Casino Royale 1954 Filmweb

The first screen portrayal of Ian Fleming’s James Bond was not Sean Connery in Dr No (1962), but on television nearly ten years before. Fleming had repeatedly sought to exploit the character on screen and there were numerous failed approaches made to him about adapting his Bond novels for television, from both US and British producers, during the 1950s. Eventually, the US network CBS broadcast Casino Royale as a live TV drama in 1954, but for decades afterwards it was ‘lost’. Fifties television’s evanescence and its more complex means of international distribution than cinema have marginalised its role in the story of Bond on screen.

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Fleming’s American agent Curtis Brown negotiated a deal for CBS to pay $1,000 for an option on the live television rights to Casino Royale, which had been published in 1953. Live television rights are separate from cinematographic rights, which apply to a pre-recorded adaptation such as a cinema film or filmed television programme. So, it was possible for Curtis Brown to make the television deal with CBS without a direct impact on possible sales of the film rights. The main production method for TV drama in the USA in the 1950s was to shoot a continuous performance live in a multi-camera television studio, using electronic cameras. The output of the three or four cameras was mixed live in the studio gallery, since videotape for recorded programme making became available only from 1956. The one-hour television Casino Royale was screened at 8.30 pm on 21 October 1954 in the series Climax! Mystery Theatre (CBS 1954-8) sponsored by the Chrysler Corporation. It was broadcast in colour, but in that first year of colour TV in the USA very few people would have seen it that way, viewing in black and white instead. YouTube now hosts poor quality monochrome uploads of the broadcast.

The Climax! series was a drama anthology; each episode was a different story, but screened under the same overall title and the episodes were planned as a single season. Each drama was bracketed by the sponsor’s advertising, a short film showing Chrysler’s current cars. The opening titles used each week had an emphatic male voice-over that told the viewer that this programme is ‘Live, from Television City in Hollywood!’ Then the series host, actor William Lundigan, addressed the audience from a study desk, and for Casino Royale he held a baccarat shoe, telling us that the week’s story is ‘based on the bestseller by Ian Fleming’. The next shot established the setting of a casino, which had been built in the studio of course. Bond (Barry Nelson) is an American spy called Jimmy Bond, we discover, who is greeted by his British associate Clarence (not Felix) Leiter (Michael Bate). Bond is to humiliate the enemy agent Le Chiffre by defeating him in a baccarat game. Valerie Mathis (Linda Christian) is introduced as Bond’s former lover, and it is quickly clear that we are in a world of sophistication, danger and intrigue that feels quite ‘Bondian’.

Fig. 2: Valerie and the sinister Le Chiffre

The action is fluid and the cameras are mobile, partly because as a continuous live performance, the actors’ movements had to be choreographed to avoid the need for cuts. As Bond and Valerie stroll past the camera arm-in-arm, Le Chiffre (Peter Lorre) and three henchmen sweep in towards it, for example, and the action moves on. To a 1954 audience, Casino Royale would have looked quite similar to other dramas in Climax! and the other anthologies of live drama of the period like The US Steel Hour (1953-63) or Kraft Television Theatre (1947-58). Although Casino Royale now looks a bit clunky, the average budget of only about $40,000 and the problems of making live drama need to be borne in mind. It was popular at the time: Climax! was among the top ten ratings winners in the mid-1950s. Fortunately for us, the live programme was kinescope recorded onto three reels of 16mm film while it was broadcast, but the film recording was then lost until its accidental rediscovery in 1981. One of the reasons for this neglect is probably that Climax! was among the last live drama series in US prime time, as the networks moved to showing filmed television fiction that could be shot out of story sequence.

The first commercial break is followed by the baccarat game, which is shot in a complex alternation of overhead shots and shot-reverse shots between the card-players. At a slower pace and with fewer problems of timing and choreography to consider, Nelson and Lorre are able to give greater depth and complexity to their performances, using eye movements, facial expression and gesture much more subtly than in the long shots and long takes that dominate the majority of the drama. Lorre is wonderfully menacing, sly and compelling to watch.

• Casino Royale (TV) is a film directed by William H. With Barry Nelson, Peter Lorre, Linda Christian, Michael Pate, Eugene Borden. Original title: Climax!.
• Full Cast & Crew: Casino Royale (1954) Cast (16) William Lundigan. Self - Host Barry Nelson. James Bond Peter Lorre. Le Chiffre Linda Christian.
• ' Casino Royale ' is a live 1954 television adaptation of the 1953 novel of the same name by Ian Fleming. An episode of the American dramatic anthology series Climax!, the show was the first screen adaptation of a James Bond novel, and stars Barry Nelson, Peter Lorre, and Linda Christian.
• Casino Royale (TV Episode 1954) cast and crew credits, including actors, actresses, directors, writers and more.

'Casino Royale' is a live 1954 television adaptation of the 1953 novel of the same name by Ian Fleming. An episode of the American dramatic anthology series Climax!, the show was the first screen adaptation of a James Bond novel, and stars Barry Nelson, Peter Lorre, and Linda Christian.

Winning the baccarat game, Bond goes to his hotel to find Valerie, who arrives in the thrall of Le Chiffre and his henchmen who are looking for Bond’s winnings. Le Chiffre tortures Bond, who is tied up in his own bathroom, by crushing his toes with pliers (rather than beating his testicles as in the novel), providing Lorre with an opportunity to play an extended sequence of controlled, menacing domination. Bond escapes, shoots Le Chiffre and the drama ends quickly as Valerie hugs Bond. Lundigan’s closing remarks include an acknowledgement of the good work being done at a National Safety Congress being held that week, and he encourages the audience to take care. The liveness of the drama is signalled again here by the mention of the congress, though accident prevention sits oddly with the sadism that we have just seen Lorre enact.

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Spatially, the 1954 adaptation is very constrained, taking place entirely in interiors. Pace is generated by rapid shifts between the fictional locations of different hotel rooms and the casino, which in production would have been adjoining sets within the one large soundstage where the drama was shot. Careful planning would have been required to ensure that the actors could get from one set to another, and cameras redeployed ready for the next scene, while action was being shot in another part of the studio. Apart from the two commercial breaks, there could be no pauses in the performance and it would have required intense concentration and coordination between actors and crew on the studio floor, and in the director’s gallery above. Apart from some brief fisticuffs, there is none of the running and jumping that we might nowadays expect from Bond, and of course no car chases or spectacular set pieces.

Fig. 4: Bond and Valerie turn the tables

The lack of a Bond TV series is a structuring absence at the heart of the cycle of British and American spy adventure television series of the 1960s. There were plenty of them, especially those made by Lew Grade’s ITC production company, such as Danger Man (1960-9), The Avengers (1961-9), The Saint (1962-9), Man in a Suitcase (1967-8) and The Champions (1968-9). These were, in a sense, echoes of a Bond who never appeared on television, except in the lost Casino Royale. Grade’s ITC action-adventure series were not adaptations of Fleming’s Bond, but they existed in the space for action, exoticism, sex and humour that Bond had carved out. In 1956, Fleming wrote a TV pilot, James Gunn – Secret Agent, for a planned television series. It was never made, but he reworked it into the novel Dr No (published in 1958), which would become the first cinema adaptation. A long story of failures to gain the rights for a television Bond led to the Eon Productions film versions that started in 1962.

Because of the technical and industrial contexts of live studio drama, the aesthetic and narrative features of the first screen Bond were wildly different from the films that came later. But the massive popularity of the literary Bond, and the related success of Bond at the cinema, made secret agent TV series obvious prospects for others to exploit. While there was hardly a television Bond at all, he embodied the combination of sophistication, physical action and globe-trotting that drove the success of a whole cycle of other television spy adventures.

Jonathan Bignell is Professor of Television and Film at the University of Reading. He works on histories of television drama, cinema and children’s media. This blog is based on a section of his chapter about TV Bond in James Bond Uncovered (ed. Jeremy Strong). Some of Jonathan’s work is available free online from his university web page or from his academia.edu page.

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.

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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