True story: One night many years ago I went to bed sick and woozy with a temperature of 103, and decided I'd watch a TV late-show double feature. The first movie was Mean Streets. Oh boy! I’d never seen it! I started watching and nodded off somewhere in the middle. I woke up some time later only to find David Niven playing James Bond, Peter Sellers attacked by a fog-bound marching band, tomahawk-clutching Injuns paratrooping into a Riviera casino, and every set a different shade of psychedelic delirium. Oh, and Bond's world-dominating Dr. Evil nemesis was revealed to be... Woody Allen?!? I thought I was in the last stages of brain death. Instead, I'd just fallen down the rabbithole of this berserk 1967 spectacle, an elephantine proto-Austin Powers Bond parody that in the right mood (sick, woozy, 103-degree fever) can strike you as hilarious, or at least the most consistently fucked-up thing you’ve ever seen. It had six directors and an amusing Burt Bacharach score (including Dusty Springfield's Oscar-winning "The Look of Love") and everyone from Allen and Billy Wilder to Terry Southern and Joseph Heller had a hand (or something) in the script. Co-stars Sellers and Orson Welles so despised each other their scenes sitting across a baccarat table had to be shot separately on different days with doubles. There are countless cameos, from Belmondo to William Holden, along with some of the most senseless throwaway gags in the medium's history. (Cut for no reason to a barking seal stamped with "007." Geddit? The Seventh Seal? Just kill me.) Not to be confused with the 2006 Daniel Craig film—or any other work of remote cinematic coherence—but worth a look all the same.
Sat., Aug. 9; Sun., Aug. 10; Mon., Aug. 11, 2008
