URSULA ANDRESS TRIPLE FEATURE
TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
Three movies featuring Ursula Andress are shown by TCM tonight. The first is somewhat iconic, the second forgettable save for its special effects – and the third is a personal favorite. Starting the triple feature at 8 p.m. ET is 1965’s She, in which the actress sports a headdress, and costume (pictured), rivaling anything Elizabeth Taylor wore two years earlier in Cleopatra. At 10 p.m. ET comes 1981’s Clash of the Titans, memorable for Ray Harryhausen’s imaginative stop-action special effects than for Andress’ divine turn as Aphrodite. (Her co-stars, for the record, include Laurence Olivier as Zeus, Maggie Smith of Downton Abbey as Thetis, Burgess Meredith as Ammon, and Harry Hamlin, later of L.A. Law, as Perseus. But my favorite doesn’t show up until after midnight, at 12:15 a.m. ET, when Casino Royale shows up. Not the 2006 Daniel Craig action film, but the 1967 spoof, in which James Bond is played by David Niven. And Peter Sellers. And Terence Cooper. And even Woody Allen. It’s a wild satire in which almost everyone gets to be 007 for a while, and in which Andress gets to cavort with Sellers’ spy-in-training to the sounds of “The Look of Love” (the entire Burt Bachrach soundtrack here is a delight). Other co-stars include Orson Welles, Daliah Lavi, Joanna Pettet, Deborah Kerr, John Huston, and so, so many others. Casino Royale is a mess of a movie… but what an enjoyable, raucous, sexy, funny mess it is.