Casino Royale

Among the holdings of the late actor-director Gregory Rattoff were the movie rights to a little spy novel entitled Casino Royale, which Rattoff's heirs transferred to producer Charles K. (What's New, Pussycat?) Feldmann, who in turn gave it the full treatment: half a dozen directors, an equivalent number of writers, one of the most star-studded casts in years, and a budget that would make many a small nation choke in envy.

One might expect a movie with so many creators to suffer from a certain unevenness of style. Not so. Casino Royale is guided through its 131 minutes by the same matchless bad taste. My own suspicion is that the budget, huge as it must have been, somehow ran out before Feldmann had thought to hire a screenwriter. Or maybe he split up what he had three ways, on the theory that invention is additive. (It's not.)

The only funny lines occur in Woody Allen's and, to a much lesser extent, Peter Seller's scenes. About to be shot down by a firing squad, Allen--as Sir James Bond's nephew Jimmy Bond--protests, "I have a low threshold of death." Sellers, being fitted for a spy outfit, is asked, "Which side do you dress?" and he answers, "Away from the window, usually." But since the scenes without these two are so repulsively unfunny, one is led to believe both Sellers and Allen did a good lot of improvising. Particularly Allen, whose entire performance resembles--is--one of his nightclub or TV routines.

Even to someone who has never read Casino Royale (which may not be such a horrible oversight) it is immediately clear that the movie borrows only a little and, I suppose, an audience from the book. The script, which appears to have been written by a select society on the order of the Warren Commission, is also about as funny as the Warren Report, and as likely to be the spy movie to end all spy movies as the Warren Commission's product is to be the final word on the Kennedy assassination.

David Niven and Orson Welles, Ursula Andress and Deborah Kerr, William Holden and George Raft, John Huston, Charles Boyer, Joana Pettet, Daliah Lauri, and in furtive appearances, Peter O'Toole and Jean Paul Belmondo, round out Casino Royale's company. Niven takes everything very very seriously, and has made of Sir James a proud, sensitive, prudish, retired spy in anything but the Ian Fleming tradition. He stutters too, at the start, but as if realizing it's not funny, Niven gives up this device a third of the way into the picture. Orson Welles, given one of the most thankless villains in ages, tries to build a character out of his very considerable talents as a magician, but somehow Panavision 70 and the ample opportunity for special effects create an unbridgeable credibility gap.

In the lengthy list of credited directors appears one "John Huston," who should be and probably is ashamed of himself. The problem--the rub--is that who can resist a cast like that? The advertising is so damn good that Casino Royale has it made--so it would be pointless to go into why it's such a ghastly movie. But the picture is not all black. Maybe Welles made enough from it to finance a movie of his own.