Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Mickey Finn. A few weeks later-even before shooting began-Coburn complained that he would feel uncomfortable making movie love to such a young thing, so the studio decided to drop Romina for someone a little older. Linda telephoned Evans a dozen times a day, demanding explanations and offering script revisions that would accommodate Romina's talent for projecting "pure love through poetry." Asked if her budding starlet might take some acting lessons, Mommy exclaimed: "Are you crazy? Do you want to spoil that gift...
With so many egos-including five directors-competing for attention, the picture soon degenerates into an incoherent and vulgar vaudeville. Each actor frantically does his bit and then gets offstage to make room for the jugglers. Niven comes off best because his stylish acting floats far above the script's witless, single-entendre standard: "Beauty is only skin-deep. How about some skin diving?" Allen provides an adroit parody of paranoia, as when he objects to going before a firing squad because he has "a low threshold of death...
...takes to the hills with his seven momless moppets and their inevitable mongrel. A fair enough premise for a one-man vehicle, but Hope is almost lost in a cast of characters that includes a slopstick baby sitter (Phyllis Diller) and her detective boy friend (Jonathan Winters), mouthing a script that contains relentless japes about little boys' bladders and big girls' figures...
Frederic Raphael, who won a 1965 Academy Award for Darling, has written a script that makes up in salt what it lacks in plot, although his dialogue, as Don Marquis once put it, sometimes merely strokes a platitude until it purrs like an epigram ("The only thing that fits into a pigeonhole is a pigeon"). Flashing back and forth through twelve years of togetherness and apartheid, Director Donen makes sure that this particular Road never quite reaches a dead end. In the final moments, Hepburn and Finney, reconciled, look lovingly at each other in the car. He sighs, "Bitch...
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...