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CASINO ROYALE. For all the ballyhoo attending the recent James Bond spoof, Casino Royale, one comes away strangely disappointed. With 14 stars, 12 million dollars, 9 writers, 7 Bonds, 5 directors, 3 chief photographers, 2 executive producers and a partridge in a pear tree, it was ex-_ pected to be deserving of all kinds _of superlatives: Worst picture of the decade. Biggest waste of talent. Poorest use of plastic material. Unfortunately, for those of us who enjoy writing hyperbolic reviews, it’s not even that.

We expected a What’s New Pussycat? with elephantiasis; we find an exceedingly moderate movie. Casino is moderately hilarious, spectacular, dazzling and “in.” It is also moderately tasteless, dull, self-indulgent — and overlong. To top the other Bond films in at least one respect, Casino does indeed feature a plethora of poontang—and the girls are moderately sexy. Ursula Andress, Barbara Bouchet and Daliah Lavi have all been so overexposed in the pages of Playboy that their presence in diaphanous gear provokes little interest; Joanna Pettet, as Mata Bond, result of a union between Mata Hari and James Bond (we can at least thank the covey of writers for not calling her Hari James), can only project chipmunk cuteness in a role that cries out for the talents of Barbara Ferris; only Jackie Bisset, as lowdown double-dealing irresistible Miss Good-thighs, would raise anyone’s concupiscence quotient. A pleasant surprise, amid all the hyperthyroid campery, is the almost realistic playing by Peter Sellers and David Niven; they make their characters seem like real human beings who happen to have fallen into a surrealistic snakepit. Sellers’ fumbling seduction scene with the incredible Ursula (she’s seducing him, of course), filmed in slow motion, through a fish-tank of pastels, and backed by dusky Dusty Springfield singing a cool bossa-nova by Burt Bacharach, is graceful, funny and excessively marvelous. Unfortunately, no director can be credited for this lovely sequence because the individual sequences aren’t marked and no individual styles are demonstrated anyway. It’s all Mid-Sixties Hollywood.

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Richard Corliss

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CASINO ROYALE. For all the ballyhoo attending the recent James Bond spoof, Casino Royale, one comes away strangely disappointed. With 14 stars, 12 million dollars, 9 writers, 7 Bonds, 5 directors, 3 chief photographers, 2 executive producers and a partridge in a pear tree, it was ex-_ pected to be deserving of all kinds _of superlatives: Worst picture of the decade. Biggest waste of talent. Poorest use of plastic material. Unfortunately, for those of us who enjoy writing hyperbolic reviews, it’s not even that.

We expected a What’s New Pussycat? with elephantiasis; we find an exceedingly moderate movie. Casino is moderately hilarious, spectacular, dazzling and “in.” It is also moderately tasteless, dull, self-indulgent — and overlong. To top the other Bond films in at least one respect, Casino does indeed feature a plethora of poontang—and the girls are moderately sexy. Ursula Andress, Barbara Bouchet and Daliah Lavi have all been so overexposed in the pages of Playboy that their presence in diaphanous gear provokes little interest; Joanna Pettet, as Mata Bond, result of a union between Mata Hari and James Bond (we can at least thank the covey of writers for not calling her Hari James), can only project chipmunk cuteness in a role that cries out for the talents of Barbara Ferris; only Jackie Bisset, as lowdown double-dealing irresistible Miss Good-thighs, would raise anyone’s concupiscence quotient. A pleasant surprise, amid all the hyperthyroid campery, is the almost realistic playing by Peter Sellers and David Niven; they make their characters seem like real human beings who happen to have fallen into a surrealistic snakepit. Sellers’ fumbling seduction scene with the incredible Ursula (she’s seducing him, of course), filmed in slow motion, through a fish-tank of pastels, and backed by dusky Dusty Springfield singing a cool bossa-nova by Burt Bacharach, is graceful, funny and excessively marvelous. Unfortunately, no director can be credited for this lovely sequence because the individual sequences aren’t marked and no individual styles are demonstrated anyway. It’s all Mid-Sixties Hollywood.