With the success of Thunderball, the Bond juggernaut seemed set to rumble on for some time, but before Sean Connery could pull on the famous Tuxedo another time, he was pipped to the post by mere months by the first non-Eon productions Bond movie – a satire that would poke fun at the more exaggerated elements of the character and the situations in which he would find himself, and indeed would suggest that these situations were – as the poster had it – ‘too much… for one James Bond!’ But given its recognition of the central absurdity of the character and a cast containing many of the Great and the Good of the period, Greg D. Smith wonders: could this movie actually be any good?

There are five credited directors to this movie (a sixth, Richard Talmadge, remains uncredited). The number of times the script itself was written and re-written from the time that Gregory Ratoff acquired the rights to the Casino Royale story from Ian Fleming in 1955 is unknown but likely prodigious. In the intervening twelve years, Ratoff passed away, Charles K Feldman acquired the rights from his widow, the movie transformed from a serious adaptation to the spoof it ended up as, after Feldman tried and failed to work with Eon and producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, and the world had become saturated with spy movies, many of them playing off the tropes established by the super spy himself. The real question of 1967’s Casino Royale then is perhaps not ‘How could such a mess have been made of it’ but rather ‘How could it not?’.

The core premise of course is solid (and one that had been done successfully only the previous year with Our Man Flint). The specific part of the spy genre which the Bond movies had established was so overblown, so full of larger than life villains, over the top heroics and pouting, two-dimensional female characters whose sole purpose was to drool over the lead that a parody of it was not only inevitable bur arguably needed. Indeed, it’s such a rich seam that decades later, movies like the Austin Powers franchise were still being made, and still finding success with large audiences.

The specific setup of this version – that the ‘original’ James Bond (in this one a ‘Sir’) was a retired superspy of the old era, squeaky clean and utterly without vice, who now looks down on what the profession has become and indeed on the ‘young man they’ve given his name and number to’, is perhaps the first hurdle the movie sets for itself. In and of itself it’s not a terrible idea, but it is quite limiting in terms of the film’s themes, restricting the plan of SMERSH (the evil organisation here) to somehow smearing the good name of Sir James by thrusting temptation at him by way of young sultry female operatives or killing him. Why the first is needed at all when the second is an option is never really clear, and whereas you can argue that it’s a spoof and therefore not to be taken seriously, even a spoof needs some sort of narrative coherence upon which to hang its gags.

That lack of coherence bothers throughout, and is likely traceable in part back to the fact of those various directors (each of whom had a specific slot of the finished product rather than the project as a whole having passed from one to the next). There are several points where a scene opens with no apparent connection to how the previous one had ended. Notable examples include an early scene where M orders a mortar strike on Sir James’ house and then the next scene has Sir James driving to Scotland to return M’s remains to his ‘widow’, but with no indication in that previous scene that M (who had been stood next to Sir James) was even injured, let alone killed.

There’s also the scene which provided my one genuine laugh throughout the whole thing, where Peter Sellers’ ‘James Bond’ gets into a racing car to chase down Vesper’s kidnappers and then the very next scene sees him in a totally different outfit waking up in Le Chiffre’s lair. It lends to this sense that what we are watching is less a coherent spoof movie and more a selection of sketches from a show like Monty Python’s Flying Circus or possibly even Saturday Night Live, except every sketch has been written and directed by someone completely different, despite them using all the same actors and characters. Of course the reality is that it’s not just the many directors, but also the fact of certain conflicts on set, which leads to much of this disjointedness, Sellers famously going missing from set on more than one occasion and refusing to appear in scenes with Orson Welles, which made producing a coherent movie out of what had been shot almost impossible.

But in spite of all that, how does it stand up as a ‘Bond film’? Well, it has its moments. Of course the central premise leads to a general feeling that the movie sees the main flaws in the Bond formula, not least the misogyny inherent therein. Having Sir James be disgusted by the ‘antics’ of his younger successors is a reasonable way to begin that and then following through with the farcical training programme of a new agent (‘Coop’, just one of the ‘James Bonds’ in the movie) to make him immune to the charms of women throwing themselves at him slightly gets away from that idea, which again feels like a thematic beat not so much missed as ignored by a different director.

It does give its female characters a reasonable amount of agency compared to its stablemates though. Andress in particular gets far more to do here as Vesper Lynd than she ever got in Dr No (itself a low bar but she genuinely does get some stuff to do in the middle of the movie – it’s just a shame that the director then changes and she is rather sidelined only to appear in a fairly prominent way in the finale). Joanna Pettet’s Mata Bond (yes, literally the love child of Sir James and Mata Hari, in the period before Hari’s life and career were subject to more scrutinised analysis) is a relatively fun character in the movie, though her scenes rather smack of someone wanting to give the actress something to do more than of having been written to further the movie in any way. The extended sequence of her going to a spy school run by SMERSH in Berlin and then coming back, all in the same taxi, adds almost nothing to the plot and then by the time she’s kidnapped by SMERSH in London and whisked away in a flying saucer to their secret base (yes you read that right) the movie hasn’t so much jumped the shark as vaulted over an entire ocean’s worth of apex predators.

Even Barbara Bouchet’s Moneypenny here gets to leave the office and go on an adventure with Sir James, in a move that Eon wouldn’t copy until 2012’s Skyfall. True, she doesn’t end up getting a massive amount to do, and in an earlier scene she ends up being ravished by Coop for no particular reason other than being there, but still it’s more than the late great Lois Maxwell ever was given.

In terms of action, the movie really leans into its spoof schtick, with homing missiles ‘disguised’ as birds, a sequence with a remote controlled explosive milk float chasing our hero and a final act that includes literal cowboys and hugely insensitive portrayals of Native Americans turning up for a final battle that just degenerates into a scene that tells you everyone involved ran out of any ideas how to actually end things. It’s not terrible for its time in terms of explosions and stunts, but even in ’67, it wasn’t going to be winning any awards for its FX work, and that’s fair when you consider what it was aiming to do – send up the character rather than accurately portray him.

Musically it does oddly echo the Bond films of the era. Burt Bacharach was brought in for the score and dealt with the movie’s song – The Look of Love – for which he was nominated for an Academy Award at the time. The score repeats many times in variants throughout the movie itself, just like the early Bonds, and the song itself does get a performance partway through the movie.

As a movie, it’s somewhat of a curiosity then. With a budget that exceeded Thunderball, a quite staggering cast and the involvement of so many directors and writers, it feels odd that it should be quite the monumental car crash that it is. Its utter lack of coherency acts to harm it because it’s difficult to buy into the many various tones of humour it sets out when it has no narrative throughline on which to hang them. Its various plotlines – a product of both the botched attempts at covering for the absence of Sellers before filming wrapped as well as that laundry list of creatives – makes matters even worse, as it becomes difficult to see what parts are relevant at any given moment to the actual proceedings.

As a Bond movie, it’s not even a curiosity. Whereas it might have started with decent intentions and even some reasonable ideas, it just doesn’t work on any level. The unevenness of tone, the way some parodic elements actually fold in on themselves to rob them of the satirical intent, and the bizarrely low-budget look of much of it, mingled with often confusing and pointless cameos just distract from what it was intended to do. Small wonder then that all these years later, it is not recalled with any fondness.