Initially toying with the idea of creating a straightforward thriller, Feldman commissioned a script by Hollywood legend Ben Hecht, the author of classics such as Hitchcock’s Notorious. When he was rebuffed, he took on the task by himself. As Broccoli and Saltzman’s Bond movies hit box-office pay dirt, Feldman cashed in his Casino chip and lobbied them hard to co-produce the property with him. Unlike Kevin McClory, the renegade producer who partnered with official Bond producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman on Thunderball (and later produced the rogue Bond movie Never Say Never Again), Feldman was no small-time operator, as demonstrated by his credits: Red River, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Seven-year Itch, to name a few. Feldman, who acquired the rights to Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1960. How this gargantuan project came to be merits an entire book by itself, but the story starts and ends with flamboyant talent agent-turned-producer Charles K. Released just prior to the Summer of Love, just before societal and political tumult dragged the world into the seventies, the movie is the ultimate sixties party: excessive and uncontrolled, stoned out and hung over, deliriously exhausted. If James Bond was at the forefront of the Swinging Sixties as the decade achieved liftoff, then perhaps it’s fitting that Casino Royale heralds the era’s crash landing.

– Woody AllenĬasino Royale is either going to be a classic bit of fun or the biggest fuck-up since the Flood.

There is no seriousness or maturity of approach. It is silly like an old Berle sketch as opposed to a fine Nichols and May sketch. There is no involvement or story or importance to any of it. I think the film stinks, as does my role. And they screwed it up by listening to all the so-called geniuses-the directors, the writers, the whole complex. Which he could have, by copying the book, because the book was a good book. When I spoke to …I said he should make a straight Bond, find a new actor, and have one shot and he’d make a lot of money.

Casino royale 1967 full cast