There’s a few others but those three were the most active and the ones that I’ll count in my ranking at the end of the marathon.Casino Royale opens with credits that just seem to keep going, and going, and going, which is a good benchmark for what this film will be. Ursula Andress is pretty good and like Niven her performance and character had a lot of potential had they been in a better movie. Peter Sellers’ performance was fine but his character was really poorly written with his only scene were he really felt like James Bond being his scene with Orson Welles, he also left the production early resulting in some of the continuity problems. David Niven does a decent job as the original Sir James Bond and I can see how with better material to work with he could have been great.

This would be the point where I’d talk about my opinion on this movie’s Bond but there’s about 7 or 8 of them (I think the movie itself lost track) so I’ll just focus on the notable ones. There were several times I audibly reacted “WHAT?!” and had trouble describing just how odd the movie was when talking to friends of mine who hadn’t seen it. But then it just gets more ridiculous and at times pretty racist to the point that even if you accept that it’s a comedy/parody it still doesn’t work because you spend most of the movie confused about what is going on. Plus David Niven was the actor Ian Fleming wanted to play the character. At the start you get the impression that maybe this was going to be a different interpretation of the books with Bond making criticisms of an agent with his name and number that were clearly directed at Connery’s Bond. Watching this certainly was an interesting experience. An older retired James Bond taking over for M, James Bond being a codename (a popular fan theory), a Bond Girl who is herself James Bond and Orson Welles as a Bond villain. Not only that but there’s so many great concepts poorly handled in this. I mean this movie has Orson Welles as a Bond villain and they under use him. The sad thing about it though is all the wasted potential, before I saw this my dad mentioned how it has a great cast that are wasted and he was right. I knew this movie wasn’t very popular but I wasn’t expecting something so bizarre.

Casino royale cast 2018