John Huston, Ken Hughes, Val Guest, Robert Parrish and Joe McGrath direct Peter Sellers, Ursula Andres and David Niven in this 007 spoof where multiple James Bonds are assigned the same mission.

Dead in the water chaos. Peter Sellers, at the height of his fame, signed on do this off-brand adaptation of Ian Fleming’s first novel. The shoot was chaotic. Rumour had it he and Orson Welles (cast as Le Chiffre and having a blast at the baccarat tables doing non-narrative magic tricks) fell out early doors. Plus Sellers wanted it to be “more serious”. Eventually he walked with only a third of the script in the can. So the producers tried to turn a weakness into a strength. Creating a framing device of David Niven as the “original” James Bond recruiting a whole bunch of newer James Bonds. It became a movie of vaguely tangentially related side plots featuring the most available stars of their day. It is an absolute dog’s dinner. Making little sense… slowly. Clutching at straws? Herb Alpert’s ear worm brass band theme tune is iconic. Welles seems to be having the time of his life disrupting a big studio mess he has no responsibility over. The Mata Hari sequence might be dated colonialism but at least is funny, sexy and spectacular. None of these things are any reason to sit through the first hour. Which is just grindingly awful. No movie could recover from such stale pop art boredom.

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Perfect Double Bill: Operation Kid Brother (1967)

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