Casino Royale (40th Anniversary Edition) |  | Directors: John Huston, Joseph McGrath, Ken Hughes, Richard Talmadge, Robert Parrish
Actors: David Niven, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, Orson Welles, Joanna Pettet
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
List Price: $19.98
Buy New: $9.97
as of 3/12/2010 11:27 CST details
You Save: $10.01 (50%)
New (27) Used (9) from $7.57
Seller: moviemars
Rating:  167 reviews
Sales Rank: 14519
Format: AC-3, Collector's Edition, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Languages: English (Original Language), French (Original Language), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), French (Dubbed), Spanish (Dubbed)
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 131 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.4 x 0.7
MPN: 109286
ISBN: 6302470021
UPC: 027616092861
EAN: 9786302470024
ASIN: 6302470021
Theatrical Release Date: April 28, 1967
Release Date: October 21, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com
John Huston was only one of five directors on this expensive, all-star 1967 spoof of Ian Fleming's 007 lore. David Niven is the aging Sir James Bond, called out of retirement to take on the organized threat of SMERSH and pass on the secret-agent mantle to his idiot son (Woody Allen). An amazing cast (Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, Deborah Kerr, etc.) is wonderful to look at, but the film is not as funny as it should be, and the romping starts to look mannered after awhile. The musical score by Burt Bacharach, however, is a keeper. --Tom Keogh
Product Description
Studio: Tcfhe/mgm Release Date: 10/21/2008 Run time: 130 minutes Rating: Nr
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 167
 Casino Royale VHS January 19, 2010
Sylvia Jarvis (Calgary, Alberta)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Casino Royale was well received with tears.
At the time of viewing, it view was excellent
It arrived in time for Christmas. It was a
gift for another person. That person just
love that movie. I am sure will watch it
many times. I would certainly purchase from
this seller again.
 icchy-pooh November 15, 2009
Joseph T. Rufer
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
even as a spoof, this movie doesn't know what it is! as a James Bond fan, i bought it to complete the set but as a Peter Sellers fan, this movie is just disappointing!!
 PLAYING AT A HEAD SHOP NEAR YOU October 6, 2009
Josef Bush (Phoenix, AZ)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
Does everything have to be s-serious? Can't we all just g-get along? Alright! Ursula Andress' name (Bear Naked?) doesn't appear in David Thomson's BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONAR OF FILM, but so what? She's the best-looking piece of cineflesh in this hashish spectacle, and more than anything else, by far, partly naked, wiggling femenine bodies in every imaginable situation are in and of themselves all (or at least most) of what this movie has to offer. Wildly forgettable Jiggle Music by Burt Bacharach.
Hashish spectacle, you say? Well, mostly the result of confusion about production (who's in charge?); the primary star quits the show; there are at least three different, unresolved scripts; it appears there are four directors, each with his own favorite part of and kind of movie to direct, and casting is searching for any putative star or personality they can find to plug a hole as a cameo, and the scene designer(s) have gone stark, staring mad. Let's go back: It's 1967. Five years ago DR. NO and the new Sean Connery took the world by storm, launching the James Bond 007 craze. It was followed by FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, another sensation, and an even better movie. With what looks like a franchise in the bud, Albert Broccoli appears to have found a gold mine. How to get some of that money?
Fleming's first Bond novel, CASINO ROYALE, a wildly improbable story about an attempt by a novice agent to bankrupt a crack but corrupt soviet functionary with a gambling habit and millions of siphoned-off Soviet money to lose, at a crowded French casino, became somehow available. The Producers dove for it and began production as quickly as possible. Catastrophe! The story proved useless. They couldn't get Connery, but they got his co-star from DR. NO, the stunning Ms. Andress, gave her the name of Vesper Lind and kept her before the camera for as long as possible. Apparently Peter Sellers, headliner, was to have played a presumably comic Bond, but he bailed out and then into the more professionally produced and sillier PINK PANTHER movies. Was he miffed because the producers hired Woody Allen to play yet another version of Bond? And let him bring his own material? He needn't have been. Allen's appearances on screen, are about as amusing as watching gangrene fester.
The star of the mix-up appears to be David Niven, who manages to get through it without making an ass of himself. He plays in rather an over-longish, not terribly funny bit, against Deborah Kerr. She's the widowed lady of a castle staffed and stuffed with horny, nubile red-haired scotch maidens, and he's an interloper come to confront or to comfort her. Either or both.
What saves this dog and pony show is the fact that the Psychedelic Sixties are in full bloom, and the Western World turns for a decade, into Lotus Land. It was like the 20s, but instead of Gin, with Marijuana. It was everywhere. It was cheap. In big cities, people gave it away on street corners. People kept it on cocktail tables in sticks, rolled, or they offered it to you as a matter of course. People everywhere began to find other aspects beside the obvious desirable, in viewing cinema, and were often to be seen with the sound low or disguised or overriden by other sounds or music, simply watching the screen and laughing simplemindedly at what they took to be hallucinations. This social blowback it was that gave the movie its saving grace. It wasn't funny, it was preposterous, but in a drugged-up, high kind of way. The movie began in hard focus, but changed until wide swaths of it oozed and swam in psychedellic pattern and color, indicative of nothing so much as a good head trip. At one point, toward the end, a shapely woman named Joanna Pettet (possibly an English, Australian or New Zeland musical comedy personality) who was supposed to be James Bond's daughter by Mata Hari, began an interminable music and dance sequence -- a blonde woman dressed in sort-of Baliinese pagoda costume -- that goes in every conceivable and many inconceivable directions, up, down, side-wise, until, somehow, it ends. Or just, just... Disintegrates. Don't ask. And somewhere in there there's George Raft, doing... Please, don't ask.
The long anticipated Bacarat game with LeChiffre takes place, more or less as expected, with Orson Welles, a sweaty Hindenberg -- corpulent quite beyond belief -- doing magic tricks above the gaming tables. Charles Boyer, William Holden, John Houston, Jean-Paul Belmondo do their five minutes, variously, and take their money and run. And somehow, throughout all this, occasionally, there's an extraordinary-looking woman in a big black wig, called Daliah Lavi, (East Jordan movie star) who apparently came with the Producer(s). At her entrance on camera she is first thrown to the ground, fully dressed; and later appears naked, strapped to an operating table for Woody Allen to play with. (Ms. Lavi can be seen to advantage in THE RETURN OF DOCTOR MABUSE, as The Photographer.) Please, don't...
Anyway, I have the BOND collection, love them all for their eccentricities and excesses, and watch them frequently. If what TV broadcasts or newscasts show me have any truth, drugs of many kinds are coming into the country regularly, dependably, and in quantity, and consequently one thinks they must be available at reasonable cost. Somewhere or other... If so, why not enjoy this particular 007 fantasy in the way it was intended/marketed? Or any of the others, for that matter? What's the difference? I certainly used to escape regularly into them and, for an hour or so, imagine myself the dashing stud assassin of British Intelligence, wallowing in conspicuous consumption and the wet laps of magnificent women. As long as the images remain stable on their media, why not enjoy ourselves again, and yet again? Bond films are all Boss-Man sex dreams. Why shouldn't we too dream we are Boss-Men?
Better the second time around August 4, 2009
Chih Hung Lee (Rosemead, CA USA)
I did not enjoy this film when I first saw it on television, because of the incoherent plot, but my opinion has changed after watching it again years later on DVD. After all, this is the only James Bond film that unabashedly makes fun of the world of 007 through sarcasm and slapstick, and incorporates the psychedelic atmosphere of the mid to late 1960s, with an all star cast including David Niven, Peter Sellers, Deborah Kerr, William Holden, Orson Welles, Woody Allen and Ursula Andress, arguably the best known Bond girl and only actress to appear in both an official Bond movie (Dr. No) and an unofficial one. The musical score is pleasant, topped off by Dusty Springfield's memorable rendition of "The Look of Love". Casino Royale is a welcomed alternative to the dark and humorless official Bond entries of Timothy Dalton and now Daniel Craig. Life is frequently somber and challenging, let's at least have fun when watching 007.
Even if you dislike this movie, you may still want to purchase it to complement your James Bond collection, and for the bonus material; the 1954 CBS television program Casino Royale, the first ever 007 production for either TV or cinema that features American actor Barry Nelson (not Sean Connery) as the first James Bond, Linda Christian the first Bond girl, and Peter Lorre the first Bond villian.
 One of the Best Spy Spoofs August 1, 2009
D. Reed (Elkton, MD USA)
What to say about this? Aside from some other spy-spoof style films of the sixties, this one dared to poke fun at the most successful movie franchise at the time (and still is). What started out as an attempt to make a serious Bond film turned into one mess of a film, but strange as it seems to me, it does seem to flow into one cohesive plot. This captures the essence of the sixties; the fashions, psychedelic craze (this was done in '67, in my opinion, the hippiest year of the late sixties). David Niven is funny as the "real" James Bond, though the stuttering in the beginning can get quite irritating. And I do enjoy his jabs at his namesake. Peter Sellers is his usual comic self as Evelyn Tremble and he has amazing chemistry with Bond alum Ursula Andress in another sexy Bond girl role, though more assertive than Honey Ryder. When they're together on screen, its some of the sexiest scenes I've seen (and done with classy taste compared to today's garbage). Burt Bacharach's score outdoes alot of the "canon" Bond films, easily outdoing YOLT, LALD, GE, TND, TWINE, DAD, CR and QOS. And Dusty Springfields' breathy rendition of "The Look of Love" I definately hold in higher regard than some of the more recent Bond songs, like Madonna and Jack White/Alicia Keys.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 167
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