Casino Royale 1967 Vs 2006

Posted : admin On 4/9/2022

Yes, Daniel Craig makes a superb Bond: Leaner, more taciturn, less sex-obsessed, able to be hurt in body and soul, not giving a damn if his martini is shaken or stirred. That doesn't make him the 'best' Bond, because I've long since given up playing that pointless ranking game; Sean Connery was first to plant the flag, and that's that. But Daniel Craig is bloody damned great as Bond, in a movie that creates a new reality for the character.

Get the best deals for casino royale 1967 at eBay.com. We have a great online selection at the lowest prices with Fast & Free shipping on many items! Undeterred, the tenacious Feldman went ahead and created one of the most infamous films in Hollywood history, 1967’s lavish, big-budget spy spoof Casino Royale. Due to complicated rights entanglements, the “official” Bond canon didn’t get around to a remake of Casino Royale until nearly forty years later, in 2006.

Retro Vs Remake. Remake is a bi-weekly audio podcast focusing on classic films and their subsequent remakes (no sequels!). The podcast is hosted by Dan Bulich and Reggie Parker. When Daniel Craig became the new James Bond in Casino Royale in 2006, it was not without public disapproval. Blonder, younger, and often thought of as less sophisticated the actor followed in the footsteps of the much-loved Pierce Brosnan.

Casino Royale 1967 Vs 2006

Year after year, attending the new Bond was like observing a ritual. There was the opening stunt sequence that served little purpose, except to lead into the titles; the title song; Miss Moneypenny; M with an assignment of great urgency to the Crown; Q with some new gadgets; an archvillain; a series of babes, some treacherous, some doomed, all frequently in stages of undress; the villain's master-plan; Bond's certain death, and a lot of chases. It could be terrific, it could be routine, but you always knew about where you were in the formula.

With 'Casino Royale,' we get to the obligatory concluding lovey-dovey on the tropical sands, and then the movie pulls a screeching U-turn and starts up again with the most sensational scene I have ever seen set in Venice, or most other places. It's a movie that keeps on giving.

This time, no Moneypenny, no Q and Judi Dench is unleashed as M, given a larger role, and allowed to seem hard-eyed and disapproving to the reckless Bond. This time, no dream of world domination, but just a bleeding-eyed rat who channels money to terrorists. This time a poker game that is interrupted by the weirdest trip to the parking lot I've ever seen. This time, no laser beam inching up on Bond's netherlands, but a nasty knotted rope actually whacking his hopes of heirs.

Casino Royale 1967 Vs 2006 Monte Carlo

And this time, no Monte Carlo, but Montenegro, a fictional casino resort, where Bond checks into the 'Hotel Splendid,' which is in fact, yes, the very same Grand Hotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary where Queen Latifah had her culinary vacation in 'Last Holiday.' That gives me another opportunity to display my expertise on the Czech Republic by informing you that 'Pupp' is pronounced 'poop,' so no wonder it's the Splendid.

I never thought I would see a Bond movie where I cared, actually cared, about the people. But I care about Bond, and about Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), even though I know that (here it comes) a Martini Vesper is shaken, not stirred. Vesper Lynd, however, is definitely stirring, as she was in Bertolucci's wonderful 'The Dreamers.' Sometimes shaken, too. Vesper and James have a shower scene that answers, at last, why nobody in a Bond movie ever seems to have any real emotions.

A common complaint laid upon big-budget movies is that they feel like two different movies cobbled together. Films frequently come about thanks to the collision of two or more similar projects - big-budget films especially. To executives, it’s just economics. Got two scripts about similar subject material? Combine them and shoot both for the price of one!

But sometimes, a film really just is an unholy mishmash of ideas, often resulting from multiple writers taking their own pass on the script. Last Action Hero is probably the most famous such film (maybe up until Batman V Superman), but even that movie can’t match the confusing chaos of 1967’s spy spoof Casino Royale. Its six directors struggled to manage warring movie star egos and a confused screenplay seemingly made up of at least three different movies.

In one Casino Royale, James Bond (David Niven!) is a stuttering dandy living a stuffy life of gardening in his advancing years. The death of M breaks him out of retirement, bringing him to reconnect with the daughter of old flame Mata Hari (who, in real life, died in 1917). Together, they infiltrate a SMERSH training centre disguised as an au pair service and uncover a plot to blackmail the world’s leaders with compromising photographs. This Casino Royale was directed primarily by the legendary John Huston and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang director Ken Hughes, with additional scenes by Val Guest (the great, underseen The Day the Earth Caught Fire and a number of Hammer films).

In another Casino Royale, the “James Bond as codename” fan theory, which could well have originated here, is rendered text. Niven’s Bond, now head of MI6 and sick of having a “sex maniac” successor bear his name, orders that all British agents be codenamed James Bond 007, and trained to resist women. One of these Bonds is baccarat expert Evelyn Tremble (Peter Sellers!), who is sent to the Casino Royale to beat SMERSH agent Le Chiffre (Orson Welles!) at his own game. This version of the movie, which actually includes elements of the source novel, was helmed by Joseph McGrath (The Magic Christian) and Academy Award-winning editor turned director Robert Parrish.

These two movies merge, clumsily, thanks to assembly by Val Guest and second-unit direction by stuntman Richard Talmadge, into a broad farce that features a flying saucer; a biological warfare plot; a plot to replace the world’s leaders with doubles; Woody Allen as a wimpy, neurotic Blofeld substitute; a huge casino brawl between secret agents, the military, cowboys and Indians; and an extraordinarily abrupt ending in which the casino gets nuked and everyone goes to heaven (except Allen, who goes to hell). Cue credits.

Guest’s task in assembling the movie was unenviable, to say the least. Based on a screenplay written, at various points, by at least ten screenwriters (including Joseph Heller and Billy Wilder!), Casino Royale contains many ideas that could sustain a movie in and of themselves, but instead battle each other for dominance. The shoot ran months over schedule, at a budget 25% higher than its spectacularly over-the-top contemporary You Only Live Twice - and that’s without even finishing the damn movie. A significant chunk of the plot is simply missing from the film (even with its two-hour-plus running time), and by some accounts, it’s all Peter Sellers’ fault.

Sellers was notoriously difficult to deal with on set, clashing both with the comic tone of the film – he wanted to play Bond seriously – and with one of his co-stars. Sellers allegedly rewrote much of his own dialogue, with writer Terry Southern, to make it more serious, but that’s nothing next to his animosity towards Orson Welles. Welles’ famously large ego – he convinced the directors to let him perform magic as Le Chiffre – rubbed Sellers’ personal insecurities the wrong way. On one occasion, Princess Margaret visited the set, and while Sellers went out of his way to flamboyantly welcome her, she largely ignored him in favour of Welles, the bigger star. The two actors refused to work with one another, performing opposite stand-ins for most of their scenes together. In one confrontation, Sellers punched director Joseph McGrath, whose casino sequences were ultimately completed by Robert Parrish. It’s not clear whether Sellers was fired or quit, but either way, he left the production with many scenes yet to be shot, forcing Guest to assemble a movie from incomplete footage.

The result of all this on-set bickering is a film whose protagonist switches from David Niven’s Bond to Sellers’ Tremble, then back again, with little to no warning. Sellers’ exit from the production meant that significant parts of his role were left unshot, necessitating the use of outtakes, still frames, and reused footage to (unsuccessfully) try to bring Sellers’ plotline to a close. More stuff happens offscreen here than in Mockingjay, and there aren’t even any characters to exposit the missing material. That Guest managed to put together and release Casino Royale at all is something of a triumph, given at least a quarter of the film was missing, but he couldn’t save it from its fate as an over-indulgent romp that basically makes no sense.

Though the constant shifts between protagonists and comic tones don’t work, Casino Royale has a few things going for it. Some of the jokes are solid. Hughes’ Berlin sequence is designed and shot in a psychedelic, heavily art-directed fashion, resulting in almost proto-Jodorowskian imagery. Burt Bacharach’s jaunty music - featuring a theme performed by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, and Dusty Springfield doing the first vocal recording of “The Look Of Love” - seems to have inspired Austin Powers more than Monty Norman and John Barry’s Bond themes did. It’s got serious casting clout, as far as Bond spoofs go, featuring 007 alumni like Ursula Andress, Vladek Sheybal, and most notably Nikki Van der Zyl, the unheralded, uncredited voice actor who dubbed leading Bond ladies in nearly every main-series film between Dr. No and Moonraker. And we also have Casino Royale to thank for the directing career of Woody Allen, who was so aghast at the on-set “madhouse” that he decided to direct for himself.

Royale

Casino Royale 1967 Vs 2006 Mustang

2006’s Casino Royale reboot – made possible by the rights having been absorbed by MGM – effectively squashed the 1967 film. Now, you have to specify “the ‘60s version” or “the spoof version” when referring to the earlier film. But while the Daniel Craig movie is by far the better film, to me Casino Royale will always be that big ol' mess where Peter Sellers gets gunned down by a bagpiper.

Casino Royale 1967 Vs 2006 Camaro

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