It’s not comic hyperbole to say that this film makes the Austin Powers movies look restrained. The film isn’t just sexist, it’s sexist by Bond movie standards. When we’re introduced to Orson Welles’ Le Chiffre, he spends a lengthy amount of time performing elaborate stage magic for no reason other than Orson Welles wanted to do some stage magic during the shoot. That’s in this film as well, only before getting into the car, a Lotus Formula 3 that hasn’t been seen in the film until now, Bond delivers a nonsensical monologue to the camera in a Scottish accent, drives off, and then it cuts directly to him being tied to a (far more elaborate) chair with no explanation for how he got there. Remember the bit in the Daniel Craig movie where Bond is racing to rescue Vesper Lynd, sees her tied up in the road, steers sharply to avoid hitting her, and overturns the car, waking up tied to a chair for the infamous “rope” scene? There was no shortage of talent in the making of this film, and yet the result is barely watchable. Not Your Granddad’s James Bond, or Anyone Else’s Among the many writers, credited and uncredited, were Billy Wilder of The Apartment and Sunset Boulevard, and Joseph Heller, the novelist who wrote Catch-22.īeneath it all, there is a good movie buried in there. The cast is stellar, featuring David Niven, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Deborah Kerr and Orson Welles, as well as the first official Bond Girl, Ursula Andress. If you’ve never seen the original big screen Casino Royale, it’s hard to articulate just what a bizarre mess the film is. Although some might say that delay paid off in the end. It is loathed by purist fans, partly because the film itself was an utter catastrophe and partly because it put the breaks on any attempt at an Eon version of the first Bond novel for 40 years. This movie, released in 1967, is, well, an artifact. But this Casino Royale is not the gritty, hard-bitten, streamlined Bond of the 2006 picture. If you went all the way to the other end of the list, and if you were including every Bond film ever made, not just the Eon Productions movies, you’d be likely to run into the name Casino Royale again. But definitely up there near the top would be Casino Royale, the Daniel Craig-starring series reboot released in 2006 that was also based on the first Ian Fleming 007 novel. If you asked somebody to rank all the James Bond movies in order of quality (and it’s the sort of thing we might do), there would likely be many different opinions about which one took the top spot.

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