Casino Royale (1967)

Visible crew/equipment: When Mimi is escaping from the castle and swinging on the drain pipes, the wire holding the whole lot up is visible. (00:29:10)

jle

M: Debussy. He plays Debussy every afternoon from sunset until its too dark to read the music. Stands on his head a lot. Eats royal jelly. Lets his intestines down and washes them by hand. Something he learned during his sojourn in Tibet.

Trivia: During the "torture of the mind" sequence, one of the bagpipers stops Peter Sellers and asks him if he is Richard Burton, to which Sellers responds, "No, I'm Peter O'Toole." The piper then says, "Then you're the finest man who ever breathed." The piper in question is Peter O'Toole in a cameo, and the exchange is a two-fold reference to the 1965 film "What's New Pussycat?", which starred both O'Toole and Sellers: first, Richard Burton had a cameo in that film and had a similarly surreal exchange with Peter O'Toole; and second, there is a dialogue between O'Toole and Sellers in that film where Sellers says O'Toole is the "finest man who ever breathed."

Question: At the beginning, M and agents representing the USA, Soviet Union and France try to convince James Bond to come out of retirement. Bond steadfastly refuses; whereupon, M lights his cigar as a signal for British troops in the distance to destroy Bond's estate with mortar fire (M is accidentally killed in the mortar attack). But what was the purpose of destroying Bond's estate? Wouldn't that action only drive Bond further away from rejoining the spy corps? Why would the British government go to such lengths to punish Bond? And then why did Bond return to the secret service, anyway, after such treachery?

Charles Austin Miller