One hundred and eleven years ago today, Albert R. Broccoli was born in New Your City.
Broccoli would eventually enter the film business, going from working as an assistant director with Howard Hughes to eventually become a very successful and highly respected film producer. Today, Broccoli is best-known for producing the James Bond films. Though Broccoli passed away in 1996, his daughter, Barbara, has continued to co-produce the films in the years since his death. In short, if not for Albert Broccoli, James Bond probably never would have become a film icon and that would have been a tragedy.
In honor of his birthday, we present to you a song of the day! In the clip below, The BBC Concert Orchestra performs Monty Norman’s iconic James Bond theme music.
Licence to Kill, which was initially released in 1989,was the 16th “official” James Bond film. It was also the second and the last one to feature Timothy Dalton in the role of James Bond. This is the one where Felix Leiter gets eaten by a shark, Bond resigns from MI6, and ends up going to Central America in search of revenge. Sad to say, it’s also one of my least favorite of the Bond films.
Licence to Kill starts out with Bond in Florida, attending the wedding of his best friend, Felix Leiter (played by David Hedison, who previously played the role in Live and Let Die). However, before going to ceremony, Felix and Bond take a few minutes to arrest notorious drug lord Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi). With the help of a crooked DEA agent (played by a wonderfully smarmy actor named Everett McGill), Sanchez escapes from custody. Accompanied by his psychotic henchman Dario (Benecio Del Toro), Sanchez gets his revenge by killing the new Mrs. Leiter and feeding Felix to a shark. When Bond discover the barely alive Felix, he also discovers a note that (in a scene borrowed from the novel Live and Let Die) reads, “He disagreed with something that ate him.”
Investigating on his own, Bond discovers that Sanchez’s partner in Florida is the wonderfully named Milton Krest (played by a brilliantly sleazy Anthony Zerbe). Soon, James Bond is on a mission of vengeance that involves tracking down and killing every member of Sanchez’s organization. However, M (Robert Brown) doesn’t like the idea of his best secret agent killing the entire population of Florida. Bond responds by resigning from the service and heading to Central America on his own.
In typical Bond film fashion, James Bond manages to infiltrate Sanchez’s organization and Sanchez soon takes a liking to the man who has vowed to kill him. Along the way, Bond romances both Sanchez’s abused mistress Lupe (Talisa Soto) and an ex-CIA agent named Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell) and the viewers learn that Sanchez’s criminal enterprise not only involves drugs but also a crooked TV preacher (played by Las Vegas mainstay Wayne Newton) as well.
Let’s start with the positive. Robert Davi, playing the role of Franz Sanchez, makes for a memorable villain. Along with the silky charm and hints of madness that we’ve come to expect from Bond villains, Davi brings an almost perverse edge to the character. Every line of dialogue that he delivers is practically dripping with decadence. Whether he’s doting on his pet iguana, his main henchman Dario, or poor Lupe, Sanchez makes for a dangerously charismatic and compelling villain, one that feels like he would have been at home in one of Ian Fleming’s original novels. Wisely, Davi plays his role almost as if he was playing James Bond and, as a result, the scenes that he shares with Dalton all have a crackling energy to them that is missing from the film as a whole.
In fact, almost all of the villains are compelling in this film, from Franz Sanchez all the way down to the lowliest henchman. As played by a very young Benicio Del Toro, Dario is all smoldering intensity and arrogant swagger. Smuggler Milton Krest is played by veteran character actor Anthony Zerbe and he gets one of the bloodiest death scenes in the history of the series. However, I have to admit that my favorite bad guy was Sanchez’s business manager, Truman-Lodge (played by Anthony Starke). Truman-Lodge is just so enthusiastic about the business opportunities that came along with allying oneself with evil that it’s rather infectious.
With such a memorable collection of bad guys, it’s a shame that the film didn’t provide them with any goals worthy of their evil talents. In previous (and future) Bond films, far less interesting villains have still come up with plans to allow them to take over the world. Even Moonraker‘s Hugo Drax was able to overcome his lack of personality and come up with a diabolical intergalactic scheme. Meanwhile, Franz Sanchez — one of the most complex and impressive Bond villains of all time — is simply content to sell drugs and feed people to sharks. It feels almost disrespectful to Davi’s performance that Sanchez’s goals are, ultimately, so boring.
And, in the end, I think that’s the main problem that I have with Licence to Kill. The film feels so predictable. There’s nothing about it that makes it comes across as a story that could only have been about James Bond. Instead, it feels like the type of standard action/revenge film that always seems to come out every summer. The film’s hero might be an Englishman named James Bond but he could just as easily be an American named Jake Sully.
According to Sinclair McKay’s invaluable history of the Bond franchise, The Man With The Golden Touch, Licence to Kill was specifically written to compliment Timothy Dalton’s more “realistic” interpretation of the Bond character. As Dalton played Bond as grim and serious, Licence to Kill is a grim and serious film. Innocents and villains alike die in bloody agony and, the few times that Dalton does smile, the expression looks so unnatural that you worry that his face is about to split in half. Unfortunately, along with being grim and serious, Dalton’s Bond is also remote and uncharismatic and, with the exception of Robert Davi, he doesn’t have any chemistry with anyone else in the cast. (Carey Lowell brings a lot of energy to the role of Pam but Dalton’s Bond never seems to be that into her.) Dalton simply doesn’t make for a very compelling hero and, as a result, Licence to Kill ends up feeling like an empty collection of occasionally impressive stunts.
Licence to Kill holds a few dubious distinctions. It was the least financially succesful of all the Bond films and it was also the last Bond film to be produced by Albert Broccoli and directed by John Glen. It was also the last to feature Robert Brown in the role of M and, of course, it was also the last to feature Timothy Dalton in the role of James Bond. (That’s not all that shocking when you consider just how miserable and bored Dalton seems to be in this film.) Over the next six years, the Bond franchise would be mired in a lawsuit between Eon productions and producer Kevin McClory and when James Bond finally did return, he would do so in the form of Pierce Brosnan.
As you probably already know, we here at the Shattered Lens have been counting down the days until the American release of Skyfall by reviewing every single film in the James Bond franchise. Today, we take a look at the first non-EON Bond film, the epic, psychedelic 1967 spoof Casino Royale.
Where to begin?
When Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953, veteran Hollywood producer Charles K. Feldman bought the film rights. However, Feldman didn’t buy the rights to Fleming’s subsequent novels and was forced to sit by and watch as Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman had unexpected success with Dr. No and the subsequent EON-produced Bond films. Much as Kevin McClory did with Thunderball, Feldman first attempted to co-produce a serious adaptation of Casino Royale with Broccoli and Saltzman. However, when Feldman, Broccoli, and Saltzman couldn’t come to an agreement on how each side would be compensated in the proposed production deal, Feldman decided to make Casino Royale on his own. He also decided that, instead of trying to compete with EON by making a “straight” James Bond film, his version of Casino Royale would be a satirical extravaganza.
Feldman’s vision of James Bond is apparent from Casino Royale’s opening credits. While the credits are definitely based on the iconic openings of the EON Bond films, they’re also designed to play up the fact that Casino Royale — in the grand tradition of the Hollywood studios at their most excessive — is meant to be a big budget, all-star extravaganza.
Casino Royale actually starts out with a pretty clever premise. It seems that the name “James Bond,” is simply a code name that has been assigned to several British spies over the years. As M (played by John Huston, who also directed the first third of the film), explains it, the name “James Bond” strikes such fear in the hearts of Britain’s enemies that the name must be kept alive.
(Speaking for myself, this is an idea that I kinda wish that the official James Bond series would adopt. If nothing else, it would certainly explain how Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig could possibly be the same person.)
The original James Bond (played by David Niven) has long since retired to his stately country estate, where he spends his time playing the piano and complaining about how the agents who have inherited his name are sullying his reputation with excessive womanizing and violence. It turns out the Sir James Bond is a man renowned for his “celibate image.” At the start of the film, Bond is asked to come out of retirement by not only M but the heads of the CIA, KGB, and French secret service as well. SMERSH, an organization of female assassins that’s led by the mysterious Dr. Noah, has been eliminating agents worldwide and only the original (and very chaste) Bond can defeat them. Bond, however, refuses and M responds by ordering a mortar attack on Bond’s estate. The estate is blown up but so is M and Bond soon finds himself returning to London as the new head of MI6.
Interestingly enough, David Niven was one of the actors who was considered for the role of James Bond in Dr. No. Reportedly, Ian Fleming was quite enthusiastic for Niven to take the role but, by the time that Dr. No went into production, Niven was considered to be too old. There’s a nice bit of irony here in seeing David Niven playing a retired James Bond who spends a good deal of the film complaining about the men who have subsequently assumed his name.
Once Niven takes over MI6, he orders that, in order to confuse SMERSH, all British agents (including female agents) will be known as James Bond. The rest of the film is divided into episodes that feature these new James Bonds battling SMERSH and the mysterious Dr. Noah.
Among these agents, there’s the handsome Coop (played by Terrence Cooper) who has been trained to resist all sexual temptations.
There’s Mata Bond (Joanna Pettet), the daughter of Sir James Bond and Mata Hari.
There’s Vesper Lynd (Ursula Andress) who is sent to seduce and recruit the expert gambler Evelyn Tremble (Peter Sellers) so that Tremble can beat SMERSH agent Le Chiffre (Orson Welles) at the Casino Royale.
Best of all, there’s Sir James Bond’s nephew, Jimmy Bond. Jimmy Bond is played by Woody Allen and … well, let’s just take a look at Jimmy’s first scene in the film:
Casino Royale had a notoriously troubled production history and most of those troubles seemed to center on Peter Sellers. While the film was designed to be a broad, slapstick comedy, Sellers reportedly insisted on trying to play his role straight and even rewrote his lines to make his scenes more dramatic. Welles eventually grew so disgusted with Sellers that he refused to be in the same room with him. This caused quite a bit of difficulty since Sellers was in almost every scene that featured Welles. Eventually, Sellers walked off the film and the film had to be hastily (and awkwardly) rewritten to account for his sudden absence.
When one watches Casino Royale today, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Sellers was essentially correct. While most of Casino Royale often feels disjointed and incoherent, the scenes featuring Sellers, Andress, and Welles are some of the strongest in the film. Sellers’ dramatic approach doesn’t negate the film’s comedy. If anything, it makes the comedy even stronger because Sellers actually seems to be invested in the reality his character, regardless of how ludicrous a situation that character may find himself in.
When I watched Casino Royale, I was struck by the stark contrast between the parts of the film that worked and the parts that didn’t. This is a movie that truly swings from one extreme to another. Either the film’s satire is working brilliantly (mostly in the scenes featuring Woody Allen and Peter Sellers) or it’s falling completely flat (like in an extended sequence that features Deborah Kerr as a SMERSH assassin).
I found myself laughing more at the little scenes than the big set pieces. For instance, I loved it when David Niven embraces Miss Moneypenny (Barbara Bouchet) just to be then told that she’s actually the daughter of the original Miss Moneypenny. I don’t know much about the actor Terrence Cooper (though, according to Wikipedia, he was also a contender to take the role of James Bond in the official series) but I enjoyed the brief sequence where Moneypenny “tests” him to see if he can take on the Bond identity. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t really have enough of these small, clever moments.
Ultimately, I found that Casino Royale works best when viewed as a time capsule. Casino Royale was made at a time when the established major Hollywood studios (and veteran producers like Charles K. Feldman) were struggling to remain relevant. Foreign films (including, it must be said, the James Bond films) were challenging the common assumptions of what could and what couldn’t be shown on-screen and the studio system reacted by trying to make films that would appeal to younger audiences while also reassuring older audiences that the movies hadn’t really changed that much. The end result were films like Casino Royale that featured the occasional psychedelic sequence along with cameos from old (and safe) Hollywood stars like George Raft, William Holden, and Charles Boyer. Casino Royale is the type of self-indulgent film that could only have been made in 1967 and, as such, it’s a valuable time capsule for all of us cinematic historians.
I also have to admit that, as excessive as Casino Royale may be, I happen to love excess. Casino Royale might be overlong and occasionally incoherent but the costumes are simply to die for. The film is a visual feast, if nothing else.
Casino Royale was released to scathing reviews and terrible box office but, in the years since, it has become something of a cult favorite. Our own Trash Film Guru has identified Casino Royale as his favorite Bond film. Myself, I found the film to be extremely flawed and yet oddly fascinating to watch. Casino Royale is a total mess and that is both its greatest flaw and greatest strength.
Tomorrow, we’ll return to the official James Bond series by taking a look at You Only Live Twice.
Through the Shattered Lens 