With guns, and knives... We're fighting for our lives!
James Bond is a very important part of the UK's cinematic heritage, boys and girls, and I've neglected him for far too long. Mr. B raised this point back in early September when I was starting to draw up a list of films to write about, and he's right, really he is, but I just haven't been able to face it.
I can pinpoint fairly accurately the moment when I lost my taste for Bondage. It was the autumn of 1995 and I was a first year at Durham University, studying French, German, and Russian whilst trying to find a nice boy so I could dispose of my virginity, whose continuing existence was rapidly becoming something of an embarrassment . The first potential candidate was K, whose down-to-earth Blackburn vowels led me to believe (mistakenly) that he was a commoner like me, despite his ability to spend £50 on a necktie without batting an eyelash. He was a bit of an arsehole and I was slightly psychotic, so it was probably for the best that my hymen was the one thing that didn't eventually implode.
While it lasted, though, we made frequent trips to the student film club, which consisted of a screen erected in the college assembly hall and offered newish movies at a reasonable price. I'd always been a fairly avid 007 fan, but as I watched this sequence from Goldeneye and the entire room erupted in derisory laughter, something inside me died and I've never been able to summon up a single iota of enthusiasm for the character since.
When I think about it, I'd actually quite like to go back and watch a bunch of old-school Bond, just not right at the tail end of a marathon month. Mr. B, therefore, ever the pragmatist, suggested I compromised with the 1967 incarnation of Casino Royale, which spoofs spy movies with more grace and dignity than Mike Myers could manage in his wildest dreams. Boasting a stellar cast and crew but also some surprisingly sound politics, it's a joy from the opening titles to the closing credits.
The story bears only minimal relation to the original novel, with David Niven starring as the retired James Bond who's bitterly disappointed by the guns, girls and gadgets ethos that seems to have overtaken the spying game. With rumours of a new band of supervillains back on the loose, however, he's reluctantly forced back onto the job along with a group of accomplices that include the likes of Ursula Andress and Terence Cooper along with Peter Sellers' baccarat book author and Joanna Pettet as Bond's love child from an affair with the Mata Hari. On the opposite side, meanwhile, we have (among others) Deborah Kerr, Orson Welles and Woody Allen.
It's all backed up by a soundtrack written by Burt Bacharach and performed by Herb Alpert, not to mention some truly epic set design. Everything is cheerfully implausible but also implausibly cheerful, with the climactic battle featuring dodgem cars, bubbles, native Americans in warpaint and the French foreign legion.
You'll probably have worked out from that last paragraph whether or not this one's for you; if it's not, I hope you'll forgive me for pitying your joyless existence. Casino Royale is female-friendly, family friendly and generally well-disposed towards anybody who doesn't have a taste for macho prickery. It's also ludicrously over the top, but honestly, that's half the charm (the other half is pure David Niven).
Just be sure to stick around for the end credits in order to enjoy the greatest earworm of your life.
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