With five directors, at least seven 007s (including Joanna Pettet, Terence Cooper and Woody Allen!), more spot gags than a MAD Magazine article and a panoply of astonishingly beautiful women, this spoof of the Bond films is overpopulated, overstuffed, wildly inconsistent, episodic and a total mess. But it’s so expensively insane that it can’t help but be entertaining.
For the money, you get... a terrific Burt Bacharach score (and Dusty Springfield singing ‘The Look of Love’); trendy psychedelic sets (you’ll love Ursula Andress’s bedroom); stretches of inspired lunacy (Deborah Kerr’s Scots routine, Peter Sellers insulting Orson Welles over a baccarat table); Dave Prowse as the Frankenstein Monster; a flying saucer in Trafalgar Square; comedy cameos from British institutions like Richard Wattis and Ronnie Corbett; more ‘60s lovelies (Ursula Andress, Dahlia Lavi, Jacqueline Bisset, Joanna Pettet) in more outlandish frocks than any other picture (it’s more sophisticatedly sexy than the official Bonds); Woody Allen before a firing squad (‘my doctor says I mustn’t allow bullets to enter any part of my body’); and an orgy of excess that tides over the let-the-fire-extinguishers-off-and-have-the-cowboys-ride-in slapstick. Too often written off as a disaster – and admittedly a total mess (Sellers walked off the set in mid-film, and the contrivances used to cover this are glaringly obvious) – it is arguably a more engaging, appealing film than 75 per cent of the “official” 007 films.
