CASINO ROYALE 1967

Despite pretensions to the contrary, this man can’t live by serious, thoughtful films alone. More often than I’d like to admit, my soul cries out for movies that appeal exclusively to my aesthetic sweet tooth. These are usually films of wholly superficial virtues, all surface gloss and totally devoid of substance, yet, for one reason or another, they occupy a place of fondness in my heart that is sometimes at complete odds with their actual merit as films. 

Broadcasting and flaunting their artifice in every glamorous, glossily art-directed, production-designed frame, these movies are proudly escapist, assertively entertaining, and unashamedly lightweight. They transport me back to the days when going to the movies was like entering a waking dream.

David Niven as Sir James Bond

Ursula Andress as Vesper Lynde

peter Sellers as Evelyn Tremble

Joanna Pettet as Mata Bond

Orson Welles as Le Chiffre

Woody Allen as Jimmy Bond

Daliah Lavi as The Detainer

A particular favorite of mine is the 1967 psychedelic spy spoof Casino Royale, a film that required the participation of five directors, at least nine writers, and over 12 million- dollars to become a convoluted, barely coherent, sixties happening. Disjointed, nonsensical, and never-as-funny-as-it-thinks-it-is, Casino Royale is nevertheless a candy-colored, mini-skirted, jewel box of a film that is really a lot of escapist fun if you surrender yourself to its loopy, druggy non-reality. Released during the overkill phase of 60s spy-mania, Casino Royale has the stylish, over-the-top, gadget-heavy look of a serious James Bond film (and some of the action sequences, particularly an early car chase scene, are very well done), but given that TVs Get Smart had been poking fun of the spy genre since 1965 - with considerably more laughs - much of what may have seemed like fresh targets when the screenplay was written, felt old-hat by the time it reached the screen.

In one of many sequences that were shot but never made it into the final film, Joanna Pettet wanders through a pop-art, psychedelic mind trap devised by the Soviet counterintelligence agency known as   S.M.E.R.S.H. 

The stars of Casino Royale are a multinational horn-of-plenty. There's David Niven, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, Orson Welles, Woody Allen and Joanna Pettet...and that's just for starters. 

Miss Moneypenny (Barbara Bouchet) and Sir James Bond (Niven)
in danger of being upstaged by the groovy '60s decor

The plot, such as it is, involves the original, knighted James Bond (Niven in starchy British mode) being forced out of retirement when SMERSH takes to utilizing beautiful female spies to strike at the oversexed heart of Her Majesty's Finest. To combat this evil, Sir James does just what anyone else would do under the circumstances; he assembles an army of sexually irresistible male and female agents and bestows upon each the name of James Bond 007.  Ok….

A cadre of distinguished fellow agents (and former David Niven co-stars) converge at Sir James' country estate in hopes of  persuading him to come out of retirement

To keep questions concerning logic at bay (and there are many), Casino Royale wisely distracts with ceaseless scenes of gunplay, car chases, karate battles, and very photogenic explosions, while throwing beautiful starlets and cameo guest stars at the screen at regular intervals. Look!...there’s William Holden and drinking pal John Houston! Look!...there’s George Raft flipping a coin! Look!...there's Jean-Paul Belmondo being all French and everything! Listen...that’s someone else’s voice coming out of Jacqueline Bisset’s mouth! It all happens so fast and with so little connection to what else is going on, it’s a little like watching a celebrity flip-book, but somehow it all seems to come together.

Only 34 years old at the time, an already wizened-looking Peter O'Toole stops by to show Peter Sellers he still has the pipes. Sellers and O'Toole appeared together in the Woody Allen-penned 1965 comedy What's New, Pussycat?, whose popularity the stylistically similar Casino Royale  hoped to duplicate

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I'm unable to separate Casino Royale from its musical score. The two are one and the same. To listen to the soundtrack album is virtually like experiencing the film. Scored by the then-untouchable Burt Bacharach, I don’t think there’s a musical score out there better suited to a movie. From the classic title tune (Herb Alpert so seriously nails this song it FLOORS me!) that simultaneously spoofs and pays tribute to the great John Barry James Bond themes, Bacharach’s indubitably '60s yet timeless score is really the best of his career. A Columbia Record Club selection of the month back in 1967, I wore out the stylus endlessly replaying this lp. More than 40 years later, it still sounds just as groovy.

PERFORMANCES

David Niven, Peter Sellers, and Woody Allen are all great, but nothing they do here is markedly different from what you’ve seen them do in countless other films. The big surprise for me is the gorgeous Joanna Pettet. As Mata Bond, the illegitimate daughter of Mata Hari and you-know-who, Pettet shows a surprising flair for comedy light years away from her serious work in The Group (1966). Making the most of a comically cockney accent which she later trades in for finishing-school posh, Pettet exudes so much freshness and sexy star quality that one wishes she had worked more.

Mata makes an entrance

For the most part, the elder members of the cast coast along on a kind of game goodwill. You're less impressed by their performances than you are by their being such good sports about taking part in such silliness. The younger players, for the most part, barely make any impression at all, what with having to compete with spaceships, Frankenstein monsters, and seriously eye-popping art direction.

Career low-point for classy actress Deborah Kerr as the evil agent Mimi: the bedroom scene where she's called upon to beseech the celibate Sir James, "Doodle me!"

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The women in Casino Royale are all major foxes. Just gorgeous. This in spite of (or because of) the outrageous extremes of late-60s high fashion and makeup tended to make women look like glamorous drag queens. The hairstyles and costumes on display in this film would make Lady Gaga weep with joy.

Ursula Andress (she of the aristocratic forehead) looks like a goddess and is photographed accordingly, but my personal favorite is the darkly exotic Daliah Lavi. They sure don’t make 'em like her anymore. Graceful and sexy with helmet hair and a smoky voice, she is a special effect all unto herself.

And, as this was the late '60s, the boom era of pop-arty, futuristic, and mod fashion, Casino Royale doesn't disappoint in showcasing what must have been an enormous costume budget. Iconic designer Paco Rabanne contributes metallic Roman-inspired military wear, but elsewhere you'll see what looks to be the entire '60s fashion catalog parade before your very eyes.

I know this looks like a 1976 edition of RuPaul's Drag Race, but Casino Royale was heavily promoted in Playboy magazine and in its ad campaign for boasting "A Bondwagon of the most beautiful girls you ever saw!"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I just love everything about how this film looks. Casino Royale is like a natural history museum exhibit of the best and worst of the most ostentatious pop fads of the '60s. The space-glam costumes, the enormous hairstyles, the futuristic sets, the plastic Playboy magazine sexuality. Everything is amped up to surreal levels of overstatement and the result borders on the epic. The directors and writers may not have known what they were doing, but the production designer, art director, and costume designers all hit home runs.

Samples of Casino Royale's great set design:

The Decoding Room at Frau Hoffner's Spy Academy

SMERSH Operations Center

The German Expressionist Lobby of Frau Hoffner's Spy Academy

The behind-the-scenes troubles in the making of Casino Royale are legendary (Sellers was fired/quit before filming was completed, scenes were written and filmed with no knowledge of what other directors were doing, last-minute rewrites, money thrown away on sets and sequences never filmed, etc.) and contribute to its scrambled narrative. It's rather something of a miracle that anyone was able to assemble even a remotely coherent film from the acres of footage shot. That the film proved a modest success at all has a lot to do with the timbre of the times: movies that made no sense were becoming all the rage.

Casino Royale, like Barbarella, Myra Breckinridge, and The Magic Christian, was fashioned as a "head film": a movie that either courted young, college-age audiences by attempting to cinematically replicate the psychedelic drug experience, or one that was best appreciated in an altered mind state. As it was also a film fashioned largely by middle-aged men, Casino Royale may have looked very hip, but was VERY old-fashioned in almost every department.

Jaqueline Bissett as Giovanna Goodthighs
Although possessed of a beautiful British accent, it was Bissett's curious fate to have
 her voice dubbed in both this film and Two for the Road (1967)

None of this was obvious to me when I first saw Casino Royale at age ten at the Embassy Theater in San Francisco. All I knew then was that the film looked like a live-action cartoon. Today when I look at it, its kaleidoscopic charms come back as vividly to me as they did then. As for it being a "head film," I guess I can't argue with that, after all, Casino Royale is definitely the kind of movie I enjoy much more when I keep my brain out of it entirely.

Miss Moneypenny and Sir James in The Fingerprint Room

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2010

THE GRADUATE 1967

A favorite film of mine that hasn't aged particularly well for me is Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, a '60s generation-gap social satire about directionless, Ivy League college grad Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), and his struggle to find himself amidst the hypocrisies and false values of post-50s suburbia.

I've seen The Graduate many times over the years and the witty dialog and sharp performances always make me laugh. I have noticed, however, that the character of Benjamin doesn’t wear so well on me after repeat viewings. Hoffman is really quite good, and the character is fleshed out enough to be authentically complex and contradictory in nature. But in the end, a major sympathetic stopgap for me is the degree to which I've come to find the character of Benjamin to be inherently unlikable; his moody self-absorption coming across like a wearisome extension of the film’s simplistic, very late-60s “Noble Youth/Morally Bankrupt Adults” bias.

Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock

Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson

Katharine Ross as Elaine Robinson

Perhaps it’s just my age showing, but what grates is the arrogance of a kid who attends four years of college (on his parent’s dole), returns home, contemptuous of both of his parents and their way of life, yet whose high ideals fail to prevent him from exploiting his middle-class advantages and floating the summer away in their backyard pool (rent-free) while figuring out how not to wind up like them.

The main attraction in The Graduate and the sole reason why it ranks so high on my list of favorite films is, simply, the glorious Anne Bancroft, certainly one of the most talented and classiest acts ever to grace the screen. As the embittered, sexually predatory Mrs. Robinson, she is Star Quality personified and in every scene makes obvious how she became the ultimate older-woman crush for scores of young men at the time. Displaying a heretofore unseen genius for comedy, Bancroft is sexy and smart, tough and touching, and gives one of those surprising, nuanced performances that gets better and better with age.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
I know that we are not really supposed to like Mrs. Robinson and the film sets her up as this big archvillain and symbol of what is wrong with the older generation, but, as is often the case with movie villains, hers is the best-written and most dimensional character in the piece. She’s a wonderful cinematic creation. An almost feminist deconstruction of the male adolescent fantasy of the older woman, Mrs. Robinson is not the lonely dreamy fantasy pin-up of Summer of ‘42, but a strong, assertive, and intelligent woman who knows what she wants and uses the leverage of her maturity to get it.

"Would you like me to seduce you? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"

Sure she’s manipulative, an alcoholic and a self-professed “neurotic,” but she’s also the most emotionally honest character in the film and I like her immensely. She doesn’t kid herself (she doesn’t pretend to be in love with Benjamin any more than she does her husband), she doesn’t take any of Benjamin’s guff (love the way she hurls his car keys into his aquarium), and she has a killer fashion sense (the streaked hair and animal print wardrobe are beyond sensational).

Mrs. Robinson: The original cougar

PERFORMANCES

Satires are dicey because, by definition, they deal with caricature. Play it too broad, you have a cartoon, play it too straight and you run the risk of actually being the thing you’re sending up. In The Graduate Anne Bancroft is the emotional anchor which makes possible the arch absurdity of Nichols’ pointed barbs at American suburban rot. Armed with a set of regal cheekbones and a look of perpetual haughty nonchalance, Bancroft lays waste every other character the minute she opens her mouth and lets out with that throaty, no-nonsense voice of hers.

Bancroft imbues Mrs. Robinson with a steely world-weariness that gives way to surprisingly disarming smiles and glimmers of raw vulnerability; reminding us that toughness is often just the armor worn by those most disappointed by life and themselves.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Bancroft is one of the few actresses able to combine old-school movie star glamour with contemporary earthiness. No matter how gorgeous she looked (and she was seriously gorgeous …she was just 35 at the time, Hoffman was 30), Bancroft always exuded such genuine intelligence, humor, and sensitivity. You really can’t take your eyes off of her.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The early scenes between Bancroft and Hoffman are such masterfully choreographed games of sexual cat and mouse (Hoffman’s comic discomfort compliments Bancroft’s droll assurance) that they are what most people recall. But my favorite scene in the entire film is the hotel room tryst that comes after Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin have been involved for some time. Benjamin is eager to take things to a more personal level while Mrs. Robinson is content to keep things strictly physical.

As he badgers her to reveal details of her personal life, for the first time there is a power shift in the dynamic of this couple, and we get a glimpse into the sadness behind Mrs. Robinson’s cool exterior. Bancroft goes through a staggering array of emotions during this scene, sublimely conveying the heartbreaking regrets Mrs. Robinson keeps so well hidden. Bancroft has played many wonderful scenes in many films, but this remains my all-time favorite.

In retrospect, it surprises me to think of how long it took me to see The Graduate. I was ten years old when it first came out, and despite its "recommended for adults" rating, I would certainly have sneaked in to see it were I interested. What I recall most are the newspaper ads that played up the graphic of the dopey schlub accosted by the shapely lady's limb. Seeing this, I was positive the film would be one of those smirky, smutty 60s sex comedies of the type I loathed (the result of too many TV reruns of Tony Curtis movies, I guess). Anyhow, when I finally saw it at a revival theater at age 20, I was pleasantly surprised at how smart it was and how hilarious I found Benjamin’s bemused stutterings in the face of Mrs. Robinson’s determined seduction.

Those scenes still make me laugh, but I can’t say I enjoy the sequences without Anne Bancroft all that much. So, in a way, I guess Mrs. Robinson seduced me, too.

AUTOGRAPH FILES

Autograph of Dustin Hoffman. He was in the courtyard restaurant at a dance studio where I was teaching in Santa Monica. Very nice and unexpectedly, such a handsome guy in person!

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2010

TOMMY 1975

In 1975, a full six years before the existence of MTV and two years before Saturday Night Fever propelled disco to the forefront of pop culture, director Ken Russell (who had previously trained his by-then trademark grandiloquent eye almost exclusively on the lives of classical composers), created what was essentially a 2-hour music video. Part Scopitone cheese-fest, part surrealist fever-dream, part theater of the absurd, and part post-'60s drug-addled freak-out; Ken Russell's 100% assault on the senses is the self-proclaimed rock-opera, Tommy.

One of the most phenomenal cinema experiences of this or any other time. 

Ann-Margret as Nora Walker

Oliver Reed as Frank Hobbs

Roger Daltrey as Tommy Walker

Not since Roman Polanski, that atheist genius of contemporary nihilism, was assigned to the darkly cynical Rosemary's Baby, has there ever been a more perfect match of director and subject. Ken Russell's theatrically baroque, visuals-as-narrative style is ideally suited to a tale of such broad-strokes bombast as Tommy. Marketed as an experience as much as a movie, Tommy boasted rock-concert-decibel-level sound (the five-speaker Quintaphonic sound system that rattled movie theater rafters every bit as much as Earthquake's Sensurround), a story told entirely in song and music; and a mind-blowing, only-in-the-'70s cast of pop/rock musicians and movie stars. But best of all, Tommy had at its helm one of the UK's most artistically fearless directors. 

In his TV biographies of classical composers for the BBC, and in the films The Music Lovers (1971), The Boy Friend (1971), and Mahler (1974), Ken Russell proved himself to be an undisputed visionary when it came to unearthing daringly evocative ways of melding music and imagery. A director for whom too much was never enough, I can't think of a soul better suited to transfer a rock opera to the big screen with all the genre-requisite exaggeration and excess.

The release of Tommy was poised as a '70s happening...and it didn't disappoint.

Certainly not when it came to its eye-popping cast of pop-cuture icons.

Jack Nicholson as The Doctor

Tina Turner as The Acid Queen

Elton John as The Pinball Wizard

Significantly retooled from the 1969 double album by The Who, Tommy is a quasi-spiritual parable about a boy (Barry Winch) rendered hysterically deaf, blind, and non-verbal after witnessing the murder of his father (Robert Powell) at the hands of his mother's lover (Oliver Reed).

Witness to the Murder
Seriously, who wouldn't be traumatized by Oliver Reed screaming in your face?

While shared guilt tears at the fibers of the marriage of Nora (Ann-Margret) and Frank (Reed) --Nora, in particular, grapples with remorse over what she has done-- the now-grown Tommy (Daltrey) retreats further and further into himself, inhabiting a vivid inner world that serves to shield him from the paradoxical trauma of well-intentioned attempts to cure him backed up by thoughtless instances of parental neglect and familial abuse. As a result of his experiences, Tommy develops a near-supernatural talent for pinball and is hailed as a pop culture prodigy. 

For Nora, instant wealth and fame only superficially cushion the pain of the responsibility she feels for Tommy's afflictions. But when her hysterics bring about his "accidental" fall through a plate-glass mirror, the miraculous restoration of his senses changes the course of all of their lives. Tommy instantly becomes a worldwide spiritual messiah, but discovers that this mock religion, which offers spiritual redemption through material acquisition, is yet but another existential dead end. 

I Am The Light

For a treatise on fame addiction, pop-spirituality, drugs, child abuse, and family dysfunction, five seasons of "Oprah" couldn't accomplish what Ken Russell does in these crammed-to-overflowing two hours. In song, yet! Classical music devotee Russell seems creatively invigorated by his first foray into the world of Rock & Roll, and his inspired translation of the Who's opera to the screen is nothing short of dazzling. Always a director able to capture memorably vivid tableaux, Russell fills Tommy with striking and, in some instances, downright bizarre images and setpieces that 1975 audiences weren't quite prepared for.  

Nora & Captain Walker
Tommy is credited to three cinematographers. Their work is often breathtaking.

Tommy is chock full of spheres, globe motifs, religious iconography, inside jokes, and Freudian symbolism. All this heavy-handed pretension was like manna for a high school film geek like me.

Robert Powell as Captain Walker

Looking at the film now, it's hard for me to take it as seriously as I did way back when. But what does persist and becomes more apparent with each viewing is the obvious artistry on display and how much sheer outrageous fun it is to watch. So many movies today are all spectacle, with nary an idea in their heads. Ken Russell movies are so crammed full of ideas and subthemes that it frequently takes repeat viewings to even catch them all. Oh, and there's plenty of spectacle to spare, too.

Modern Family

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

If Tommy were a Western, it would be a Western with covered wagons, the cavalry, and stagecoaches; were it a war film, it would have air strikes, tanks, battalions, and explosions every fifteen minutes. In short, Tommy is so much fun because it has too much of everything. The music is exhilarating (and loud), and the visuals are, in turn, brash, vulgar, and ingenious. Most movies have at least one setpiece scene; Tommy is ALL setpiece scenes. Under any other circumstances, this would be a recipe for a somewhat overwhelming viewing experience. But Ken Russell's operatic ambition and vastness of scope are so gleefully grandiose and overreaching that I find Tommy to be just irresistible cinema.

Show Biz
The "Pinball Wizard" sequence, featuring The Who and Elton John is combat as rock concert

Satire
Organized religion and fame culture are skewered in a jaw-dropping sequence set in a church worshiping Marilyn Monroe 

Surrealism
Tommy in a landscape of giant pinballs and flaming pinball machines

PERFORMANCES

The title role may belong to Roger Daltrey, but the film belongs to Ann-Margret. As Tommy's troubled mother (understatement), Ann-Margret seems to sense that this is the role of a lifetime and attacks it with a commitment and ferocity that comes from a place very real. Her performance is so compelling that she pulls off the Herculean feat of anchoring the entire film (which could have easily slid into campiness) in a kind of emotional truth.

Tommy was Ann-Margret's first Best Actress Oscar nomination. In 1971 she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Carnal Knowledge, a film in which she played opposite Tommy's romantically smitten physician, Jack Nicholson

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The pairing of the director of The Devils with the actress who stole an entire film from under Elvis Presley's nose was bound to produce a few sparks, but no one was prepared for the cinematic conflagration that was the "Champagne" musical number; popularly known as "The beans sequence." A song written expressly for the film, it communicates Nora's profound guilt, compounded by the riches and comfort that has come to her through Tommy's pinball success. In an attempt to blot out Tommy's image from both her mind and the television screen, which alternates close-ups of Tommy's staring, blameless eyes, with insipid commercials for baked beans, soap suds, and chocolate, Nora gets plastered. Everything comes to an emotional and visual head when Nora hallucinates the television set vomiting its material goods into her pristine white bedroom.

If you really want to see an actor going all out, nerves exposed and raw, you need look no further than Ann-Margret's Technicolor nervous breakdown in Tommy. Audacious isn't even the word. Understandably, this scene was all critics could talk about when the film was released, and even today I think it can't help but astonish. A primo example of truly inspired, virtuoso looniness.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

It's fascinating to me that a film propelled by wall-to-wall rock music is also so visually stimulating; I can imagine someone could watch it without sound and still find it to be an exciting and compelling motion picture. Ken Russell has a silent filmmaker's grasp of the visual rhythms of dramatic storytelling. He's always been a director known for letting images do the talking, and with Tommy, he comes the closest he's ever been to achieving pure cinema.

Tommy's Primary Color Triad of Trauma
(The Acid Queen, Uncle Ernie, and Cousin Kevin)

As a teen, the only records I owned were movie soundtrack albums (the film-geek thing), so, rather remarkably, Tommy was my introduction to rock music. Purists, of course, would say that Tommy is to Rock what Dreamgirls is to R&B. But independent of questions on whether The Who's concept album conceit is the real thing or not, my love for this score eventually led to my expanding my record collection to include real-life, non-movie music of all stripes. How fitting then to be indoctrinated into the musical world of soaring theatrics, broad emotionalism, and specious spirituality by a film director whose entire career was built on those very things.

AUTOGRAPH FILES

Ann-Margret (or her publicist) sent this photo and this accompanying note in 1976 following a letter I wrote gushing about her performance in Tommy. I always assumed messages and pictures from celebrities were PR products until I worked for actor Walter Matthau in the 1990s and saw that he personally answered his fan mail and autographed photos. Do stars even do this now, or are fans immediately placed on a "stalker" list?

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2010