It’s not clear whether it was the decision of screenwriters Ellis and Bennett or that of producer Bretaigne Windust to change the names and backgrounds of the characters for American television, or to give the main character the ridiculous nickname “ Card Sense Jimmy Bond.” When Casino Royale was broadcast live in 1954, the adventures of James Bond were still largely unknown in the United States, so no one paid much attention to the changes in the story. The story nonetheless conveys a sense of Fleming’s style and that of the Bond films to come: the high-stakes gambling, the larger-than-life villain, the beautiful woman ( Linda Christian as beautiful double agent Valerie Mathis, the film’s take on the novel’s Deuxième Bureau agent Rene Mathis), and the loyal friend-in this case, Michael Pate as British agent Clarence Leiter, the movie’s version of CIA agent Felix Leiter. Brown from a script by Antony Ellis and Charles Bennett.

The battlefield: a Monte Carlo baccarat table.ĬBS purchased the television rights to Fleming’s novel for $1,000, and the result was this terribly dated and low-key effort, directed by William H. Technically the first Bond movie, Casino Royale is a small-scale, studio-bound thriller that introduces James Bond ( Barry Nelson) as an American agent up against a Russian master spy named Le Chiffre ( Peter Lorre).

★★: TV adaptation of Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, which aired at 8:30 pm EST on Thursday, October 21, 1954, as the third live one-hour episode of CBS’s Climax Mystery Theater anthology series.

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