James Bond - The Secret History. Sean Egan
it is this man who is responsible for Leiter’s losing an arm and a leg in the same tank – coldly kicks him to a watery grave.
What completes the impression that Live and Let Die would have made more sense than Casino Royale as the opening novel in the franchise is Bond’s skirmishes with Mr Big. Here, Fleming provides the ingredients for many classic Bond showdowns to come: the villain’s menace tempered by ironic politeness (Mr Big addresses the hero as ‘Mister James Bond’), Bond’s calm defiance in the villain’s clutches, the villain’s incongruous eloquence, the notice given Bond of his death that grants him convenient thinking time – all are elements that would become lovably familiar in the Bond canon.
There was interest from an early stage in adapting Bond to the big screen. The UK’s Associated British Pictures and Hollywood’s MCA made enquiries about Casino Royale, but both overtures failed to make any progress because of squabbles over percentages between Cape and Fleming’s US agent, Curtis Brown.
However, a television deal was struck for the property and, on 21 October 1954 at 8.30 p.m. EST, the American television network CBS broadcast an adaptation of Casino Royale as part of its Climax! drama strand.
Excluding commercials, CBS’s adaptation of the first Bond novel ran to just under fifty-two minutes. As with all television of the era it was in monochrome and, as with much televised drama of that time, it was broadcast live. It was directed by William H. Brown and its script came from Antony Lewis and Charles Bennett.
Actor Barry Nelson was not Bond as we know him. Referred to as ‘Jimmy’ (‘007’ is nowhere mentioned), he works for the ‘Combined Intelligence Agency’ in Washington, has a bouffant of swept-back hair and uses his American accent to drawl unperturbed quips (‘Still in one piece, but I wouldn’t know how’). The redrawing of the character’s nationality was typical of an era when there was no reason for the United States to dance to any other nation’s tune, economic, political or cultural.
As in the book, Le Chiffre has a gambling vice that makes him vulnerable and Bond’s objective is to clean him out. He is assisted by Clarence (sic) Leiter, played by Michael Pate, the show’s token Brit.
Unlike in the book, Chiffre (as opposed to the affectation of Le Chiffre) is a real name. Naturally, on fifties prime-time TV, testicle torture to obtain the hidden cheque is out of the question, although the pliers-and-toes substitution has its own wince-making properties, even if not directly seen. A torture-racked Bond manages to shoot Chiffre dead as Chiffre is about to dispatch Valerie Mathis (Linda Christian), the production’s substitute for Vesper Lynd.
Cut to host William Lundigan previewing the next week’s episode. He also, on behalf of the network, salutes the 42nd National Safety Congress currently occurring in Chicago – an act that is the epitome of the sort of clean-cut gushing alien to Fleming, his creation and the rest of the British race.
Despite that grisly all-American kiss-off, Casino Royale is not a half-bad entrée for James Bond to the world of visual drama. Leaving aside the necessary truncation and dilution, the adaptation is fairly faithful and adroit, and actually quite sophisticated in the way it convincingly portrays the procedures and tempo of the baccarat table. Although Bond is not in full tuxedo, his bow tie in the casino scenes even provides a precursor to one of the trademarks of the cinema Bond, as does his snogging the girl as the closing music starts up. While Nelson might be a boringly identikit square-jawed type common to the time, Peter Lorre as Chiffre is indeed as repulsively ‘toad-like’ as Leiter describes him.
Fleming never saw the broadcast, having to content himself with a critique provided by old friend Clare Blanshard. In a video/DVD/Internet-less world, Fleming must have written it off as a shady buck-making little secret that wasn’t likely to contaminate his literary series. If its being forgotten not long after he had banked his $1,000 fee was his desire, he got his wish, at least in his lifetime. The Americanisation of Bond remained merely the stuff of rumour and increasingly fading memories for several decades, giving rise to urban myths such as the one about Lorre getting up after he is killed because he doesn’t realise he’s still in shot. The show was long considered lost when a partial copy surfaced in 1981 followed by other, full, copies, and it has now graduated to commercially available DVDs.
The cultural heavy-handedness of the Casino Royale TV production also attended Bond’s entrée on the American literary scene. Casino Royale was published in hardback by Macmillan in the States in March 1954. However, a paperback was initially passed over in favour of a soft-cover version of the third Bond novel, Moonraker, which appeared in 1955 through Permabooks. It reduced the title to a parenthesised subheading in favour of something one could more imagine coming out of the mouth of Humphrey Bogart than a British government agent: Too Hot To Handle. The text had been tweaked to make it more understandable to non-Britons, ‘lifts’ becoming ‘elevators,’ ‘zebra crossings’ changed to ‘pedestrian crossings’, etc. Whole paragraphs containing material thought inordinately English were excised and there were some explanatory footnotes from Fleming. When Casino Royale did make it into paperback in the States in 1955 via American Popular Library, its title was reduced to a bracketed subtitle beneath a gumshoe-y new name: You Asked for It. On the back, the hero was ‘Jimmy Bond’.
Mercifully, this was the extent of American tampering. The US would, moreover, embrace Bond specifically because of his Englishness. In a short course of time, the success of the Bond books and, especially, movies would be one of the things mainly responsible for making America more open to the virtues of the ‘Briddish’.
In 1954, Fleming sold to producer Gregory Ratoff a $600 option on a movie version of Casino Royale. Ratoff bought full rights for $6,000 in 1955. By the beginning of the following year, Ratoff was announcing that Twentieth Century Fox would distribute an adaptation he planned to start filming in the summer. (It was revealed that Fleming had written a screenplay but that it would not be used.)
A surviving Casino Royale script dating from 1957 is by an unknown hand. Like the CBS adaptation, it’s fairly faithful to the book except for its disdain for the idea of the hero being British: Bond becomes American gangster and poker expert Lucky Fortunato. ‘I did think it was good,’ says Jeremy Duns. However, he adds, ‘It’s a draft script – it’s not filmable. It felt quite old-fashioned. It felt much more like a Sinatra film.’
In what would become a pattern over the following years with putative Bond live-action projects, the Ratoff film failed to materialise.
Novelist Len Deighton – who first met him in 1963 – recalled that for Ian Fleming ‘writing was a challenge and a test of his manly resilience to pain; he made no secret of the fact that he hated it.’
While it may not be the case that by the time of the third Bond book he was already detesting the process, it seems that what had started as a hobby for Fleming was already on the cusp of becoming a resented chore. After he had produced its first draft, he wrote to Cape to tell them that he might already be moving into self-parody. He said that ‘the future of James Bond is going to require far more thought than I have so far devoted to him’ and that the books seemed destined to follow ‘more or less the same pattern, but losing freshness with each volume’. To Fleming’s credit, little or none of this showed in Moonraker, published on 5 April 1955. The book lacks the exotic backdrops and sometimes hectic action of Live and Let Die, but is a smoother read than both that and Casino Royale.
This is despite the fact that there is remarkably little action in Moonraker: a kick up the backside, some mild torture and a high-speed car chase are about the extent of it. We do, though, get a positive landslide of insight into Bond’s private and professional lives.
‘It was only two or three times a year that an assignment came along requiring his particular abilities,’ we are told of 007. The rest of the year he is more like an ‘easy-going senior civil servant’, laboriously reading through the endless dockets and files about anything that the Service thinks he may need to know.
Musing on the fact that the compulsory double-O retirement age is forty-five, Bond is glumly conscious