Casino Royale 1967 Canon

Entertainment December 28, 2020

Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress and Orson Welles pictures on a lobby card for 'Casino Royale.' Source: IMDB

The 1967 version of Casino Royale is not an official Bond film - but it is a Bond film of sorts. The lead, Is David Niven was one of the few actors who was militarily qualified to portray Bond. Casino Royale (1967) Full Cast & Crew. Directed by (6) Writing credits (11) Cast (130) Produced by (3) Music by (1) Cinematography by (1) Film Editing by (1) Casting.

The 1967 James Bond comedy Casino Royale assembled one of the greatest cast lists in movie history, including Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Orson Welles, Ursula Andress, David Niven, William Holden, Barbara Bouchet, George Raft, Deborah Kerr and more. The list of stars makes the poster look like a page out of a phone book -- well, if you look past Robert McGinnis' iconic image of a body-painted pistol-packin' model. This farce, which featured numerous James Bonds and which isn't at all part of the Eon 007 canon (which had kicked off with Sean Connery in Dr. No five years earlier), is the sort of kitchen-sink '60s comedy that tried to be hip but seems incredibly square today. It also tried to be funny, with mixed results.

Bond, James Bond, the seductive secret agent with no equal, never encountered a situation without a pun at the ready. Unless, of course, you’re talking about Casino Royale” that starred Woody Allen, David Niven, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, and Orson Welles as opposed to Sean Connery or Daniel Craig. The ‘67 Casino Royale in no way resembles a James Bond film because it really isn’t one. Producer Charles K. Feldman secured the rights from Ian Fleming but failed to rope in any of the major players. So instead, Feldman, coming off the major success of the purposely incongruous, “What’s New, Pussycat,” went the spoof route for his swing at 007.

Casino Royale was a star-studded debacle -- not an unsuccessful film, owing probably to its A-list cast, but not a classic. It was painful to watch at the time (as contemporary reviews make clear); today it's kitschy fun for the dated visuals and verges on so-bad-its's-good. Eon productions, the company headed by the Broccoli family that is responsible for the Bond cinematic canon, was horrified by the tarnishing of the James Bond brand. Ever since, Eon has been famously protective of the rights to Ian Fleming's work, lest some other inferior version of the secret agent make it to the big screen. (Eon's failure to lock down exclusive rights to Thunderball resulted in the non-canon Never Say Never Again, but that's another story.)

Woody Allen As Jimmy Bond (Dr. Noah)

The controversial but undoubtedly talented Woody Allen, who was primarily a writer and standup comedian, signed on to play Jimmy Bond in Casino Royale after his successful experience with Feldman on What’s New, Pussycat. Unfortunately, Allen probably didn’t realize that Feldman would use as many as six directors all shooting at the same time without consulting one another.

Naturally, that created some confusion, to say the least. Apparently, said confusion delayed Allen’s final day of shooting so many times, he left the set in a huff and flew directly to New York without even changing out of his costume. Such angst was common during Casino Royale. Part of the problem may have laid with the fact that most of the stars had no idea they signed on for a comedy and not a real James Bond movie.

In a hilarious letter penned to a friend, Allen lays out the litany of problems with the film:

I haven't begun filming yet but saw the sets for my scenes. They are the height of bad pop art expensive vulgarity. Saw rushes and am dubious to put it mildly, but probably the film will coin a mint. (Not money, just a single peppermint.) I play the villain (okay to give that out) and also James Bond's bastard nephew (not all right to give that out) and my part changes every day as new stars fall in. ... I would like it emphasized and made quite clear that I am not a writer of Casino. I'm adding a few ad-lib jokes to my own part but that's all. In fact ... we demanded a letter saying my name cannot appear on screen as a writer. This because everyone who contributed a comma is demanding his name on the film.

Casino Royale 1967 Canon Rebel

Peter Sellers As Evelyn Tremble (James Bond 007)

Sellers was another of the actors playing a James Bond (there are at least four) in Casino Royale, and was also alarmed by the chaotic nature of the concept and shoot -- so much so that he hired his own writer, Terry Southern, to write his dialogue so he could outshine Allen and Orson Welles. He also made the executive decision to play it straight, despite starring in what amounted to Monty Python’s version of James Bond.

His decision to not go along with the tone of the film created extraordinary tension between Peter Sellers and Orson Welles as well as director, Val Guest. Allegedly, Sellers and Welles hated each other so much that they couldn't be in the same room together. Their scene at the gambling table had to be shot over multiple days, with doubles standing in for the other actor. Supposedly, the rift between Sellers and Welles started when Princess Margaret, with whom Sellers was familiar, visited the set and completely ignored him to swoon over Welles. Guest, on the other hand, was so sick of Sellers' behavior that he fired him before the actor had even finished all his scenes. Rewrites were required to remove Sellers from the film.

Jacqueline Bisset As Miss Goodthighs

Even more disturbing, Sellers, during one of his serious ad-libs, also shot Jacqueline Bisset in the face with a blank. The gunpowder burned her face and the tiny shards from the round actually made her bleed. As Bisset remembered,

First I thought I had been actually shot and then when I realized it had been a blank, I thought I'd been blinded. My face looked like a shower spout of pinpricks leaking blood. I was panicked whenever I had a scene with Peter Sellers. To get shot in your first scene with a big star, that is a nightmare.

To cap it all off, Sellers punched friend and director Joseph McGrath in the face when he complained about the actor’s behavior.

David Niven As Sir James Bond

Niven was actually Ian Fleming’s first choice for the real James Bond, but was overruled by producers who selected Sean Connery. Niven got his chance, of sorts, to play “Sir James Bond” in what Woody Allen called “a madhouse” of a production. Niven's character is in a sense the 'real' James Bond, a dashing and successful British secret agent who retired 20 years before the film begins but is drawn out of retirement. In the face of an imminent and convoluted threat, Sir James Bond decrees that all MI6 agents be renamed 'James Bond' to confuse the villains (and, unfortunately, the audience).

When considering Casino Royale, it’s better to think of it as an Austin Powers movie rather than an actual James Bond movie. Thanks to the complete chaos involved from top to bottom, it doesn’t really work any other way.

Joanna Pettet As Mata Bond

As Mata Bond, Joanna Pettet plays the daughter of the legendary femme fatale/spy Mata Hari. Her father, from whom she is estranged, is Sir James Bond (Niven). Bond, a famous ladies' man, finds old habits die hard, even around his own daughter, who tends to dress in skimpy belly-dancing outfits. He's also constantly cracking wise about Mata Hari's sexual aptitude and enthusiasm:

Mata Bond: Oh! You want me to be a spy - like mum, huh? Well.

Sir James: Family tradition, my dear.

Mata Bond: Do I get an exploding brief case and a secret transmitter?

Sir James: That won't be necessary.

Mata Bond: Well, I have to have some equipment.

Sir James: Your mother wiped out three divisions of infantry and five brigades of cavalry and, well, frankly, she had much less equipment than you have.

Pettet continued to make movies for years after Casino Royale, but never had a hit. She was considered a virtual Sharon Tate lookalike, which is interesting because she and Tate were actually good friends in real life. Pettet was one of the last people to see Sharon Tate alive, having been at the pregnant actress' house the day she was murdered. In Quentin Tarantino's film Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood, Pettet was played by Rumer Willis.

Orson Welles As Le Chiffre

Orson Welles played the evil mastermind, “Le Chiffre” and got the role, ironically, in part thanks to Sellers’ recommendation. Unfortunately, whether it was Princess Margaret’s unintentional snub of Sellers, her fawning over Orson Welles, or Welles' own adamant desire to perform magic in the movie, the two Hollywood heavyweights despised one another almost immediately.

We certainly aren’t taking sides but stories like Sellers demanding a set be taken down because he had a dream in which his mother disapproved of the background, making the animosity understandable. Interestingly, the iconic polymath Orson Welles, director of the masterpiece Citizen Kane, attributed the relative success of the film to an ad featuring a naked tattooed woman.

Ursula Andress As Vesper Lynd (007)

Ursula Andress played Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale and unlike her subsequent movies which earned her the nickname, 'Ursula undress,' did not actually get naked. She did wear a skin color bodysuit that assuredly got many men hot under the collar and likely led to years of research by internet sleuths. Unlike her male counterparts who sparred like wild animals, Andress stirred clear of most of the controversy surrounding the cast of the film. She did, however, manage to get an eye injury while feeding deer at Hampton Court.

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Tags: Cast Lists From Popular Movies David Niven James Bond Orson Welles Peter Sellers Ursula Andress Woody Allen

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Kellar Ellsworth

Writer

Completion is often an important facet of one’s fandom: you have all of The Beatles’ studio albums on your iPod, or sitting on your shelf is every novel Virginia Woolf ever wrote, or you own multiple versions Cinema Paradiso. But what if you planned to have everything and you didn’t get what you thought you were paying for?

That’s the core issue of a class action lawsuit brought against MGM Studios and 20th Century Fox by plaintiff Mary Johnson of Washington, who bought the Bond 50: Celebrating Five Decades of Bond DVD box set, and filed the complaint when she realized the set did not include the 1967 film Casino Royale (the one with Woody Allen – yes, you read that correctly) and 1983’s Never Say Never Again. It’s a matter of whether this is necessarily false advertising, as there’s legal precedent for why these films weren’t included. But should these films be included in Bond box sets in the future? And do their very existence say about the 007 series in general?

A Brief History of Casino Royale ’67

I’m still not quite sure if my Bond education was an unusual one, but I grew up understanding that the 1967 Casino Royale and Never Say Never Again were asterisks in James Bond history: films that weren’t officially “canon” as it were, as they, formally, diverted from the conventions and tropes that had become an established part of the franchise. More logistically, they weren’t produced by EON Productions, the company, started by producers Albert R. Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, that has made all of the James Bond films since the beginning, starting with 1962’s Dr. No.

Ian Fleming, Bond’s creator, had sold the rights to the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1955 – an earlier rights deal to CBS resulted in the telefilm Casino Royale in 1954 as part of their Climax! series – to Gregory Ratoff, but the rights were then sold to Charles K. Feldman by Ratoff’s widow, making it legally difficult for Broccoli and Saltzman to make their version of Casino Royale without Feldman as a creative partner and producer. Legal issues also halted them from making Thunderball as the first Bond film. They moved to adapt the sixth Bond novel instead, Dr. No.

Casino Royale 1967 Canon Mark Iv

In years following the success of the James Bond series, two things occurred: many a knockoff and parody of 007 was produced and Feldman, who had worked on films like The Seven-Year Itch and What’s New Pussycat?, still sought to make his adaptation of the first Bond book. The option to make a straight-up Bond movie was out of the question, partially because it didn’t make sense to compete on the exact same turf and partially because getting Sean Connery (who had at that point a five film tenure as Bond) was a no go. Instead, he decided to make a Bond parody, with five directors (John Houston, Kenneth Hughes, Val Guest, Robert Parrish, and Joseph McGrath) and three writers (Wolf Mankowitz, John Law, and Michael Sayers), numerous contributors (including Billy Wilder and Ben Hecht), and an enormous cast including David Niven, Peter Sellers, Orson Welles, Deborah Kerr, and many Bond alumni like Ursula Andress, Vladek Sheybal, and Caroline Munroe. The movie is a mess. It is often rightfully acknowledged as such.

A Brief History of Never Say Never Again

The exclusion of Never Say Never Again also stems from legal issues, as Fleming had been working on a screenplay with Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham in the early 1960s, at that time titled Longitude 78 West. Fleming abandoned the script and turned it into the Bond novel Thunderball, published in 1961, without crediting either McClory or Whittingham. For this, breaching copyright, Fleming was taken to court, settling in 1963. EON made a deal with McClory, letting him produce Thunderball as a film in 1965, with no other adaptations of that book to be made for ten years following the film’s release that year.

This gave time for McClory to stew, beginning work on another adaptation in the mid-1970s called Warhead, with Len Deighton and Sean Connery also working on the script. The film continued to be developed throughout the ‘70s, during which Roger Moore had taken over the “official” role of Bond, and EON continued to try to block it. Though Connery had declared he would never revisit the role of 007 again after Diamonds Are Forever in 1971, he would ultimately return for this film, which would finally get its release in 1983, with the title courtesy of Connery’s wife, Micheline.

Casino Royale 1967 Canon Mark Ii

Distribution Issues

Both Casino Royale ’67 and Never Say Never Again competed against EON-produced Bond movies the years they were released: You Only Live Twice and Octopussy, respectively. In the franchise’s fifty-five year history, the baton of who owns the rights to finance and distribute the films has been passed several times. United Artists initially were the sole distributors until For Your Eyes Only in 1981, when MGM absorbed UA. MGM handled all of the Bond films by themselves from Tomorrow Never Dies in 1997 to Die Another Day in 2002. And MGM and Columbia Pictures have shared distribution rights since Casino Royale in 2006, with Columbia’s parent company, Sony Pictures Entertainment, saving MGM from near bankruptcy in 2005. Currently, there’s a bidding war over who will distribute the next Bond film, but it’s much of these transferences of power which have kept the 1967 Casino Royale and Never Say Never Again from being included in box sets.

Both Casino Royale ’67 and Never Say Never Again weren’t distributed or produced by anyone that had ownership over Bond in the first place; the former was distributed by Columbia and the latter by Warner Bros. It wasn’t until 1989 and 1997 that either film had its distribution rights purchased by MGM. An ongoing legal battle with the McClory estate, which prevented especially the latter film from being included in collected box sets, was settled in November 2013, too late for the release of the Bond 50 set in September 2012.

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Casino Royale 1967 Canon