth between Ursula Andress and Peter Sellers during a conversation, but the shots of Sellers show him speaking while sitting down, and the shots of Andress are slow motion shots of her doing awkward contortions while speaking. The effect is to make the scene look like the wrong shots of her were intercut with the right shots of Sellers. I gave it about 45 minutes before I realized I was laughing out of sympathy for the embarrassingly bad humor, and that the only reason to keep watching was the futile hope I might catch a flash of skin from one of the brainless bimbos that constantly flitted around the background in skimpy outfits or obscured partial nudity.
