[January 10th marks the 100th anniversary of the renaming, rebranding, and relaunch of Columbia Pictures, one of the foundational and most iconic American film studios. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Columbia’s many film innovations over its first few decades, leading up to a special weekend tribute to one of our preeminent 21st century FilmStudiers!]
On two
ways Columbia tried to capitalize on the popularity of the spy series that got
away.
Most
hugely successful film series probably have at least a studio or two who can
look back regretfully at having passed on the chance to produce them—the Lord of the Rings films have a
handful, for example—and in the case of Columbia Pictures, I can’t imagine a
bigger “one that got away” in the studio’s century of history than the James
Bond films. Columbia apparently had the chance to partner with Albert “Cubby” Broccoli’s Eon
Productions to produce the Bond films when they first began to be adapted from
Ian Fleming’s bestselling novels in the early 1960s, but the studio passed, and the
result is only one of the longest-running and most successful film
franchises of all time. (To be fair, Columbia did eventually
become attached to the series in its 21st century incarnation starring
Daniel Craig as the superspy, as part of the studio’s partnership with Sony
Pictures; but still, that’s nearly 50 years of prior James Bond films that the
studio could have been part of.)
It didn’t
take long for Columbia to realize that they had missed out, and in 1965, with
the fourth Bond film in four years about to be released, they decided to jump
into the spy film game, working with a former producing partner of Broccoli’s (Irving Allen) just in
case the Bond associations weren’t clear enough. But they did so in an
interesting way: purchasing the rights to a serious and clearly
Fleming-inspired spy series, Donald
Hamilton’s Matt Helm novels (the first 9 of which had been published
between 1960 and 1965, with another 18 to come before the series
concluded in the 1990s); but deciding to make the film adaptations of those
novels into silly spoofs, starring Dean Martin as a
wisecracking, light-hearted revision of Hamilton’s tough-as-nails character.
Four of a planned five such films were eventually produced, beginning with
1966’s The Silencers and Murderers’ Row and continuing with The Ambushers (1967) and The Wrecking Crew (1969); the films were
relatively unsuccessful, however, and Martin abandoned the character before the
fifth and final film could be made.
Well, if
you can’t parody them obliquely, parody them directly, as the saying most
definitely does not go. Producer
Charles Feldman had acquired the film rights to Fleming’s first Bond novel,
Casino Royale (1953), in 1960, and
had tried unsuccessfully to make it for Eon Productions with Broccoli. So
Feldman decided to make the film into a satire instead, and with the Matt Helm
films not really taking off Columbia came on board as the studio. The resulting 1967 film was
quite the sprawling affair, with five credited directors (including John Huston!),
three credited writers, and a truly stunning list of actors on board, including
former Bond girl Ursula
Andress playing one of six “James Bonds” and none other than Orson Welles playing Bond’s
chief adversary Le Chiffre. Casino Royale
was significantly more successful than the Helm films (it grossed over $40
million worldwide, compared to the $7 million of the most successful Helm film),
and, even more importantly I’m sure for the studio that had passed on Bond,
became and remains a part of the James Bond cinematic legacy as well as the
long story of Columbia Pictures.
Special
post this weekend,
Ben
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