The cast is stellar, featuring David Niven, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Deborah Kerr and Orson Welles, as well as the first official Bond Girl, Ursula Andress. If you’ve never seen the original big screen Casino Royale, it’s hard to articulate just what a bizarre mess the film is. Although some might say that delay paid off in the end.
It is loathed by purist fans, partly because the film itself was an utter catastrophe and partly because it put the breaks on any attempt at an Eon version of the first Bond novel for 40 years. This movie, released in 1967, is, well, an artifact. But this Casino Royale is not the gritty, hard-bitten, streamlined Bond of the 2006 picture.
If you went all the way to the other end of the list, and if you were including every Bond film ever made, not just the Eon Productions movies, you’d be likely to run into the name Casino Royale again. But definitely up there near the top would be Casino Royale, the Daniel Craig-starring series reboot released in 2006 that was also based on the first Ian Fleming 007 novel. If you asked somebody to rank all the James Bond movies in order of quality (and it’s the sort of thing we might do), there would likely be many different opinions about which one took the top spot.
