Opening less than two months before Eon’s “You Only Live Twice,” “Casino Royale” did get at least one thing right: The role of Bond would soon open up to all manner of actors, none of them a match for Sean Connery (at least “Never Say Never Again” was able to cast the original Bond). Crediting “Casino Royale’s” meta-satire with mocking and then ultimately predicting where the increasingly overblown Eon productions were headed, he writes, “the film was stocked with in-stars, in-jokes, and an in-style that would surpass not only the grandeur of the original series and its penchant for outrageous cold-warrior escapades, but in turn, influence the megalomania of the ‘real’ Bond series.” Robert von Dassanowsky is a film historian, and I learn from Wikipedia that he has written a fascinating defense of one of the worst films ever made. A lavish, garish and ultimately nightmarish snapshot of creative energies run amok, which Roger Ebert called “a definitive example of what can happen when everybody working on a film goes simultaneously berserk,” “Casino Royale” suggests what we might expect if a Bond villain were ever to get his way, ending with the detonation of an atomic device and most of the characters blown to high heaven. The result is a film of astounding sloppiness, an insult to the Bond name (most likely deliberate) and a dark spot on the resumes of all involved (surely unintentional). Failing that, he decided to make his own version, attempting to subvert the character itself in a madcap satire with five different directors and one of the starriest ensembles of all time, featuring everyone from Peter Sellers and David Niven (both playing Bond) to Orson Welles and Peter O’Toole to Charles Boyer and Jean-Paul Belmondo, many of them appearing in blink-and-you-miss-it cameos. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman over the years, trying to worm his way into what, until Harry Potter came along, was the most successful film franchise of all time. I’m no film historian, but I picture Feldman running a SMERSH-like extortion racket on Eon’s Albert R. No,” but didn’t bother to exercise them until four Sean Connery films had made Bond an internationally bankable name.

In the case of “Casino Royale,” Feldman bought the rights more than a decade before “Dr.

Feldman’s “ Casino Royale,” the first of two unofficial 007 pics (the other being “Never Say Never Again”) in which producers who’d acquired the rights to an Ian Fleming novel set out to make a competing entry on their own. Even the worst Eon-backed Bond movie has the distinction of being better than Charles K.

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