Casino Royale

Casino Royale (1967)

Casino Royale is too much for one James Bond!

Sir James Bond is called back out of retirement to stop SMERSH. In order to trick SMERSH, James thinks up the ultimate plan - that every agent will be named 'James Bond'. One of the Bonds, whose real name is Evelyn Tremble is sent to take on Le Chiffre in a game of baccarat, but all the Bonds get more than they can handle.

Date of release
1967-04-18
TMDB
5.2 / 10 (872)
Runtime
2h 11m
Genres
Adventure, Action, Comedy
Director
Joseph McGrath, Robert Parrish, Ken Hughes, John Huston, Val Guest

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $41.7M
  • Budget: $12M
  • Earned 3.5× its budget
  • Based on: Casino Royale
  • Filmed in: Mereworth Castle, Amalgamated Studios, Pinewood Studios, Killeen Castle, Dunsany, Shepperton Studios, 10 Downing Street and 6 more

Casino Royale is a 1967 spy parody film originally distributed by Columbia Pictures. It is loosely based on the 1953 novel Casino Royale, the first novel in Ian Fleming's James Bond book series.

Production

In November 1952, several months before the publication of his first James Bond novel Casino Royale, Ian Fleming purchased the small theatrical agency Glidrose Productions Limited to produce a screen adaptation of the novel. After the publication, Curtis Brown, Associated British Pictures and the Music Corporation of America all expressed interest in purchasing the film rights.

By 1964, Feldman had invested nearly $550,000 of his own money into pre-production. He decided to try a deal with Eon Productions and United Artists. The attempt at a co-production fell through because Feldman frequently argued with Broccoli and Saltzman about profit division and they could not agree on a production start date. Feldman decided to offer his project to Columbia Pictures with a script written by Ben Hecht, and the studio accepted.

Later drafts see vice made central to the plot, with the Le Chiffre character becoming head of a network of brothels (as he is in the novel) whose patrons are then blackmailed by Le Chiffre to fund Spectre (an invention of the screenwriter). The racy plot elements opened up by this change of background include a chase scene through Hamburg's red-light district that results in Bond escaping disguised as a female mud wrestler.

The script was then completely re-written by Billy Wilder, and by the time the film reached production, only the idea that the name James Bond should be given to a number of other agents remained. This key plot device in the finished film, in the case of Hecht's version, occurs after the demise of the original James Bond (an event which happened prior to the beginning of his story) which, as Hecht's M puts it, "not only perpetuates his memory, bu…

Feldman approached Sean Connery to play Bond, but rejected Connery's offer to do the film for $1 million. Feldman originally intended to cast Terence Cooper as Bond and had him under personal contract for two years prior to production. Feldman had worked with Sellers on What's New Pussycat? (1965) and offered the actor a part as Bond. Sellers originally turned him down saying he felt the image of Bond was "too fixed".

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