Trivia / Casino Royale (1967)

• Acting for Two: In the European French dub, Georges Aminel voiced both Le Chiffre and the bagpipe player.
• Actor-Shared Background: One of the few times in her career Deborah Kerr played a Scot (who's actually a Frenchwoman in disguise).
• All-Star Cast: A pretty big amount of Household Names here: David Niven, Peter Sellers, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, Deborah Kerr, John Huston, William Holden, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Boyer, Jacqueline Bisset... And that's not even mentioning the cameos by the likes of Peter O'Toole or Geraldine Chaplin.
• Billing Displacement: Peter Sellers and Ursula Andress get top billing as they were originally the stars of the film. However, after Sellers left the film, material with David Niven was shot to wrap around Sellers' and Andress' material in which Niven became the main character. Niven taking over what was intended as a Sellers vehicle is the inverse of The Pink Panther.
• Breakaway Pop Hit:
  • Nearly 50 years later, Dusty Springfield's "The Look of Love" still gets airplay on light rock stations, while Royale wallows in well-deserved obscurity, known primarily only by Bond fanatics.
  • The instrumental theme from the movie was a modest hit for Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass (#27 on the Billboard Hot 100; #1 on the "Easy Listening" charts) and probably is better known today than the movie itself is.
• Cast the Runner-Up:
  • At the Intercon science fiction convention held in Slough in 1978, David Prowse commented on his part in this film, apparently his big-screen debut. He claimed that he was originally asked to play "Super Pooh", a giant Winnie the Pooh in a superhero costume who attacks Tremble during the Torture of The Mind sequence. This idea, as with many others in the film's script, was rapidly dropped, and Prowse was re-cast as a Frankenstein-type monster for the closing scenes.
  • William Holden and Peter O'Toole were considered for Sir James Bond. They instead make cameos.
• The Cast Showoff: Peter Sellers puts on a range of accents, while Orson Welles fills his side with magic tricks (Welles was a keen amateur magician). None of it is remotely relevant to what little plot there is.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Got one from star Peter Sellers, who wanted a serious Bond film but wound up with another comedy that he was ejected from.
  • Woody Allen to this day regrets taking part in the film, calling the production "a madhouse".
• Creator-Chosen Casting: An odd case. Ian Fleming cited David Niven as his ideal casting choice for Bond, but he certainly didn't envision him in a comedy.
• Creator Killer:
  • A sadly literal instance. The stress of making the film caused producer Charles K. Feldman to develop heart problems, which claimed his life just two years after its release.
  • A less lethal instance happened to all of the film's directors except for John Huston. All of them had fairly distinguished careers prior to working on this film, but none of them had anywhere near the same success afterwards. Probably the worst affected was Val Guest; after word got out that he had taken over as the primary director late in production, he got unfairly blamed for the resulting mess and was reduced to directing Awful British Sex Comedies for the rest of his career.
• The Danza: Terence Cooper as Coop.
• Deleted Role:
  • Ian Hendry was cut out of this project. All that remains of his role is a dead body being removed.
  • Geraldine Chaplin filmed a cameo appearance, but was cut out of the film.
• Descended Creator: John Huston originally wrote the role of M with Robert Morley in mind. When Morley was unavailable, Huston played the part himself.
• Dueling Works: It was released in the same year as a Eon Productions James Bond film, You Only Live Twice, which got better reviews and the best results at the box office. Outside of this, Casino Royale got a DEFCON-1 level backlash from Eon producers, who became hell-bent on preventing any other Bond production not authorized by them from taking place, setting the stage for their long and bitter legal feud with Kevin McClory later, which only fully ended in 2013, 7 years after McClory's death and nearly five decades from when You Only Live Twice and Casino Royale hit theaters. Eon Productions also scored a major victory in the long run when they managed to acquire the rights to Casino Royale and triumphantly released a proper adaptation of the novel in 2006.
• Fake Brit: American actor/filmmaker John Huston plays M, who's inexplicably a Scotsman in this continuity.
• Franchise Killer:
  • This one Bond spoof's critical and popular thrashing and EON getting the blame for it convinced them to go hard after anything even remotely resembling James Bond, which became a HUGE problem with Kevin McClory 10 years later. Only Mike Myers's Austin Powers series has been able to skirt by this.
  • The film's failure with film critics and Bond fans, it being responsible for producer Charles Feldman's death, and it becoming one of the roots of the ugly EON vs Kevin McClory rivalry tainted its reputation so badly, no other attempts were made to adapt Casino Royale until EON themselves used it as the starting point for their rebooted Bond series.
• Hostility on the Set: The rift between Orson Welles and Peter Sellers was partly caused by the arrival on set of Princess Margaret, sister of Queen Elizabeth II. Sellers had known her previously and greeted her in an ostentatious manner to ensure all cast and crew noticed. However, the Princess walked straight past him and made a big fuss over Welles. Nonplussed, Sellers stormed off the set and refused to film with Welles again. It's also been suggested that the superstitious Sellers disapproved of Welles' use of magic tricks.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: The film was supposed to be a serious adaptation of the novel and proper James Bond film to compete with the proper series. When the filmmakers couldn't get Sean Connery, it became a spoof.
• Not Screened for Critics: The film invoked this trope due to it being a patchwork of scenes with five directors, and it unsurprisingly failed with critics and unleashed a lot of problems that didn't fully go away until 2013.
• Production Posse: Peter Sellers, Peter O'Toole, Woody Allen, Ursula Andress, and Burt Bacharach all previously worked on What's New Pussycat?, also produced by Charles K. Feldman.
• Real-Life Relative: The film also proved to be young Anjelica Huston's first experience in the film industry as she was called upon by her father, John Huston, to cover the screen shots of Deborah Kerr's hands.
• Release Date Change: This film was originally intended to be released on Christmas in 1966, but because the shoot ran several months over schedule it was not released until April of 1967.
• Screwed by the Lawyers/Channel Hop: Columbia Pictures lost the rights to the film after they got entangled in a lawsuit by MGM/UA and Eon Productions (they wanted to make a rival Bond series, holding already the rights to Casino Royale and allying with Kevin McClory, who helped with Thunderball), trading them and the book rights for the ones MGM held to Spider-Man (which then became Columbia's own Cash-Cow Franchise).
• Star-Derailing Role: Peter Sellers was actually fired midway through the shoot when he proved too unreliable and uncooperative, and while the film was finished without him it was extremely messy. This left a black mark on his reputation (particularly with American studios), and most of his subsequent films through 1974 would turn out to be flops if they even made it to theaters. He experienced a Career Resurrection after that.
• Troubled Production: The film was a trainwreck of epic proportions that had long-standing ramifications on the greater Bond franchise.
  • EON Productions (who were behind the official film series) did not have the rights to the novel as Ian Fleming had sold the film rights to Casino Royale seperately to Gregory Ratoff, who died in 1960 before he could find backers to fund the film; the film rights ended up in the hands of producer Charles K. Feldman. Feldman and EON producer Albert R. Broccoli attempted to make the film a co-production, but Feldman and Broccoli butted heads over profit divisions and production dates which led Feldman to break off talks. Feldman attempted to sign on Sean Connery, but balked when Connery demanded one million dollars for the role.
  • Feldman, with a script written by Scarface (1932) screenwriter Ben Hecht, brought the film to Columbia Pictures who agreed to take on the project. Hecht had initially written a straightforward adaptation of the novel but he died in 1964, just two days before he was due to present his final script to Feldman. Feldman, seeing the spy film craze beginning due to the success of EON's Bond films, opted to change the film into a parody of Bond to seperate it from the pack, bringing in several writers (among them Wolf Mankowitz and Billy Wilder) to rewrite the script before and during shooting, while Peter Sellers ended up in the lead role.
  • Sellers, who allegedly had been led to believe the film was a serious adaptation of the novel, arrived to see it was a comedy spoofing it. Sellers was dismayed and greatly angered and became increasingly uncooperative toward the production. Among his antics was having actor John Bluthal fired, ordering a set torn down over a dream he had, bringing in Terry Southern to rewrite his character's dialogue in an attempt to outshine his co-stars, and leaving the set for days or weeks at a time.
  • Part of his absent behavior was the Hostility on the Set between Sellers and Orson Welles. Sources disagree on exactly what caused the rift between the two; Princess Margaret, sister of Queen Elizabeth II, is said to have ignored Sellers in favor of Welles during a set visit, which caused Sellers to throw a tantrum and blame Welles. Wolf Mankowitz claimed that Sellers also felt intimidated by Welles (possibly on account of the extremely superstitious Sellers being spooked by Welles' magic tricks). The animosity was mutual; Sellers felt Welles wasn't taking scenes seriously while Welles refused to shoot scenes with "that amateur". Sellers became so disruptive that he was fired from the production with a number of his scenes still unfilmed.
  • The production scrambled as the plot was hastily rewritten to account for missing and unfinished scenes. Five different directors would be credited for the final film (John Huston, Val Guest, Ken Hughes, Joseph McGrath and Robert Parrish. Richard Talmadge also did uncredited directing). David Niven was brought in for new scenes that would wrap around scenes Sellers had been in while other sequences were either cut, dropped or replaced entirely, which eventually led to a film about multiple agents named James Bond in a zany parody of EON's films. The resulting chaos caused the film's budget to run far over what it had began with.
  • When the film finally released in April 1967, it was blasted by critics for a long list of reasons, among them being its nonsense plot and choppy editing. Virtually nobody involved in the production had nice things to say about the experience, and many of those who worked on the film saw their careers derailed or killed; of the film's directors, John Huston was mostly unscathed while Val Guest, who had handled Niven's scenes, was scapegoated for the mess and reduced to directing films like Confessions Of A Window Cleaner for the rest of his career. Charles Feldman develped heart issues as a result of the stress incurred by the film and died two years after the film's release. Peter Sellers suffered a black mark to his reputation thanks to his actions on the set, which led some studios to simply not deal with him at all, though he would bounce back after a string of failures with The Return of the Pink Panther.
  • And as for EON Productions? While they couldn't take direct legal action against the film, it caused them to take a much more aggressive stance in protecting their hold of the Bond franchise. It was also a key factor in EON's decades-long feud and legal entanglements with Kevin McClory, who held rights to the Bond novel Thunderball (and who would make his own unoffical Bond film with Never Say Never Again). The film's reputation along with legal issues kept the rights out of EON's hands until 1999, and in 2006 they would finally make their own adaptation of Fleming's novel.
• Uncredited Role:
  • In addition to the credited writers, Woody Allen, Peter Sellers, Val Guest, Ben Hecht, Joseph Heller, Terry Southern, and Billy Wilder are all believed to have contributed to the screenplay to varying degrees.
  • John Le Mesurier as M's driver.
• Wag the Director: Peter Sellers caused many problems onset. He had actor John Bluthal (who was to play multiple roles) sacked, ordered a set torn down because he had a dream where his mother visited the set and told him she didn't like it, caused delays by leaving the set for days at a time, refused to be onset with Orson Welles and hired Terry Southern to write his dialogue (and not the rest of the script) to "outshine" his costars. Welles also demanded be allowed to show off his magic tricks despite that it resulted in more Padding in a film full of them.
• What Could Have Been: Enough for its own page.

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