Casino Royale was released on 13 April 1967, two months prior to Eon's fifth Bond movie, You Only Live Twice. The film was a financial success, grossing over $41.7 million worldwide, and Burt Bacharach 's musical score was praised, earning him an Oscar nomination for the song ' The Look of Love '. In 1954, there were only two published novels in the series, Casino Royale and Live and Let Die. CBS chose to adapt the first novel for their live anthology television series, Climax! Fleming agreed and CBS paid him a marginal sum for the rights to the novel. Casino Royale aired live on October 21st in 1954 as the third episode of Climax!
Our Word Is Our Bond is a new series which will look at every 007 film in chronological order. Jonathon Dabell kicks off the series with a look at Casino Royale (1954) starring Barry Nelson and Peter Lorre.
Imagine, if you will, that you are on a TV quiz show. The host looks you in the eye and asks you “who was the first actor to portray James Bond on screen?” You smile inwardly, confident in your own knowledge, and reply “Sean Connery”. You may even be enough of a smart-ass to add “in Dr. No“, just to prove you know your onions. Wrong. More paranoid players, anticipating a trick question, might plump for David Niven who portrayed an in-name-only version of the character in Casino Royale, a wacky 007 spoof made by other hands. But here again they would be wrong. The spoof Casino Royale was actually made in 1967, when the Connery Bond films were already well established.
James Bond (Barry Nelson) weighs up the odds in Casino Royale (1954).
The correct answer to the question is actually Barry Nelson. An anthology TV show called Climax! ran in America from 1954 to 1958, each episode around 50-60 minutes in length and many of them filmed in front of a live audience in colour (the episodes which survive, alas, are all black-and-white kinescope copies). The third show in the first season of the show was one Casino Royale, based on a recent novel by a then little-known chap named Ian Fleming.
It’s amusing to note from the off that James Bond (often referred to throughout the film as ‘Jimmy’) is an American agent working for some organisation vaguely mentioned as ‘Combined Intelligence’. His inside contact at the casino is a British agent named Clarence Leiter, played with the stiffest of upper lips by Michael Pate. Aside from this juggling of nationalities, and changes to the character names (‘Clarence’ is actually named ‘Felix’ Leiter throughout the Bond novels and films, while the main female character here, Valerie Mathis, is a combination of Rene Mathis, a French Deuxieme agent, and Vesper Lynd, a tormented double agent, from Fleming’s book), the film remains fairly faithful to the source novel.
James Bond (Barry Nelson) teaches Clarence Leiter (Michael Pate) the finer points of baccarat, in Casino Royale (1954).
Bond (Nelson) has been assigned to beat a French-based Russian agent, Le Chiffre (Peter Lorre), at baccarat. Le Chiffre is a dangerous and enormously valuable agent, incorruptible and totally reliable apart from one key character flaw – he has an addiction to gambling. After using money provided him in good faith by his Russian spy-masters to fund his gambling, Le Chiffre has lost almost all of it and needs to win it back urgently before he is ‘retired’ (that’s code for ‘assassinated’, just in case you missed the point). Bond’s job is to defeat him at the baccarat table and leave him to his fate. To add to the intrigue, Bond’s ex-lover Valerie (Linda Christian) is now Le Chiffre’s moll, although it’s clear she still holds a candle for Bond as does he for her. Bond receives an anonymous phone-call informing him that is he beats Le Chiffre at the baccarat tables, Valerie will be killed.
James Bond (Barry Nelson) and Valerie Mathis (Linda Christian) in Casino Royale (1954).
There’s very little in common between this Bond production and the many Eon productions that followed. Nelson admitted that he had little idea how to play the character – there were no existing Bond films for him to use as reference points, and he had not read the novel (it was not well-known at all in America – indeed, it wasn’t until John F. Kennedy labelled From Russia With Love as one of his favourite books that the Bond novels took off in America). He felt the role was poorly written and found the process of filming before a live audience rather terrifying on the whole, though the chance to act opposite the legendary Peter Lorre was enough to make him want to do it. The film is split, as if to reinforce its stage-play approach, into three acts. The opening act is mainly about getting the plot machinations into gear; the second deals with the card game at which Bond and Le Chiffre square up to each other; and the final act sees a desperate Le Chiffre torturing Bond in his hotel room in an effort to recover the money he has lost.
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Le Chiffre (Peter Lorre) tortures Bond (Barry Nelson) in the bath tub, while a distraught Valerie (Linda Christian) looks on. Casino Royale (1954).
While Nelson is right about the role being underwritten, he lacks the charisma to raise it on the strength of his personality alone. His generally bland line delivery and posturing make one realise just how commanding a performance is given by Sean Connery in the later entries. Linda Cristian is also somewhat out of her depth as the hopelessly wooden leading lady of the piece. Lorre, though, is pretty good as Le Chiffre. Always a sinister and unpredictable presence in a movie, Lorre is close to Fleming’s original depiction of Le Chiffre and utterly steals the film from everyone else around him. The torturing of Bond in the final act is too graphic in the novel to be shown in any real detail in a 50s TV production (heck, even the 2006 Daniel Craig version it is still toned down a little from the book), but Lorre’s urbane savagery makes the scene effective. I watched the film for the first time recently with my wife, and during the torture scene she turned to me and said “this is quite dark for a 50s film!” which is pretty much what I was thinking myself at that moment. The effect is not achieved through visceral visual nastiness; it’s all down to Lorre’s uncanny knack for making one believe his ruthless evilness.
For many years, Casino Royale (1954) was considered a lost movie, until a kinescope copy was discovered in the 80s. Even that was missing the final two minutes, a final twist in which Le Chiffre tries to thwart Bond by taking Valerie as a hostage while he holds a razor blade to her throat. This final scene has since been found as well, although the picture and sound quality during this final frisson is clearly more deteriorated than the rest of the film. It’s just about watchable, albeit rather scratchy and washed-out.
Overall Casino Royale has not held up well, certainly not when measured against the best of the Eon productions. The low budget makes the casino scenes rather unconvincing, and Nelson’s general insipidness as Bond is a major distraction. However, it deserves credit for being a reasonably faithful adaptation of a fine novel, plus further praise needs adding for Lorre’s confident display of silky menace. Generally-speaking, though, it is more of a curiosity piece than anything else. Bond completists should give it a look just to say they’ve seen it. And remember, if you’re ever on that TV quiz show and they ask you who was the first person to play Bond on screen… Barry Nelson’s the name you’re looking for!
MoM Rating: 5/10
Watching the 1954 Climax! version of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale is a jarring experience. It defamiliarizes one of the most famous stories about one of cinema’s most famous characters. But only in retrospect. The oddness of Casino Royale is that it teases us with an alternate iconography for James Bond. Imagine a world where Eon Productions never formed, where Sean Connery never made the role an icon, and Goldfinger, Moonraker, and Skyfall never happened. Imagine a world where James Bond was an American! It might look very similar to the James Bond we see in Climax!. It’s a dispiriting thought experiment, but also fascinating, like a television version of an alternate reality.
Before Dr. No premiered in 1962 and Sean Connery redefined masculinity on the silver screen, James Bond was just a character in the novels of Ian Fleming. In 1954, there were only two published novels in the series, Casino Royale and Live and Let Die. CBS chose to adapt the first novel for their live anthology television series, Climax!. Fleming agreed and CBS paid him a marginal sum for the rights to the novel. Casino Royale aired live on October 21st in 1954 as the third episode of Climax!. It disappeared from public consciousness until the 1980s when film historian Jim Schoenberger located it, albeit without its final credits. We’re lucky Schoenberger found it, as it’s a fascinating oddity.
The plot of the TV film is largely similar to the novel, although condensed for TV and changed to suit its Eisenhower-era American audience. Barry Nelson plays James Bond as a cool American “combined intelligence” agent working to take down the Russian spy, Le Chiffre (Peter Lorre), during a game of baccarat. Michael Pate co-stars as Bond’s ally, the loyal British agent Clarence Leiter, and Linda Christian rounds out the cast as Valerie Mathis, Le Chiffre’s girlfriend who is secretly working for the French secret service.
Every Bond fan will be able to spot where Casino Royale differs from its source material. For example, they’ll know that Mathis combines aspects of the Vesper Lynd character with René Mathis, the French agent assigned to the case in the novel. She’s given a past relationship with Bond, but completely sidelined narratively, operating mostly as a damsel in distress. Other changes, like the condensation of the plotline to the events in and around the casino are understandable in order to accommodate the one-hour live television format. The most interesting change is the swapping of Bond and Leiter’s national identities. It reveals the most interesting aspects of this modest television production, clarifying 1950s American attitudes towards both the British and themselves.
Although the Bond franchise has always targeted American audiences, it has never tempered its distinct British identity to do so. The Climax! version of James Bond goes too far in catering to its presumptive audience. First of all, it makes Bond an American. That means he’s no longer a cold, mysterious gentleman, but instead a rugged, affable American who speaks and shoots straight. The producers likely believed that the British character as written would never appeal to American audiences—perhaps they disliked the classism inherent in Fleming’s Bond. Whatever the reason, they made Bond resemble a middle-class American hero familiar from the big screen at the time, while relegating the British presence to the supporting character, Clarence Leiter.
In Fleming’s novels, Leiter is an American named Felix. He’s a rough-and-tumble spy, with a weakness for ladies and a high tolerance for alcohol. Clarence Leiter is a refined gentleman, loyal to Bond, but hardly tough or sexy. He’s a tad feminine. Michael Pate plays him like a butler as spy, always subservient to Bond’s course of action. In one scene he talks his way out of gunpoint, using the arrival of a waiter to cover his exit, but you never get the sense Leiter will turn violent to escape. You can hardly imagine him getting in a fight, presumably because Americans don’t think Brits get their hands dirty. Leiter is good at his job, but he’s not exciting. He’s distant and stuffy.
Bond, on the other hand, is familiar and adventurous. He’s often called “Jimmy,” as if he’s the good ol’ boy you can count on when you’re in a tight spot. He’s violent and brave, but he’s not cool or mysterious. He’s also hardly charming. Nelson may be a memorable actor in other films (I especially like him as the manager of the Overlook Hotel, Stuart Ullman, in The Shining) but here he reads as alternatingly dull and hokey. When he’s trying to be cool, he’s apping William Holden, even trying to mimic his vocal patterns. As such, he often comes across as flippant instead of clever. He reads as a dull American hero—hardly James Bond, Agent 007 of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It’s as if the producers took what they presumed were the American attributes of the James Bond character, added a pinch of the silver screen spy persona, and distilled these characteristics into their Bond, while pushing the rest of the character from the novel into the emasculated Leiter. The result is two characters who are little more than emblems for their respective nations, a pissing match between an American man and a British strawman.
Peter Lorre fares better as Le Chiffre, overplaying the character’s confidence during baccarat and enjoying the sadism of the torture scenes. Lorre always excelled at playing deranged villains, so it’s not a stretch for him to play Le Chiffre. Still, he remains the sole performer to actually excite while onscreen. When he’s having Bond’s nails removed to suss out information (the movie understandably censors aspects of the novel, namely Le Chiffre’s mode of torture. Even nowadays it’d be nearly unthinkable for network television to show a man being tortured by damaging his testicles), Lorre revels in his power over Bond. The other part of Casino Royale that is unquestionably successful is its explanation of baccarat. As baccarat was likely unfamiliar to the majority of Climax!’s audience, the film goes to great lengths to explain the game to the viewer. They do so by having Bond explain the game to Leiter as a cover to allow them to speak privately together. Although I have read the novel Casino Royale as well as a few tutorials of the game online, I’ve never entirely understood the baccarat betting system. Casino Royale clarified it for me. Although the way the film justifies explaining the rules is clumsy, it’s remarkably effective.
As for the filmmaking, since it was originally a live telecast, Casino Royale is visually unremarkable. Most cuts are utilized to mask theatrical changes. The camera always stays on one side of the characters. The overhead lighting is bright and flat, so as to light as many character’s faces as possible. It’s interesting to note that Climax! was one of the few network programs of the 1950s to be broadcast in colour, although only black and white versions of its programming remain. Perhaps a colour version of Casino Royale would have added some visual interest.
The Climax! version of Casino Royale made me thankful for the franchise we got. Ian Fleming’s debonair spy could have turned into just another alluring killer from a trade paperback, fodder for the occasional TV movie or serial plot. Instead we got the Aston Martin DB5 and the Lotus Esprit, the raid on Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s Piz Gloria fortress and the tank chase through the streets of St. Petersburg. Casino Royale gives us a fascinating glimpse into a world without Bond as we know him. It makes me glad we live in a world with James, and not “Jimmy,” Bond.
4 out of 10
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Directed by William H. Brown Jr.; written by Charles Bennett and Anthony Ellis based on Ian Fleming’s novel; presented by William Lundigan; starring Barry Nelson, Peter Lorre, Linda Christian, Michael Pate, Eugene Borden, Jean Del Val, Gene Roth.