Casino Royale [1967]

Sir James Bond is called back out of retirement to stop SMERSH. In order to trick SMERSH, Bond 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, especially when the ultimate villain turns out to be Bonds nephew.




After the death of M, Sir James Bond is called back out of retirement to stop SMERSH. In order to trick SMERSH and Le Chiffre, Bond 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, especially when the ultimate villain turns out to be Bonds nephew, Jimmy Bond.
Written by simon



Sir James Bond, a spy from the old school (a good spy is a pure spy) is called back to service by the death of "M" and the imminent collapse of civilization. The opposition tries to compromise him, but even as nubile young agents are thrown at him, he remains above it all. Going beyond parody to sillyness, every agent is renamed James Bond, 007 to confuse the enemy, including Woody Allen who plays, Little Jimmy Bond.
Written by John Vogel



The freewheeling farce begins when aging Sir James Bond is persuaded to rejoin Her Majesty's Secret Service and head an operation to smash SMERSH. His mission? Topple Le Chiffre, whose baccarat winnings support the evil organization. Before you can say "double-oh-cross," enticing Vesper Lynd recruits baccarat ace Evelyn Tremble to impersonate the suave super-sleuth and confront the villain. Adding to the mayhem is Sir James' neurotic nephew, Jimmy Bond, a SMERSH defector.
Written by Robert Lynch



Sir James Bond is enjoying his retirement when four international agents press him into service again in hopes of smashing SMERSH and Topple LeChiffre at the baccarat tables. Bond is taken in by Agent Mimi (alias Lady Fiona McTarry) who immediately falls in love with him. Bond's illegitimate daughter, Mata Bond, whose mother was the late Mata Hari, is going to help out. The current agent using the Bond name, Cooper, has his hands full, despite his assistance by beautiful secretary, Moneypenny. 007's nephew Jimmy Bond is supposedly incompetent. Bond, hoping to clear his name from its current low repute, hires Evelyn Tremble to meet LeChiffre at the gambling tables at Casino Royale. The world's richest agent, Vesper Lynd, helps convince Tremble to masquerade as 007.
Written by Aaron Handy III




SYNOPSIS

Casino Royale (1967 spoof)

Sir James Bond (David Niven) retired at the height of his powers when forced to betray his lover Mata Hari, and now lives in an English country house, surrounded by lions, devoting himself to Debussy and cultivating black roses, attended by his butler (Erik Chitty). However, alarmed by the mounting losses of their spies, he is visited by the heads of the British ('M' or McTarry; John Huston), French (LeGrand; Charles Boyer), American (Ransome; William Holden) and Russian (Smernov; Kurt Kasznar) Secret Services (collectively driven by M's chauffer John LeMesurier), who petition him to return. He refuses, considering himself to belong to a nobler tradition, and them all gadget-ridden "jokeshop" spies, and deploring the handing on of his legend, name and number to a "sexual acrobat". Even a letter from the Queen does not sway him, and as a final desperate trick M signals for Sir James' home to be blown up by the Army: the attack also kills M (but not, apparently, the others).

Smersh Authority (the villains) learns that "Sir James Bond is back, with his morals, his vows and his celibate image. We must destroy that image".

Sir James, thus forced out of retirement, travels to Scotland, taking M's toupee (the only surviving relic or heirloom) to M's widow, Lady Fiona, who has been substituted by Smersh agent Mimi (Deborah Kerr). She explains the rituals surrounding the death of The McTarry, which include a banquet (with fresh goat haggis and lots of whisky), dancing, and a memorial grouse shoot ("Whenever a McTarry dies, the grouse come into season"). The castle is filled with beautiful girls, agents of Smersh, pretending to be M's eleven 16-19-year-old daughters ("some of us are adopted") including Heather (Tracey Crisp) and Meg (Alexandra Bastedo), who undress Sir James for his bath ("be careful, that's my loose kneecap"), Buttercup ("Daddy's little thermometer", Angela Scoular) whom Sir James discovers actually in his bath, as well as Eliza (Gabriella Licudi), Peg (Elaine Taylor), and Michele (Frances Cosslett).

Sir James drinks all the others under the table at the banquet, but when later approached by Mimi in his bedroom claiming he "comfort her" as her "widow's due", upon rejecting her, she calls him a "ninnogaywillycouf" and summons the pipers for a 'worzle', a contest which involves picking up and attempting to throw large stone cannonballs. This he wins, largely as the five pipers (Robin, Jock, Sandy: Bob Godfrey, Percy Herbert) injure themselves in trying to pick up the balls, whereas he manages to pick one up, throw it and catch it. Mimi is so impressed the other girls decide she is a risk and lock her in her room.

At the grouse shoot, one of Sir James' cape buttons has been substituted with a homing beacon, and the girls send rocket-launched explosive-laden dummy grouse towards him. Assisted by Mimi, who has escaped down the rather unsafe drainpipe from her room, Sir James uses his braces to fire the button back into the rocket launcher, blowing it up. Mimi, injured, wins a farewell kiss from Sir James ("Madam, are you quite sure you're dying?") before entering a convent, and tells him that their orders came from "Authority: International Mothers' Help, East Berlin" (1).

Driving back from Scotland, Sir James is trailed by a remote-controlled booby-trapped milk float (control girl Penny Riley), but manages to escape so that it kills yet another Smersh agent (). In London, he takes over as head of the British Secret Service, whose only surviving members are his secretary Miss Moneypenny (or rather her daughter; Barbara Bouchet), and his assistant Hadley (or rather his son; Derek Nimmo), who explain that all the secret agents apart from Sir James' replacement (now doing television) have been killed in sexually suggestive situations ("stabbed to death in a ladies sauna bath", "burnt in a blazing bordello", "garrotted in a geisha house", etc.) with the possible exception of Sir James' nephew, Jimmy Bond (Woody Allen), last seen in the Caribbean escaping a firing squad ("I have a very low threshold of death") with an exploding cigarette, only to end up in front of another firing squad. Sir James decides to call up all the auxiliary staff, and to create the ultimate 'Anti-Female Spy Device' - a man whom all women desire, but who is indifferent to them. Miss Moneypenny is tasked with finding one such ("your mother did some of her best work at night"), and she finds Cooper ('Coop': Terence Cooper: "Sounds like something for keeping birds." "That's me"). Coop, a holder of the 'Kama Sutra Black Belt', is then sent for his anti-female training, against a gym-full of a variety of exotic, exotically dressed Bond girls (Yvonne Marsh, Veronica Gardnier - there are over 200 beautiful girls in the film), overcoming them all but eventually meeting new secret weapon The Detainer (Daliah Lavi), who also becomes 007 ("I don't do anything, but, unless you're one of them, you do"), Sir James having decided that to create confusion all agents, both male and female, will become 'James Bond, 007'.

Sir James personally recruits two new 007 spies. The first is wealthy Vesper Lynd (Ursula Andress: assistant Valentine Dyall), who Sir James persuades using a £5m tax arrears demand (2). Vesper is given the task of approaching and recruiting Evelyn Tremble (Peter Sellers: "Isn't Evelyn a girl's name? No, its mine"), an expert in baccarat at the Buckingham Club, whom Sir James wants to use to defeat Smersh's treasurer, Le Chiffre (Orson Welles), currently gambling with Smersh's money at Casino Royale. She does this, seducing Tremble at her Mayfair flat (to which she has lately had Nelson's Column removed) and also encouraging him to dress up in a number of costumes (including Napoleon - complete with 'Sunny Elba' pamphlet - Hitler and Toulouse-Lautrec: "Come on, you have more to do". "More?!"). Tremble, now also James Bond, 007, goes to Q (Geoffrey Bayldon) and his fey assistant Fordyce (John Wells) in their cellars full of inept inventions (where he is also shadowed by a dwarf dressed as a garden gnome "He's our security man") for his fitting with a gadget-filled suit ("a little bit tight about the..." "Poison capsule compartment?").

Sir James then recruits his own daughter by Mata Hari, Mata Bond (Joanna Pettet), currently working as a living Eastern goddess ("Celestial Virgin of the Sacred Altar" "Figuratively speaking, of course": temple guard Milton Reid, monk John Hollis): there is a superb temple dance sequence. Mata Bond is sent to West Berlin by London taxicab (taxicab driver Bernard Cribbins) to infiltrate International Mothers' Help, known to be a Smersh cover for the Mata Hari School of Dancing, a spy training school, with rather complex neo-Cubist décor, presided over by the formidable Frau Hoffner (Anna Quale) and the diminutive Polo (Ronnie Corbett). Revealing her identity as Mata Hari's daughter, she is shown by Polo to her mother's old room ("What an enormous bed!" "The German army was very large in those days"), where she discovers a secret passageway activated by the cistern, which leads to a projection suite: she also discovers 'little Otto' one of her mother's lovers ("Is he dead?" "Hard to tell. He always looked like that"). She learns that Le Chiffre is, via his agent (Vladek Sheybal) auctioning his art collection of blackmail photographs to raise money: the auction in the auditorium is attended by officers from the British (Jack Gwilliam, Richard Wattis), Chinese (Burt Kwouk), American (Hal Galili) and Russian armies. Warned by the taxi-driver (revealed as Carlton-Towers of the Foreign Office) to prevent Le Chiffre raising the money, as the bidding for the first lot escalates ("Seventy million tons of rice!" "Sixty tons of caviar!"), Mata returns to the projection room, seizes the case of projector slides and flushes them away: she then escapes Polo by unplugging his external heart battery, Frau Hoffner is shot by Otto, and Mata, using a foam fire-extinguisher on the assorted military, makes good her escape with Carlton-Towers (first trying a drain, but on hearing 'What's New, Pussycat', by taxi back to London). Le Chiffre's agent, telephoning him to report his failure, and that Smersh's leader Dr. Noah now knows what Le Chiffre has been up to, is blown up in his telephone box (the explosion also destroys part of the Berlin Wall).

Tremble now travels to Casino Royale, where after meeting Matthis, a French inspector of police (with an improbable Scots accent; Duncan Macrae (3)) , and having a car-wash with many eavesdroppers (yet more beautiful girls), in his room meets Miss Goodthighs (Jacqueline Bisset) "the management of the Hotel Tropical present their compliments" who attempts to drug him with doped champagne. Vesper arrives, 'takes care of' Miss Goodthighs, and rouses Tremble.

Vesper and Tremble go the Casino: they deposit £100,000 (cashier Graham Stark) and then meet the casino director Slimmington-Jones (Colin Gordon) in his office. Tremble spots that Le Chiffre is using infra-red spectacles to cheat: Vesper steals these: Le Chiffre shows off with some magic (assistants Jennifer Baker, Susan Baker), and then Tremble and Le Chiffre play a very-high-stakes baccarat game (50 million francs: ~£3.6m or $10m at the time), which Tremble ultimately wins. Tremble takes his winnings as a cheque drawn on a Swiss bank.

On the way out of the Casino, Vesper is kidnapped: Tremble, advised of this by the doorman (John Bluthal) follows in a racing car (the racing car driver Sterling Moss, as himself, having run off) but is also captured by Le Chiffre, who wants the cheque. Placed in a very elaborate but broken chair in Le Chiffre's dungeon, he suffers torture - not physical, but mental - eventually becoming a Scot in full Highland costume attacked by four Scots marching bands (including Peter O'Toole), he is rescued by Vesper using a machine gun disguised as bagpipes, who then, however, betrays and kills him (and presumably takes the cheque: "Never trust a rich spy'). Le Chiffre is then killed by Smersh agents sent by Dr. Noah.

Back in London, Sir James goes to see the Prime Minister, leaving Mata to sight-see ("Mummy would have taken me in" "Mummy took everyone in"): she is captured by a Household Cavalry officer () on horseback and taken by flying saucer, which lands on the now-vacated site of Nelson's Column, to Casino Royale, where, it is now revealed, the secret headquarters of Smersh's leader Dr. Noah are located (announcer Valentine Dyall). Advised of this by former agent Mimi, now a nun collecting donations ("This department has always been very helpful to needy girls") Sir James and Moneypenny follow to Casino Royale: attacked in the casino director's room (which is a lift connecting to Dr. Noah's HQ, activated by pushing the eye of a stuffed tiger) they eventually win through to an audience hall with chairs made of gold ingots to see Dr. Noah himself - who turns out to be Sir James' missing nephew, Jimmy Bond. Jimmy is however speechless in his uncle's presence: "I never should have let Nellie send him to progressive school... I'm beginning to think you're a trifle neurotic". Dr. Noah/Jimmy reveals part of his plans (using a taped message); to release a bacillus which will leave all women beautiful and all men shorter than himself; and then hits a gong to summon his staff and have Sir James and Moneypenny incarcerated.

Dr. Noah then reveals to The Detainer, whom he has also captured, stripped and strapped down to a couch ("I learnt that in the Boy Scouts"), his desire to outshine his uncle, and the rest of his plans: to substitute robot doubles for all world leaders (some of which he has already done). He also shows her a pill he has invented, which "looks like an aspirin, it tastes like an aspirin, but it is not an aspirin" - it is in fact an atomic bomb, which goes off after 400 chain reactions. Feigning interest in him, she is released, steals the pill, and manages to slip it into his champagne, and he starts his hiccup-visualized countdown.

Sir James, Mata, Moneypenny and Coop (captured earlier) now manage to escape the psychedelically-decorated room in which they have been imprisoned (using exploding 'vaporized lysergic acid' (4)), and making their way back to the audience hall ("Super place for a coming-out party") and meeting up with The Detainer, find their way back to the Casino (with the aid of Frankenstein's monster: David Prowse). Whilst The Detainer escapes, Sir James tries to call London for aid, but is stopped by Vesper; "Dear Vesper. The things you do for money": who has, however, apparently fallen in love with him, and everything that has happened has been a plan to lure him to her at Casino Royale. He overpowers her, and then he and the remaining James Bonds initiate an attack on the Smersh agents in the Casino, aided by the French (Jean-Paul Belmondo: translates 'Merde!' as 'Ouch') and the Americans, both horse-riding Cowboys and tomahawk-wielding Red Indians (air-dropped with tepees as parachutes: Ransome reappears also): George Raft (as himself) shots himself during the affray, and the Keystone Cops have a cameo. Dr. Noah appears with the final chain-reaction countdown hiccups, and the Casino is explosively completely destroyed, killing all five remaining James Bonds (Sir James, Coop, Vesper, Mata, Moneypenny), as well as Dr. Noah/Jimmy Bond. The closing song explains that six James Bonds (including Tremble) go to "a heavenly spot", Jimmy to "a place where it's terribly hot").