Initial Thoughts: Casino Royale (1954)

I reviewed the (as of this writing) newest Bond film here. Now I will be reviewing the oldest Bond film too.

Well technically, it’s a TV special. It aired as an episode of the anthology series, Climax!. Either way, the Climax! episode so happens to be the first ever adaptation of a James Bond novel. Many people (myself included, most of the time) talk about Sean Connery being the first Bond actor, which is true for the official Eon Productions film series. But in fact, Sean Connery was predated by Barry Nelson.

Despite being a James Bond fan for so many years, it took me a remarkably long time to get around to seeing this very earliest book-to-screen Bond adaptation. In fact, I watched it just recently for the first time so I could review it here. Shortly before seeing it, I had also read the Ian Fleming novel again and so I wanted to compare the two.

Needless to say, this is a very different beast from the Eon films; the overall style and presentation is nothing alike. It’s also quite a lot shorter than the Eon films, and so everything moves along briskly. The other quirk that jumps out right away is the changed character names. Instead of James Bond, we have Jimmy Bond. Instead of Felix Leiter, we have Clarence Leiter. And instead of Vesper Lynd and Renè Mathis, they are merged into the character of Valerie Mathis.

Barry Nelson, while not the greatest James (or rather, Jimmy) Bond, nonetheless gives a good performance. Even better is Peter Lorre as the villainous Le Chiffre, who brings a surprising amount of fun and charm to the role.

The special as a whole is mostly pretty entertaining throughout, although the climax (no pun intended) is somewhat lackluster, even for a low-budget TV production (or, perhaps, because of that). It also feels too compressed from the novel in places. Significant chunks of the story are removed. Which I can understand since it was a TV episode and they had to fit it into a one-hour timeslot, but still, it did hurt the quality. This probably would’ve turned out better if it’d been at least an hour-and-a-half long.

Overall, I would give it a 6/10. I had a fair bit of fun with it myself, but probably moreso for its interesting quirks and for the novelty of seeing the first Bond adaptation than for the quality of it on its own merits. It’s hard for me to recommend to anyone who isn’t already a fan of the franchise. For casual audiences, there are an abundance of much better Bond adventures out there. Still, if you are a big Bond fan already, and/or if you’re a fan of old-fashioned spy thriller shows, then I’d say it’s worth checking out for curiosity’s sake.