M sends Bondon his maiden mission as a 00 Agentto attend this game and prevent Le Chiffre from winning. But when they showed the scene at the end where the Indians are riding horses in a casino, everyone in the studio said: ‘What are the horses about?’ ” Royale, which cost $12 million to make, was an unlikely hit: It earned $41.7 million worldwide ($300 million today) and was 1967’s 13th highest grossing domestic film. Le Chiffre, a banker to the world's terrorists, is scheduled to participate in a high-stakes poker game in Montenegro, where he intends to use his winnings to establish his financial grip on the terrorist market. “The movie didn’t make sense, but they didn’t want it to make sense,” says co-star Daliah Lavi, now 73. Noah, the evil head of Soviet counterintelligence agency SMERSH), Orson Welles and John Huston, who also is credited as a director.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s review called the two-hour, 17-minute Royale “over-long, undisciplined, formless, confusing, misfiring and a threat to the coccyx.” The film had five credited directors one star (Peter Sellers) who believed the film shouldn’t be done as a spoof and acted accordingly a slew of celebrity cameos (Jean-Paul Belmondo and Peter O’Toole among them), plus a cast that included Woody Allen (who played both Jimmy Bond - James Bond’s nephew - and Dr.