“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

Sad.

THE SAD SACK is Private Meredith Bixby (Jerry Lewis), an inept dogsbody who is, for his mechanical skill, given the chance to succeed in the military by a female major, who orders another Private to surreptitiously shepherd Bixby through adversities, such as everyday life in the military. The title might imply someone moping around like a killjoy – which Bixby does not do (in fact, he is inexplicably optimistic, with an amazing photographic memory) – but it is actually military slang for “sad sack of shit,” meaning a total fuckup. Of course, this movie’s family demographic prohibits it from getting anywhere near that phrasing.

It’s the stupidest plot in a Jerry Lewis film since SAILOR BEWARE. That movie was also military-themed. Proving that Hollywood writers ran out of ideas for military comedies a long time ago.

Based on the unnamed 1942 cartoon character by Sgt. George Baker, I guess Jerry is probably one of the few people who can carry off being a cartoon klutz, but the story is so stupid and the characterizations so irritating that no amount of Jerry mugging can save this sad sack of shit.

Private Bixby is shielded from harm by Major Shelton (Phyllis Kirk, HOUSE OF WAX). She’s a soldier, a psychiatrist, and a dame. And that seems to throw every man who comes into contact with her into brain farts. When she summons Corporal Dolan (David Wayne) to tell him about Bixby’s potential and him needing a protector, she has to qualify her position and her orders, because – hot female. Dolan: “You’re quite a departure from the usual Major!” Is that how the army allows you to speak to superior officers? Not unless they have tits, I guess. Constant sexism dogs Shelton’s every encounter with males: “Aren’t you being overly sentimental?” Shelton: “Sentimental?” Male: “Well, you ARE a woman.” Somebody shoot the writer.

And then – in a total reversal of what the film is saying by placing a woman in the empowered Major’s role – she falls for Dolan like a schoolgirl crush. Why? Was it his runneled 43-year-old face that was meant to look 20? Was it how doughy his backside looked in those Army issue pants? And he didn’t even sing her a song to wet her down. Speaking of which, Dolan’s role was written for Dean Martin. (Even the name Dolan was reminiscent of “Dogface Dolan” from Martin-and-Lewis’s JUMPING JACKS.) In retrospect, we can clearly see the demarcation line between Martin and Lewis films and Jerry’s solo career, but back in that year (with only this second solo Jerry movie in launch), studio movies and their contracted personalities were an ongoing business venture, and the producers that made major bank off Martin-Lewis were regarding the breakup as a simple separation, and were still commissioning movies fully with the intent to place Martin and Lewis side by side again; maybe not in the next one, or in the next two pictures – let the boys get their ya-yas out! – but there would come a time when the teammates would see the folly of their separate ways and eventually come back together like atoms circling a nucleus. It was Science. And it was Hal Wallis, the producer whom Martin and Lewis OWED three more movies under contract, and Hal would not be denied his pound of flesh…

Jerry didn’t want to do another military movie, feeling he had done all he could with the format in his 3 Martin and Lewis military pictures (AT WAR WITH THE ARMY, SAILOR BEWARE, JUMPING JACKS); he was also exhausted from a hectic schedule of live shows, recordings and producing his last film himself (life without Dean was proving just as lucrative and rewarding!) but Wallis was waving contracts in his face and creeping like a lawyer; it allowed him to force director George Marshall onto the production, whom Jerry hated working with since the days of MY FRIEND IRMA.

For whatever reason (maybe wartime authenticity?), this is Jerry’s second black and white solo film in a row.

Larry Dolan was paired with another numbnuts named Stan (overacting Joe Mantell), making their character names Stanley and Larry… a tad close to Stanley Laurel; and their antics almost resemble Laurel-and-Hardy’s, if it weren’t for the fact that Dolan had to retain a semblance of leading-man cool (of which he had none anyway). Also, it just doesn’t look right that both these guys are considerably shorter than Jerry.

After what seems like interminable oft-seen Jerry gags (as he feared, he was repeating himself), Bixby is assigned to Morocco, and Dolan is sent as shepherd. In an exotic bar there, Bixby falls for a Parisian femme fatale (Liliane Montevecchi, an exotic brunette who looked nothing like the American pointy-bra dames that populated Jerry’s films), and gets mixed up in a terrorist plot, while trying to join the French Foreign Legion. Peter Lorre and Michael Ansara (renowned That Guy) are the villains who use Bixby’s photographic memory to force him to build one of the new American cannons.

The French Foreign Legion actually appear in the final frames to pin a medal on Bixby for foiling the plot (inadvertently, of course). Ah, so this is where the French love affair with Jerry started!

END

We’ll Always Have Overacting.

Leonard Maltin calls CASABLANCA “The best Hollywood movie of all time”; it won the 1943 Best Picture Oscar; voted #2 film of all time by the American Film Institute; Roger Ebert effuses, “Casablanca is THE movie”; it boasts one of the most regal Hollywood stars in Ingrid Bergman (in the movie that would catapult her to stardom), and the cynical founder of the Holmby Hills Rat Pack, Humphrey Bogart, one of the eras manly sex symbols, even though his face resembled the underside of a running shoe.

Some movies were great back then, and stay great: CITIZEN KANE, SEVEN SAMURAI, GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT. Poor CASABLANCA has dated badly – due to censorship at the time not allowing the filmmakers to solidly portray a married woman cheating, censorship on what could be shown onscreen to denote “passionate affair,” contention over the nihilistic lead character necessarily having a heart of gold, the faults go on… After decades of progress in American film, CASABLANCA, though it has insinuated itself into popular vernacular as a “great film,” is nothing more than a talky cardboard romance thriller, with overacting threatening to send us into a melodramatic swoon and enough soft-focus on Ingrid Bergman to make us cross-eyed.

During World War II, Rick (Bogart) and Ilsa (Bergman) had a steamy love affair in Paris, which involved lots of kissing with their mouths closed and lots of hugging with their clothes on. Years later, Rick runs a gin joint in Casablanca, The Café Americain, a stopover in Morocco for refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe on their way to America. It’s kinda like the Cantina in STAR WARS, except all the aliens are illegal. Peter Lorre cameos as Chewbacca, and Sam the piano player (Dooley Wilson) plays As Time Goes By by flapping his hands up and down on the keys like a seal. “You badly synched it for her, you can badly synch it for me.”

Play it for Poffy, schweetheart!

When Ilsa and her activist husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) seek egress through Casablanca to The States, they seek out Rick at his Café (“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks her pointy bra into mine”), knowing he has Letters of Transit that would confuse the Nazi stormtroopers hunting them due to Laszlo causing a great disturbance in the Resistance on Tattooine. “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. Move along.”

And Rick and Ilsa reignite their love affair by meeting in dark rooms and talking a lot with their clothes on. Rick’s refrain, “We’ll always have Paris” makes us wonder why he doesn’t tear off her pointy bra and make Casablanca the new Paris. Everyone constantly drinking and smoking, yet no one ever gets drunk enough to have a Sexy Party. Censorship, thou frigid mistress.

Claude Rains is an unscrupulous, stylish weasel of a frog, a French officer who is nonchalantly AC/DC when it comes to helping either Rick or the Germans – whoever can benefit him the most. Conrad Veidt is Nazi Strasser, bedecked incorrectly in a Luftwaffe uniform.

Evidence abounds that CASABLANCA would not make it through today’s muster onto the silver screen. Based on the play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” imdb trivia tells us “in 1980 this script was sent to readers at a number of major studios and production companies under its original title. Some readers recognized the script but most did not. Many complained that the script was “not good enough” to make a decent movie. Others gave such complaints as “too dated,” “too much dialogue” and “not enough sex.””

According to actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, Bogart and Bergman themselves “thought the dialogue was ridiculous and the situations were unbelievable…” Yet the movie remains a classic for most film aficionados. Back when they were starstruck kids it was “the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Ah, to me, “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill o’ beans in this crazy world.” I couldn’t have melodramatically said it better, Humphrey.

END