Casino Royale (1967)

Skippable, and it is barely a Bond film. The rights to the first novel had been sold separately years before Eon existed, and what the owners produced in 1967 was a spoof: David Niven as a retired Sir James Bond, with several other characters renamed James Bond as a deliberate joke, and a plot that collapses entirely in the last half hour.

It is famous for the chaos of its making. Five credited directors shot separate sections, the budget ran to several times the original estimate, Peter Sellers and Orson Welles reportedly refused to be filmed together so their card game was assembled from separate takes, and Sellers left before his material was finished. The result has no narrative continuity between sequences.

What survives is the surface. Burt Bacharach's score is genuinely lovely and produced a standard in The Look of Love, Herb Alpert's title theme is a delight, and the production design is pure late-sixties excess. Individual scenes are funny.

The film as a whole is incoherent and exhausting, and the finale is a brawl involving cowboys, seals and a chimpanzee. Watch it for the soundtrack and treat it as a curiosity outside the series entirely.