Sets are designed as optical illusions or mazes of angular stairs like something out of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919). Colossal dance sequences rub shoulders with performing animals, UFOs and Frankenstein monsters. Not surprisingly, Casino Royale is a sprawling, incoherent mess. Part of the problem was a difficult Peter Sellers, who started as the star of the film but developed an intense dislike of Orson Welles and refused to appear in the same shots he did and then became fed up and went AWOL from the set without telling anyone. The budget spiralled up to $6 million, which was a considerable amount for the day.

Feldman’s idea was to talk some star into coming and playing for the day and then write scenes around them.

Feldman had the film made by five different directors (and about as many uncredited), using over a dozen different scripts, at three different studios and on as many soundstages at once. Nobody apparently had any consistent idea of the film they were trying to make. David Niven as James BondĬasino Royale ended up being one of the largest follies ever committed to film. For more detail about such see Spy Films. Although a spoof of the spy craze, coming when the genre was being dominated by the likes of Dean Martin in the Matt Helm films – The Silencers (1966), Murderers Row (1966), The Ambushers (1967) and The Wrecking Crew (1969) – and James Coburn Our Man Flint (1966), might well have seemed redundant. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman – the other being Thunderball (1961) – and resurrected it as a spoof of the spy craze. The show however had Bond unforgivably played as a rough diamond American card player, facing off against a Le Chiffre played by Peter Lorre.ĭuring the midst of the 1960s Bond craze created by the Sean Connery films, someone remembered Casino Royale, the only of two James Bond novels not owned by producers Albert R.

The answer is in fact Barry Nelson who played James Bond in a 1954 one-hour live adaptation of Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel Casino Royale (1953), which appeared as an episode of the tv anthology series Climax (1954-8). Trivia question:– Who was the first actor to play James Bond? If you replied Sean Connery you are wrong.

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