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Accidentally returning to @Dwayne's post during work, made me blush.
As for this list, I haven't come around counting yet. It's been quite busy, I think I'll be able to get to it when I have some time off soon. If anyone still wants to participate, feel free to pm your list to me. I will post here whenever I have started counting it.
Should anyone have missed this and want to partecipate, please pm me your current EON only Bond film ranking before Monday 0.00 CET.
In the meantime, as you all know the non-EON Bond adaptions were not considered for this game. Should you want to discuss them, now would be a good time.
NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN (1983)
Directed by Irvin Kershner
CASINO ROYALE (1967)
Directed by John Huston, Kenneth Hughes, Val Guest, Robert Parrish, Joseph McGrath
CASINO ROYALE (1954)
Directed by William H. Brown
CR ‘67 is utter madness, but I feel there’s little hints of genius in there. NSNA has its moments I guess but it’s just not a very exciting film to watch.
NSNA comes next. While not a terrible film in total, there are things going on in it that I severely dislike. I also consider the film squandered mostly potential.
CR67 is the silly result of an out-of-control production, mainly caused by my guy Peter Sellers acting up all the time. It's a circus, a wild collection of incompatible vignettes thrown in a pot, blended, and served up for dinner. BUT, despite the utter madness that is this film, it somehow works in a time when Dean Martin broke the fourth wall as Matt Helm and James Coburn was fighting evil mothers in space as Derek Flint. The power of CR67 resides with its delicious cast, including tons of gorgeous ladies and more big Hollywood cameos than any other film, as well as its fantastic sets and juicy Bacharach score. I've got the look of love too when I watch this film simply because I fell in love with it ages ago when I stopped treating it as a Bond film and started thinking of it as just one of the other perfectly innocent '60s spoofs. Crazy though it is, I find the film quite entertaining as a drug-induced fever dream that should have been the movie Blake Edwards made immediately before or after he did The Party.
CR '67 is indeed a mess, can't remember when I first saw it, but it's an enjoyable mess, a wild cast list and great music ( I probably listen to the soundtrack more than watch the film!)
My upgrading of my CR'67 to bluray has given me the bonus of CR' 54! I had only seen it once, and didn't remember much of it, but surprisingly it is very enjoyable as a curio, and it's short and sweet!
Now that I have it on tape, it will be a regular watch! Of the 3, I would have to pick NSNA, as it's the one that's closest to a proper Bond movie!!
CR54: I can be short here. An American as Bond is like a pizza with pineapple or a carbonara with cream, so I'll skip. One thing that does work though is the great Peter Lorre as Le Chiffre.
CR67: as @DarthDimi pointed out, it works rather well as long as you don't look at it as a Bond film. And as such, I have come to like this one quite a bit. The music, the sets, the craziness. Moreover I am a big David Niven and Barbara Bouchet fan.
NSNA: I was never a hater and that hasn't changed. Not quite a match for either TB or OP, but I certainly take it over my bottom 3 or 4 EON's. I like Brandauer and Carrera, and I consider Bernie Casey my favourite Felix of them all.
CR67: Enjoying it purely as a dazzling, colorful comedy, it's much easier to swallow and enjoy. As a Bond film though? Not so much. It works better with its parody style and juggling of huge stars, but it gets so outrageous and nonsensical at times that I can clearly tell why it's not for everyone.
NSNA: Here's where I commit one of the bigger Bond sins out there when I say I genuinely enjoy this one more and have a lot more fun watching it than I do TB. Sure, the title song is abysmal, it's a little heavy on the comedy, and Basinger isn't among the best Bond girls, but Connery looks to be having a load of fun, it's hilarious, the action is constantly exciting, it has arguably my favorite portrayal of Felix Leiter in the series, and Klaus Maria Brandauer is honestly one of the better scenery-chewing villains in the entire franchise. I have a soft spot in my heart for this one and always will.
CR '54: I don't know if this one belongs in here at all, I mean, it's an episode of a TV series (Climax!) To even compete with the other two (NSNA and CR '67), but in its own quality, it's okay, I think this show made it as closer to the book as possible (like Peter Lorre being close to the book Le Chiffre than Mads' version), I liked the 50s noir setting that really captured the book's atmosphere and setting, suddenly some characters got switched up like Mathis being a woman when she's supposed to be Vesper Lynd 😅 although she got the British nationality right which is really in the book, but Jimmy Bond is American, yep, the closest thing we could see an American Bond. Linda Christian was beautiful and I think she's a good actress, but we don't understand her motivations unlike what Vesper does in the book, Barry Nelson, he's okay, I guess, but not Bond, but he's miles better than all of the Bonds who have played in CR '67 😅 (maybe except Peter Sellers).
NSNA: The only decent Bond outing in this list, the only I'd say is a proper Bond film, it got all the Bond elements right sans the Title Sequence, and for me, it did better than what Thunderball done (Celi's Largo was not intimidating that Brandauer's Largo managed to portray, the treatment of Domino's brother instead of cloning, which for me was really silly in the original 1965 film, here in 1983, it did a better job by succumbing Domino's brother to drugs), Fatima Blush was good, although a bit overacting at times, and not as dangerous as Fiona Volpe, I think it has something to do with Barbara Carrera's acting, I think Fatima Blush on paper was meant to be menacing as Fiona Volpe but Carrera undersold the role by being OTT in her portrayal, Sean Connery's performance was for sure, much better here than he did in both YOLT and DAF, so that's a plus, good to see him energized in the Bond role again, even if it's unofficial, the theme song was bland, then so the soundtrack.
We are btw almost done, if I get SIS's final ranking, I'll be able to proceed with the first reveal tomorrow morning CET.
1. Casino royale 54
2. Never say never again
3. Casino Royale 67
Already sent my pm..... Thanks 😊
I recall from Michael Richardson's great book "THE MAKING OF CASINO ROYALE (1967)" that Sellers wanted anything but to be taken seriously as Bond. It was he who goofed everything up, who acted like a diva and made it almost impossible for anyone to take him seriously. I love Sellers, but the author's extensive research indicates that Sellers is a big reason for CR going off the rails like it does.
I agree, David Niven is always classy, and one of the better things of the film. I've read Michael Richardson book on the movie, and indeed, Peter Sellers was indeed a lot of trouble, for example being intimidated by Orson Welles so much that he wanted his scenes with him shot separately!
That's kinda bad though, but if my memory serves, the original idea for Casino Royale as Charles K. Feldman had planned was to make it as closer to the book and have Connery play as Bond with Elizabeth Taylor in talks to play Vesper, but Connery demanded so much money that the plan didn't came to fruition, so Feldman just kinda let it go and it resulted into the mess that's the film we have now, it was written by multiple scriptwriters too if I get the fact right......from my old knowledge 😅, (and may have possibly directed by many directors too, although I'm still yet to confirm this part). So maybe long before Sellers came, the film was already made that way or maybe his attitude just added up to the shortcomings of the film that resulted in the way it is.
I don't know, but thanks for the info 😊👍
You're welcome. And yes, having multiple directors each contribute one or two segments to something that was supposed to neatly click together in the end, is not the best strategy, if you ask me, especially when things were changed on the spot.
The original idea was, indeed, to make a more serious film, closer to the EONs.
He was offered the credit "supervising director" or something in that area, but he refused. That's why the last credit in the title sequence reads:
"Additional sequences by Val Guest"
Yeah, Sellers was a great comedy actor, but a sorry excuse for a human being, even if he likely suffered from some sort of mental health/personality issue. This was likely around the time that his drug and alcohol use began to get worse too, and it only messed him up more into the 70s.
A serious Bond film where Bond is retired but finds himself called back to MI6, meets the new 007, we discover he's had a daughter and he travels to an island at the end to stop a madman with a deadly bioweapon who has kidnapped her, only for Bond to die at the end? Nah that'd never work.
Yeah that could have been fun, it's a nice idea. Just to concentrate on one idea would have been a good start.
The odd thing is that it's a Bond spoof which doesn't really spoof the Bond films at all, except in a couple of brief places.
Of course. The "Bond" part was gradually lost in favour of a broader comedic exploration of the times. That's what makes the film harmless in my opinion. It's not an attack on the EON Bond, nor attempted competition. NSNA, by contrast, was.
Yes, there's definitely shades of NTTD in there! And I guess it's not really even a spoof as such in one sense, true (or at least in its best form it didn't need to be). It could have instead been an interesting Bond pastiche/meta comedy film, with a lot of broad and rather stupid humour (always good). Or as @GoldenGun and @DarthDimi said, more a parody of the 60s rather than a poke at EON simply by using the James Bond name.
One way of looking at Casino Royale ’67 is to view it not as a direct Bond spoof, but instead to view it more as a caricature of how the public had come to view Bond by the mid-1960s. And (IMO, of course), it you view it that way, it is possible to have fun with it. Notice I didn’t say that all of the film’s jokes were funny, just that I can giggle at some of the tropes of “the swinging 1960s.”
In any case, CR’67 makes for a nice double feature with the prior year’s “What’s Up Pussycat” – also produced by Charles K. Feldman. I could also add “After the Fox” (1966) to this list of films which work better if you view them as a kind of time capsule of the middle "mod" years of that decade.
PS: Like CR’67, "What's Up Pussycat" it has more than its share of eye candy: Romy Schneider, Capucine, Ursula Andress and Paula Prentiss.
@GoldenGun : How are you tabulating this? Are you using a spreadsheet or calculating it by hand.
I think YOLT's box office was hurt a little by this movie but that's something we'll never know.
Possibly. And other films too. Our Man Flint, The Silencers, ... Spy spoofs were all over the place.
Sorry forgot to reply to this. So I'm putting all the numbers in an Excel spreadsheet. For example (this example I made up btw), DN has three 1st places, two 2nd places, etc. So that's three times 10 pts, two times 9 pts, etc. After adding everything up per entry, I rank the entries by total scores.
In case of a tie, I use the following tiebreakers by order of importance:
1: amount of 1st places
2: amount of top 3 finishes
3: amount of top 5 finishes
4: amount of top 10 finishes
5: amount of last places
6: amount of top half finishes (top 13)
7: amount of bottom 3 finishes