Casino Royale!

I write these Bond reviews with the expectation that everyone has seen all the movies, if not read the all the books. So, tread as carefully as it seems prudent. 

Like most men of my generation, I grew up with the James Bond movies. Every few years, we'd get another action epic featuring Ian Fleming's super-spy. But as familiar as I am with the various iterations of the movie Bond, I am less familiar with the original James Bond novels by Ian Fleming which touched off the fantastically successful series of films as well a boom of spy-related material in books, comics, and television. 

Casino Royale I have read a few times and this time it didn't disappoint. It's a rapid read introducing most of the key Bond tropes. The gambling is front and center of course as Bond attempts to block a "Redlands" (Soviets specifically SMERSH) agent from getting hold of some needed cash to keep him in good graces with his iron-willed managers. The details of chemin de fer, the game they play bore me a bit, but the notion of two foes battling over the cards does not. The actual game goes on for several chapters. The torture Bond endures is pretty basic and powerful, and indicative of the almost sadistic quality of the early Fleming books.

Needless to say, Bond's infamous attitude towards women is well on display, and speaks to the fundamentally barbaric nature of this man who functions so well at times in the precise world of manners. He is after all a confirmed cold-blooded murderer, or he'd not have a "00" designation. There are times when the book reads like a romance, and a few pages are actively erotic. But a fatal tragedy undermines the potential happiness. 

Casino Royale was published in 1953 and quickly adapted to television in a live hour-long episode of the series Climax. The show features Barry Nelson as Jimmy Bond an Americanized version of Fleming's hero. He's up against La Chiffre again, who is played by the great Peter Lorre. Linda Christian is the obligatory Bond girl in this brief effort that never leaves the titular casino. It's a curiosity and you can check it out for yourself at this YouTube link which offers up a small glimpse. 

In the now quite deep James Bond canon, the offbeat 1967 Casino Royale is a novelty of the highest order. If you like your movie adventures shaken with absurdity and not stirred by actual real suspense, then this might be the Bond movie for you. I enjoy it well enough, but watching it is always more of an act of beholding a pop-art piece than falling into the throes of a sweeping spy flick. The story just doesn't cling together in any way which might allow a viewer to get swept away, the movie always brings you up short and reminds you that all of the farce which is writhing on the screen is not for a moment intended to elevate your endorphins, save for the bits which feature some beautiful dames, and the movie does that splendidly.

For those who might not know what this particular Casino Royale is, let me try to explain. The world is threatened, and all of the usual spies have been taken off the board because they have become overly consumed with sexual antics. The leaders of the spy world convene to bring back the original James Bond (David Niven) who is quite prudish and effete, the very opposite of the classic manly Bond type. He investigates the near immediate demise of the spy leaders and gets caught up in an absurd scheme to stop him which involves pretty girls (who are led by Deborah Kerr) and pheasants. He lives. Then we find out that there are other "James Bonds" in the world and  we end up with Peter Sellers as a James Bond who is trying to bring down Le Chiffre (Orson Welles) in a card game with the help of Vesper Lynd (a gorgeous Ursula Andress) and meanwhile the love Matta Bond (Joanna Pettit -the daughter of Niven's Bond and Matta Hari) investigates behind Soviet lines in Germany, and Jimmy Bond (Woody Allen) is on the run in a South American country. Along the way we meet Moneypenny (the ravishing Barbare Bouchet) and someone called the Detainer (the lovely Daliah Lavi) and others. Add in cameos by John Huston, Charles Boyer, William Holden, and George Raft and you get the idea. Actually, it all makes much less sense than the paragraph I just wrote.

The movie had at least four directors and took literally years to create. It cost a fortune as producer Charles K. Feldman lavished money and time on the project. Peter Sellers apparently cracked up during the film and was kicked off, which was what inspired the creators to make it into the exotic romp it is. The finale is an event which evokes the later work of Mel Brooks. Casino Royale ain't really a good movie and it ain't a bad one. But it is a curiosity, a museum piece from an era when spies were all the rage, and movies were spectacles. This one is all of that. I used to dislike this movie for what it wasn't, but now I enjoy it for what it is. That's one way.

The Casino Royale of 2006 was nothing less than a rebirth. The change of Bonds from the excellent Pierce Brosnan, who despite some criticism was still not too old to play Bond a few more times, was at best a sketchy move by the producers. I was not happy to hear that an actor I knew mostly from his sidekick role in a Tomb Raider movie was the new guy. He seemed at first too short for the role and lacked that certain chemistry needed for the incredibly demanding role. I was dead wrong.

He might well be too short, but that doesn't matter as Daniel Craig has returned to the violent roots of Ian Fleming's highly successful character and has given us a Bond who is more man than superman.  He's no longer just someone to root for, he is someone we can root alongside with, a man who is dark and dangerous and familiar.

In Casino Royale we meet the new Bond, in a story which turns out to be his secret origin. We see him become a double "O" agent, and we seem increasingly hardened by the killing he is required to do. Where has death-dealing has always been the calling card of all the men who have been called Bond, this one seems less aloof and more emotionally vulnerable, though no less ready to end an enemy's life. Hard-bitten cruelty is part of the character from the very beginning in Fleming's pages, and you find them in Sean Connery's early portrayals. But even by the end of his initial run, the darker aspects of Bond's character had been replaced by over-reliance on charm, wit, and gimmicks. The gritty willingness to kill a dangerous man with a simple direct gunshot, so brutally demonstrated in Dr. No, is almost never repeated in the series.

In Casino Royale that brutal man is back and not only willing to kill, he is willing to break a sweat doing it. That change, the decision to show Bond as a man with deficiencies and doubts is what makes this new Bond so compelling. And while we know that Bond will never die, we suddenly feel that he thinks he could, and that's a game-changer on how to involve yourself with the narrative. By the end of this story, he is a hard edge of an agent, fully Bond, but with motives and plans apart from what "M" might design for him.

James Bond Returns in Live or Let Die. 

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