Forty years before Daniel Craig rebooted Bond, there was another Casino Royale, one with six James Bonds that starred David Niven, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, and Orson Welles. Sound like a joke? It was, just not a very funny one.

When the producer of The Seven Year Itch and What's New, Pussycat? bought the rights to Ian Fleming's first novel, rather than competing with the Bond series he turned it into a spoof. Six Bonds and five directors later, Casino Royale was famous for how epically awful it was, so disastrous that it ended up somehow good in a blinding act of movie jujitsu.

David Niven plays James Bond, lured out of retirement to find out who's killing the world's secret agents. The plot, if the term applies, hinges on Le Chiffre (Orson Welles), a SMERSH agent who embezzled the organization's money and is trying to pay it back. Bond sends Mata Bond, his daughter, to break up Le Chiffre's auction of blackmail photos, and has Vesper Lynd (Ursula Andress, who was also in Dr. No) convince a baccarat expert (Peter Sellers) to pose as James Bond and take on Le Chiffre in his last chance to win the money at Casino Royale.

It goes on from there, seldom logically, often with actual missing steps. Mata is kidnapped by a flying saucer that takes her to Casino Royale, which -- natch -- is built on the underground HQ of Dr. Noah (nyuk), chief of SMERSH, and Bond's nephew Jimmy Bond (played by Woody Allen, introduced early in the film doing a painful parody of himself). When Bond goes to the rescue, we're treated to an amazing '60s-style lair, complete with little silver go-karts and a swinging babe army in gold boots. In the climax, after Bond and Mata escape to the casino, Vesper (now also going under the name James Bond) pulls a gun -- double-crossed again.

Then, the movie goes spectacularly off the rails in one of the strangest scenes ever put to film. The cavalry shows up to save the day -- I mean, cowboys on horseback come pouring through the doors of the casino -- sparking a massive melee involving seals (seals?), a bubble machine, naked girls in gold paint, a monkey in a toupee, Indians jumping out of a plane with teepee parachutes, and black-and-white clips of Keystone Kops footage.

Then Woody Allen, tricked into swallowing a pill that turns him into a walking atom bomb, explodes. And everybody dies.

Seriously, that's it. But the plot, which if anything is even more convoluted than it sounds, doesn't tell the whole story; Casino Royale is a hilarious send-up of the time, all the groovy psychedelia and swinging fashion that the Austin Powers series works so hard to reproduce. They even stole Burt Bacharach.

A lot of the film's problems stem from the fact that Peter Sellers, who apparently had wanted to play a serious Bond, left midway through the shoot, which gave rise to some of the more ridiculous plot holes (how, exactly, did Le Chiffre kidnap him from a moving sports car?). And with a series of no fewer than five directors, it probably isn't surprising that the stitched-together version that was released doesn't make much sense.

What was surprising is that it was something of a hit, the third-highest grossing movie of 1967. Critics were less kind, and it passed into movie memory as one of those best-avoided horror shows. Of course, like the best cult films, there are those who take Casino Royale, and themselves, way too seriously. In a scholarly article that reads like its own parody, this film professor calls it "far more Weltanschauung than spy narrative." (He also says, "This denigration of modernity in favor of divinity and mythos also suggests a false totality." Riiight.)

Casino Royale is worth watching for its bizarre vision of the sixties, for its lush visuals and their influence on the movies we're still watching, and for that unbelievable ending. Not so much for the Weltanschauung.

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