Word: bond
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Friday, June 2 WELCOME TO JAPAN, MR. BOND (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). A preview of the newest and wildest Sean Connery-James Bond spectacular. You Only Live Twice. Clips from the film, an interview with Sean on location in Japan, plus earlier 007 movies...
CASINO ROYALE. Several fine performances (David Niven, Woody Allen, Deborah Kerr), five directors (including John Huston), $12 million and the rights to one of Ian Fleming's best James Bond novels have not prevented the movie from over-spilling into incoherent vaudeville...
Casino Royale starts with a premise that is cheerfully cheeky: Sean Connery is an impostor. The real 007 is David Niven, now Sir James Bond, retired to a county seat. Visited by an all-star team of secret agents including William Holden, Charles Boyer and John Huston, he is persuaded to re-enter Her Majesty's Service, an experience that he soon finds simply SMERSHing. Along the way he encounters Joanna Pettet, the byproduct of his illicit union with Mata Hari; Peter Sellers, a green-gilled card shark who impersonates James Bond; Woody Allen as Jimmy Bond, James...
...there is never much chance for the comedy, let alone for the original yarn (which, like all Bond stories, could not be taken seriously, but which at least was a story). The movie is too busy kidding the previous Bond movies, which kidded the books and themselves before they were in turn kidded by the U.N.C.L.E.s and Flints. Poor 007 is now lost in a hall of distorting mirrors. It is no surprise that by the last reel there is a distinct air of defeat about Casino Royale, as if the money ($12 million) and the time (134 minutes...
...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...