Tomorrow, when James Bond finally comes back, the critics will give a SPECTRE-quality drubbing for one of my favorite cult films. To paraphrase a famous line of Deborah Kerr's, one of the stars of the film in question, when they speak of Casino Royale '67 -- and they will speak of it -- they won't be kind. But having just sat through a double bill of true excess yesterday -- Dreamgirls and Curse of the Golden Flower, I'd have to reevaluate what's meant by extreme, everything-but-the-kitchen sink filmmaking. Casino Royale 1967 may have burned through 5 credited directors, but at least it spared our eyes the sight of a color-coordinated Gong Li going slowly, slowly nuts from poisoned tea, and spared our ears the sound of Jennifer Hudson's American Idol-winning song stylings, which is too say a sort of gospel-meets-Alpine-yodeling.

I love music that's a little understated, and Dusty Springfield's quiet, almost whispered "The Look of Love" is one of the many moments that makes Casino Royale '67the spy musical, even if the characters in Our Man Flint seem ready to burst into song at any minute. (If Casino Royale '67 was Bollywood instead of Hollywood, everyone would praise it for its craziness, instead of deploring it for its weirdness.)The Springfield number comes out in the middle, during Casino Royale's sudden 180-degree turn into seriousness. Peter Sellers who, like any comedian, had a hard, weary side, is seen through a home aquarium, looking at, and sort of past, Ursula Andress's Vesper Lynd. As they move toward one another, they're slowed slightly, as per the famous kiss sequence in Rear Window. Posing this couple "underwater" via fish tank-cam may be some very inside-baseball parody of the usual scuba-sequence in a Bond flick. Yet Seller's Evelyn Tremble is, for a moment, a plausible lover-man, and as lonely as Daniel Craig's Bond himself. Sellers longed to play a dramatic Bond, says Wikipedia, and seemingly didn't realize that he was being cast in a comedy. When he ankled it, the producers brought in the actor Fleming always wanted as Bond, David Niven, to expand on what they had already.

Summarizing this plot is a fool's errand, so here's the short version. The secret services of the world are having their agents killed off one by one, In desperation, representatives of the US, UK, USSR and France try to lure Sir James Bond himself out of retirement. Niven plays as the aged Bond, vegetaing on his genteel estate, raising roses and playing Debussy on the piano. A gentleman spy of the 1914-1918 war whose heart was broken by Mata Hari herself; he has no patience for this "sexual acrobat" who inherited his name and legend. Persuaded (violently) to return to work, Niven's Bond comes up with a brilliant plan: Everyone in the entire British secret service will now be named James Bond, all the better to thrown the spy-killers off the scent. In between the cameos, Niven has an autumnal romance on the Scottish moors with the widow of M: it's Deborah Kerr, doing a comic Scottish dialect Mike Meyers could envy.

Sellers' card wizard Evelyn Tremble is one of the many who get the new name, and he's the one who follows the thread of the novel's plot, including the lethal game at Casino Royale with Le Chiffre (Orson Welles). Sharp-eyed Bond geeks can notice the carpet-beater protruding from the back of Welles' chair; in the book, it was a carpet beater and not a knotted rope that Le Chiffre wielded... What follows is a psychological torture sequence involving LSD vapor and op-art. ["This page may make you feel sick," warns that link -- beware!]. Ultimately, the actual villain, Dr. Noah is unmasked as Woody Allen, who gets in some apparently self-written dialogue. Cackling over a tied-up Dahlia Lavi, Allen claims "They called Einstein crazy, too! ... Well, they would have if he carried on like this."

There is a seriously crapified three-ring circus finale, with flying roulette wheels, cowboys and Indians, and a trained seal. "A psychedelic movie," claims one of the five directors, Val Guest, who adds that there ought to be a movie about the making of the film; he remembers the experience fondly, despite producer Charles Feldman's 4 am phone calls to request a way to write in William Holden. Casino Royale is more like is what my colleague Dr. Goulfinger describes as "a scotch-drinker's idea of the psychedelic."

The film is of a piece with its times, an era of such serious artistic upheaval that no one knew when or where to laugh. Casino Royale 1967's scattering of Bonds has a deeper meaning than it seems, After all, Bond encompasses the character of slick wisecrackers like Roger Moore, self-amused surfers on waves of future shock like Pierce Brosnan, or dead-earnest killers like Daniel Craig: There's not just one Bond, and so many ways of imagining him.

The recent DVD issue of Casino Royale 1967 includes something most Casino Royale 2006 viewers will want to look at: the original TV version from the 1950s with Barry Nelson as the least-viable James Bond ever, and Peter Lorre as one of the most plausible of the villains. Lorre, Welles, Mads Mikkelsen ... even if the latter is outfitted with disturbing, bloody tears -- a gambit probably filched from Zadie Smith's White Teeth -- there's a diminuendo going on here. Still, the Bond music shows no sign of stopping soon.