Casino Royale (1967)

Director: John Huston, Ken Hughes, Val Guest, Robert Parrish, Joe McGrath

Cast: Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, David Niven, Woody Allen, Orson Welles*

Have I Seen It Before: Yes, as one of those rogue Bond-films (I’m using each of those three words rather generously) it wasn’t one of those that I was exposed to on regular TBS Bond-a-thons, but somewhere along the way curiosity alone brought me to it. I remember my mother had a fondness for it, but I’m prepared to write that off mostly to Burt Bacharach. I thought at the time that there were a few laughs, but the whole thing dragged on far too long, which wasn’t especially damning. As a child I thought that about plenty of comedies of the era.

It's entirely possible I didn’t stick around to the end. In fact, that ending being what it is, I’m pretty sure I didn’t. Years later I came back to it. Now I know.

Did I Like It: Let’s start with the positive. A farce revolving around the idea that the world so desperately needs a James Bond that they’ll hand the name and number out to just about anybody isn’t a bad concept. Twenty years ago, if you had asked me what film desperately needed to be remade, I’d put this at the top of the list. Now that we live in a world where Casino Royale (2006) exists, one might think the case would be closed. But a conceptual remake is aching to be done, too. Just leave the Fleming canon right where it is, thank you.

What else… What else? Oh. The DVD includes a 1954 episode of the anthology series Climax!** which was the first attempt to adapt the first Fleming novel. It’s not especially good, either, but is ultimately fascinating. A completist like myself would be incomplete without both of these on his shelf.

That’d be about it. There are a fitful few laughs on display here. I’m even trying to remember them now, and they slip away the moment the film is over. Woody Allen as one of many Bond’s isn’t a bad pitch for 1967, but even that one ought to stay on the shelf in the here and now. Thin material culminates in a brief epilogue taking place in heaven, when one of the Bonds gets his final revenge on the villain of the piece. I’d say I wouldn’t identify the turn here for the sake of spoilers, but you probably wouldn’t believe me if I decided to go the other way.

This may be the most overwrought, overproduced film to be unleashed from an editing bay. I may start petitioning for the retirement of the phrase “too many cooks” and replace it with “too many directors making Royale.” It’s more words, but it feels like more descriptive. I’m paraphrasing, but Gene Siskel once described a good test of the worth of a movie is whether or not you’d rather see a documentary of the same cast having lunch. With Welles and Sellers, that’s an automatic decision from me. The movie may well have been doomed from the start.

*If I’m going to have to list five separate directors, I really ought to be allowed to list a fifth actor. Especially that one.

**Try getting that one by the censors today.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

Director: J. Lee Thompson

Cast: Roddy McDowall, Claude Akins, Natalie Trundy, John Huston

Have I Seen It Before: Yes, but it leapt immediately from my brain and memory, even all those years ago.

Did I Like It: If you cut out the awkward framing device, wherein The Lawgiver (Huston, because I’m betting Orson Welles uncharacteristically said no) pontificates on the legend of the first intelligent ape, Caesar (McDowall, who here is far too fascinated with the fact that he looks exactly like his father, Cornelius, for my taste), you might have a leaner movie that doesn’t end on an ape statue crying (no, really). If you cut out all the footage from earlier (read: better) films, this may not even qualify as a feature. Although, if you had added more footage of Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) you would also accidentally increase your Kim Hunter quotient, and I think there’s a pretty strong correlation between Kim Hunter or Andy Serkis’ presence in a Planet of the Apes movie and whether or not the film is worth a damn. It probably wouldn’t save the film. It certainly didn’t save Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972).

Now, I come here not to bury Caesar. I’ve even managed to find ways to praise him somewhat*. Stopping for several minutes to unpack the logic of time travel will only kind of work as a way to suck up to me. This movie wants to spend several minutes getting mired in the logical problems of time travel, which is usually a sure-fire way to suck up to me. It has more than enough weirdness in it. In fact, while the majority of this review has been demonstrably negative, I don’t think you would have a terrible time if you watched, certainly if you have watched the previous five films.

*I’m unreasonably proud with how that one turned out.

The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

Director: Orson Welles

Cast: John Huston, Oja Kodar, Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Even better still, I’ve devoted more than a little of my life’s work to the notion that I would never see it, and that the film might not actually exist.

Did I Like It: There’s plenty to like. There’s plenty that befuddles. There’s plenty that disappoints.

In short, it is an Orson Welles film.

After Citizen Kane (1941), Welles never got full dominion over a film project. Towards the end of his career, he was cobbling together film projects from whatever favors and hustle he had left. Like the last film released in his lifetime, F for Fake (1973), this posthumous release feels profoundly stitched together like the cinematic equivalent of a frayed, but lovingly stitched together quilt.

In Fake, the discordant quality gave the film a quality of having a protracted conversation with Welles, bobbing along with the history and passions that might flit through his mind at any given moment. Here, whether because the end result is at best an indirect product from Welles, or because the limited format just doesn’t serve a fictional narrative, the results are more muddled.

Welles was smart enough to know the limitations of his resources, and manages to create the context of a film that could have this disjointed structure, a fly-on-the-wall mockumentary shot mostly by eager film students (one imagines you couldn’t swing your arms in early 70s LA and find such a group of cinephiles) about a legendary film director (Huston) at the height of his legend, but the end of his career. So, even when the film isn’t particularly interested in making sense, it at least has some kind of logical consistency.

The figure of Jake Hannaford is certainly the most interesting, but illusive figure in the film. Is he a shade of Huston, the actor portraying him? He has the gate, tone, mannerisms, and some of the background, sure, but that seems to pat of an answer, and Huston doesn’t seem like the kind of man who would have enough sense of humor about himself to appear in something akin to a farce wherein he is largely the butt of the joke.

Is he the figure the film would present to us? A musing as to what Hemingway would have been like had he gone into stagecraft and bull fighting instead of writing and bull fighting? There are certainly enough trappings that one would be forgiven for thinking so.

Is Hannaford Welles himself? Almost certainly, and there is just enough of the other two possibilities to disingenuously—and probably unsuccessfully—put people off the scent. Most of Welles’ protagonists, from Kane through the corrupt cop Quinlan of Touch of Evil (1958) were a bit Welles. Any other argument doesn’t hold a whole lot of water.

What also doesn’t hold a lot of water is Hannaford’s film-within-the-film. It’s clear he’s trying to ape the style of European art films that surrounded his exile, but in the attempt to satirize there’s not much to it, where those other films at least have a reason to exist. It’s clear that—between this and Fake—that he is enamored of his mistress, Kodar, but here presence always feels more boring than it should be, which is impressive considering her role is essentially pornographic. He also hinges a significant performance out of an actress who isn’t really an actress (Cathy Lucas), merely in an attempt to take a shot at longtime frenemy Peter Bogdanovich and his relationship with Cybill Shepherd. I’ll allow for the possibility that I may not get the joke, but especially where Kodar is concerned it feels like a betrayal of his previous aesthetic insistence that sex could only exacerbate the fakeness of a narrative film. That may be the problem: the whole film is too misogynistic and lionizing of that misogyny—when it isn’t barely holding together as an actually movie—to fully recommend.