Would you believe an American James Bond
By JEFFREY GANTZ | November 17, 2006
“CARD SENSE JIMMY BOND”? It’s enough to make Sean Connery barf in his vodka martini.
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Cinema buffs and Bond fans know that the Casino Royale that’s opening in theaters this week isn’t the first screen version of Ian Fleming’s novel. Back in 1967, a spoofy, very-late-British-’60s Casino Royale opened opposite the franchise entry On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, with at least a half-dozen Bonds (Peter Sellers, David Niven, and Woody Allen among them) and almost as many directors. Panned by the critics, it did well enough at the box office. But even that was only the second Casino Royale. The first — and the first time James Bond appeared on screen — was a one-hour version made for the CBS live dramatic anthology Climax that aired Thursday October 21, 1954. James is played by nascent American TV star Barry Nelson, and, yes, this Bond is a Yank. Felix Leiter is on hand, renamed Clarence Leiter, and he’s a Brit. What’s more, our hero is known far and wide as “Card Sense Jimmy Bond.” It’s enough to make Sean Connery barf in his vodka martini. But if you’ve a stronger stomach than Sean, you can see for yourself, since the show, which was thought lost till it turned up in 1981, is available on videotape and DVD. Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, his first James Bond novel, was published by Jonathan Cape in 1953. Hoping to promote Bond in the US, Fleming in 1954 sold a six-month option on the film rights to Gregory Ratoff for $600; Ratoff took the property to CBS, which made the Climax episode, and a year later he bought it outright for an additional $6000. Fleming had reason to regret not asking for more; in 1961, Ratoff’s widow sold the rights to Charles K. Feldman for $75,000. By then, Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman were teaming up to make the “official” Bond films, starting with Dr. No in 1962. Feldman proposed a joint Casino Royale with Broccoli and Saltzman, but negotiations fell through and he wound up making the 1967 parody version on his own. EON Productions didn’t acquire the rights to what would become the Daniel Craig Casino Royale till this century.
But the 1954 version, in what’s now a very washed-out black-and-white, is reasonably faithful to Fleming and no aberration. CBS doubtless figured Fleming’s Normandy wouldn’t register with viewers as a romantic gambling venue, so the setting is Monte Carlo, though you’d hardly guess from looking at the far-from-opulent sets of Hollywood’s Television City. Bond is no 007 but an agent of the CIA (Combined Intelligence Agencies), Leiter (Michael Pate) works for the British Secret Service, and before it’s all over we’ll learn who’s working for the Deuxième Bureau. Le Chiffre (Peter Lorre) is the same Soviet agent we met in the book; instead of Vesper Lynd, however, we get Valerie Mathis (Linda Christian), who used to be in love with James but is now going about on Le Chiffre’s arm and his considerable dime. The plot smacks more of The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca than of Fleming’s hard-boiled, cynical novel, with Lorre as the heavy and Christian doing a passable Ingrid Bergman as a woman who’s not supposed to love James still but does. (There’s a little of Notorious in there too.)
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