![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Notes
1. In fairness, it should be noted that Sellers’ collaborators on Royale were themselves not without sin. Sikov cites the production logs, which record: “Waiting for Mr. Sellers,” “Waiting for Mr. Welles,” “Waiting for Miss Andress,” “Waiting for Mr. Welles,” “Waiting for Mr. Sellers,” etc. (Sikov 252). Feldman also contributed to the film's tardy shooting schedule. Guest recalled: “Charlie would ring me in the middle of the night and say, ‘Look, I can get [Brigitte] Bardot next Wednesday. What set are we on? Well, write her in'” (qtd. in Baxter 130).
2. Note, for example, Adamson's account of how Irving Thalberg, head of production at M. G. M., tried to make the Marx Brothers’ freewheeling style conform to the studio's industrial narrative standard for A Night at the Opera (1935). By contrast, the exceptional attitude of Herman J. Mankiewicz, the Marxes’ previous producer, at Paramount, was: “If Groucho and Chico stand against a wall for an hour and forty minutes and crack funny jokes, that's enough of a plot for me” (qtd. in Adamson 134)—an aesthetic, incidentally, adopted decades later by Budd Friedman at his Improv comedy clubs.
3. Pauline Kael, in her assessment of the trend in Cat Ballou (1965), defines spoofing as merely “a face-saving device”: “spoofing has become the safety net for those who are unsure of their footing,” she writes. “What we are seeing is ineptitude—coyly disguised” (Kael 34, 37). As for Feldman's claim to novelty, the mid-to-late ‘60s saw many spoofs of the spy genre, including the “Matt Helm” films The Silencers (1966), Murderers’ Row (1966), The Ambushers (1968), and The Wrecking Crew (1969); Our Man Flint (1966) and In Like Flint (1967); as well as Modesty Blaise (1966), The Last of the Secret Agents? (1966), Where the Spies Are (1966), and Come Spy with Me (1967). During this same period on television, one could view I Spy, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart, Mission: Impossible, and The Avengers. In fact, writes Barbara Leaming, Welles thought that “The Avengers was, week after week, clearly superior to anything they were doing [in Casino Royale] in terms of spoofing Bond” (Leaming 467).
4. Historically, SMERSH was, write Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, “a military counter-intelligence agency detached from the NKVD [People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs] in 1943 … [whose] main mission was to hunt for traitors and Soviet citizens who had collaborated with the enemy. On Stalin's instructions, it cast its net remarkably wide, screening well over five million people”; the apolitical use of SMERSH in Royale may reflect the Russian etymology of the agency's name, Smert Shpionam, “Death to Spies!” (Andrew and Mitrokhin 177).
5. Merwyn Grote, contributor to Roger Ebert's The Bigger Little Book of Hollywood Clichés, illustrates this with the following: “Grim Reaping. Involuntary and unconscious act of counting up the cast members in old movies who are no longer alive. For instance, seeing Gone With the Wind and reflecting that everybody in it is dead except for Butterfly McQueen. Particularly distracting if you think Butterfly McQueen might have died too” (qtd. in Ebert 62).