“Look at how gangsta I hold the gun, honey.”

Baby Bond.

When James Bond was American. When the most outlandish gadget was a walking-cane with a gun in it. But when the villains still talked instead of shooting.

It’s the first ever James Bond adapted to film from Ian Fleming’s 1953 book, Casino Royale; a black and white TV presentation from CBS, under a series called CLIMAX! Aired in October 1954, CASINO ROYALE is a stodgy one-hour play in three acts, finding “card sense Jimmy Bond” up against a Soviet spy called Le Chiffre, aiming to bankrupt him at the casino tables so that the Soviets will disown him.

Barry Nelson is James Bond, an arrogant American with none of the suave or heroism of the Bonds who would come after him and make the role desirous. Peter Lorre is Le Chiffre, who is inordinately bullied for his ogre looks by the heroes. Michael Pate is British intelligence Clarence (not Felix) Leiter, who uses a tub of Brylcreem daily on his hair. (So the roles are basically reversed – in official Bond canon, Bond is British and Leiter is American.)

Linda Christian is an ex-lover of Bond, who is now Le Chiffre’s woman, and undercover French Intelligence. And there’s Gene Roth, the old sheriff from EARTH VS THE SPIDER, before he put on the weight and the old sheriff demeanor – here, as Le Chiffre’s bodyguard. And the music is by Jerry Goldsmith (PLANET OF THE APES, PAPILLON, CHINATOWN, LOGAN’S RUN, THE OMEN…)!

The dramatic elements are not bad, and the acting is reasonable; the film falls down in its action scenes, which are directed and blocked like schoolboy choreography. But hey, the fight scenes didn’t get much better with Sean Connery – have you seen the final fight scene in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE with Rosa Klebb?

And if we thought the convention of the villain holding the hero at gunpoint and then talking his ass off started with DR NO, well, no. Here, Le Chiffre holds Bond and the woman at gunpoint, mansplaining his reasons on why he didn’t kill her earlier. They’re stupid, made up reasons of course – as the Screen Rant guy tells us – “so that the movie can happen.” Le Chiffre gets SO complacent that he actually sits down and lowers the gun while he keeps talking for zero reason! Then after threatening to shoot Bond for the 47^th time, he KNOCKS BOND OUT. Then he wakes Bond so that he can threaten to shoot him again while talking instead. When he tells his men that Bond is “ready for the bathtub” I thought they were going to waterboard him or torture him with dunking – next scene: Bond is sitting comfortably in the tub and Le Chiffre is waving some pliers around. Eventually Le Chiffre gets around to doing something to Bond’s toes in the tub (they can’t show graphic violence due to the censors, and even Bond can’t react too outrageously, as that would be censored, so we have to be content with offscreen toe torture and Bond wailing like a pedicurist just tickled him too hard.

Watch for academic reasons only. With this Bond, nobody does it worser.

END

Stay Lost.

Dinosaurs! Uh, no, just komodos and iguanas with horns and spikes duct-taped to them….

Didn’t matter when you were ten. And THE LOST WORLD (the second film adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle‘s 1912 novel) is definitely FOR ten-year-olds, seemingly made BY ten-year-olds.

Been decades since I read the book, but screenwriter-director Irwin Allen takes Conan Doyle’s exciting meat and potatoes story, changes it unnecessarily to accommodate his interminable padding (the gripping “volunteers” segment, the compelling “arguing-over-taking-a-woman” vignette, the tension-wracked “tentacles-that-don’t-kill-anyone” obstacle, the thrilling “walking-slowly-through-the-dead-dinosaur-ribcage” scene – there’s more padding here than in Kiera Knightley’s bra) – then Allen adds cheese and plastic.

THE CHEESE:

• As Professor Challenger, Claude Rains overacts into leading an expedition to a prehistoric Amazonian plateau, accompanied by:
• Michael Rennie (smug overactor, because he made the Earth stand still for one day)
• David Hedison (actionboy overactor, who would soon VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA)
• Fernando Lamas (Spanish overactor, who does a mean Ricardo Montalban; father of Lorenzo; some kind of gay subplot with him and another guy in a locket together – ?)
• Richard Haydn (British overactor – best known for helping Chris Plummer and Julie Andrews escape nazis in THE SOUND OF MUSIC)
• Jill St. John (stereotypical woman overactor, whom Challenger doesn’t want on the expedition because she’ll bring her girl germs and pink luggage)
• a puling Jay Novello (who’s Italian, but playing Mexican – I think? Who knows?)
• a teen model (heartthrob overactor, taking time off from a Frankie Avalon beach shoot)
• the hot cavegirl (Vitina Marcus, with her animal-skin miniskirt designed by Tommy Hilfiger – d’ya think she’s wearing undies? In 1967, she would become The Girl From The Green Dimension, who found Dr. Smith “handsome pretty handsome.”)

Voyage To The Bottom Of The C-List

THE PLASTIC:

Spikes, horns, sails, spinal plates, head frills – all lackadaisically taped to plodding komodo dragons, soporific iguanas and an unfortunate caiman, which made them look like dinosaurs to people with the intelligence of cavemen.

We can expect bad effects from pre-CGI movies, but THE LOST WORLD fails for many other reasons: foremost being its blatant disinformation, voiced via its ignorant characters, and by association, the ignorant filmmakers.

After being “chased” by a forced-perspective komodo with a taped-on frill (roaring like an explosion coming through a tunnel), Challenger says, “We’ve just been visited by a Jurassic Brontosaurus!” If I can stop my head from exploding in outrage, I’ll outline why this statement proves Irwin Allen’s braincase is as small as outmoded thinking perceived dinosaur braincases to be: Brontosaurus (correctly termed Apatosaurus) was known since the late 1870s. Even schoolkids in 1960 knew Brontosaurus. (Exactly how retarded does Allen think his audience?) And if you knew Brontosaurus, firstly, you knew this sleek, splay-footed lizard looked NOTHING like the bulky, tree-limbed Brontosaurus. You also knew it was a herbivore, and herbivores don’t chase people to eat them – unless they are taunted by magnificent overacting.

At least other stop-motion dinosaur movies of the time displayed a level of art and ingenuity, in trying to portray dinosaurs at the state that science knew them. The great Willis O’Brien is listed as an effects technician, but I think he just lent his imprimatur to this farce, and let the buffoons in the effects department go nuts with animals and glue, while he sat in the corner and read a good book. Truly, these people just don’t care! It’s like that maverick mediocrity Bert I. Gordon in KING DINOSAUR (1955), calling a forced-perspective iguana a Tyrannosaurus rex and expecting everyone in his audiences to squint real hard.

In this movie’s defense, it came during an unenlightened age, when biological science took a step backwards and started regarding dinosaurs as big dopey versions of modern lizards. Very soon, it would be realized that dinosaurs were not reptiles, but in the Archosaurs clade. They resembled reptiles as much as this movie resembled JURASSIC PARK. Their physiology, movement, bone structure, habits, appearance – were nothing like reptiles.

After the eight mismatched explorers stand around yammering for a good part of the film’s running time, all standing facing the fourth wall to get their screentime on like an episode of FRIENDS, they are kidnapped by white-skinned natives who look suspiciously like extras who can’t act.

The hot cavegirl helps them find a path out of their cave prison by helpfully showing it to them right in front of their faces. (We wonder what axe she’s grinding against her own people to aid the intruders’ escape. Someone that hot would be spoiled bitchless in cave-culture – unless the gene to perceive hotness wasn’t invented yet and she was considered mutated.)

Naff subplots about diamonds, past expeditions, Lamas sacrificing his life to save the others by letting a doll that looks like him fall into some lava…enough cheese and plastic to make a modern corporate theater hotdog proud.

END