Long before
Austin Powers,
there was already a spoof Bond film available in the form of Casino
Royale, originally released by Columbia but now on the MGM label.
SMERSH are on the loose again - having killed 11 of the best British
Intelligence agents - and one of the bad guys is Baccarat-playing illusionist
Le Chiffre (Orson Welles), so it's just as well that when retired agent
Sir James Bond (David Niven) is coaxed back into work with a plan to
hire new agents all of whom will be known as "James Bond 007", so as to confuse
the enemy and "because one James Bond isn't enough", one of the applicants is an author who wrote the book on successful
Baccarat-playing, Evelyn Tremble (Peter Sellers). There are also roles
for Ursula Andress, Woody Allen and Deborah Kerr.
However, although this may have been a great Bond-spoof at the time, I'm
approaching this film for the first time after having seen a slew of other
Bond films since as well as numerous other action/spy flicks and, as such,
parts of Casino Royale just don't seem funny any more and, although this
film got their first, I saw the rotating bed scene in the first
Austin Powers
outing, for example. Also, the whole Bond series has since become rather a parody
of itself, albeit a far more entertaining one than this production.
One other thing about this film is that it keeps changing direction and looks
like a series of disjointed, overlong sketches stuck together, so it won't be surprisingly
for you to learn that no less than five directors had their say. Talk about
too many cooks...
Firstly, the print isn't anamorphic and there are some print flecks at times,
although it's fairly free of artifacts and doesn't look too bad for a film
that's now 34 years old. Presented in the original widescreen ratio of 2.35:1,
the average bitrate is 5.82Mb/s, briefly peaking over 8Mb/s.
The sound is mono. Dialogue is pretty clear, but any action shots don't stand
out to any great degree so don't use this as a demo disc.
In the extras dept., there's not a lot going on for this spoof - just a
4:3 theatrical trailer lasting nearly 2½ minutes and an
anamorphic 2.35:1 widescreen Teaser Trailer lasting just over
90 seconds.
The disc contains a mere 16 chapters and dialogue is delivered in English,
German, French, Italian and Spanish.
Subtitles are in 10 languages: English and German (both with hard of hearing
options), French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian and
Danish. The main menu contains animation and music but nothing like to the
extravangance we've come to expect from the Bond collection.
FILM CONTENT PICTURE QUALITY SOUND QUALITY EXTRAS
OVERALL
The following is a list of all the Bond films now available in production order
with their dates of release, followed by the unofficial movies:
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
