Alicia I love this movie so much

Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Dorathen Better Late Then Never

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Zbigniew_Krycsiwiki Early TV movie adaptation of 'Casino Royale' has the low key feeling of the original novel. The low budget both helps the movie and hinders it: it gives it the grittier look that some of the Bond novels have, and also makes it look slightly like a film noir, but also limits it in term of sets and props and lighting (which is often times visible over the actors' heads.) The short run time is also a mixed bag: the film doesn't overstay its welcome, and follows the book fairly closely, (the original novel was so short that it seems almost like a pamphlet, rather than a full length novel) but it doesn't give much opportunity to flesh out the characters at all.Peter Lorre is good as LeChiffre, and Michael Pate as Leiter (or "Letter" as he's listed in the end credits) is very likable, and perhaps would have made a better choice to play Bond here, but Barry Nelson was mediocre. If he would have been more familiar with the character and not been doing a Humphrey Bogart impersonation, he might have been good. He does fairly well when he's intensely grilling Valerie Mathis about the microphone LeChiffre planted in Bond's room, and he's adequate in the casino sequences, but falls flat during the climactic scenes.This TV-movie is also marred by the fact that the love interest between Bond and the lead girl is almost completely overlooked here, as is Bond's contemplation of resignation and his subsequent double-cross by the girl; basically the entire fourth(!) act of the novel was omitted here. Maybe if it would have had a longer running time, and if the censors would have allowed it, they could have fleshed out some of these omitted story elements? One of the villain's henchmen has a cane which doubles as a gun, which is a good touch; this particular scene follows the book closely, and is one of the better scenes in this film.

Bill Slocum It was the first time we heard the distinctive opening theme music...of a timpani fanfare. It was the first time we saw him order...a Scotch and water. The first time we heard a woman moan: "Oh...Jimmy."Um, okay, so there were still a few kinks to work out. But it was October, 1954, just one year after Ian Fleming's first novel was published. So what if James Bond didn't hit the ground running? To see the man, okay, played by Norwegian-American Barry Nelson, offer a casual quip after a brush with death, tuxedo unruffled, will stir the heart of any true Bondophile.Bond (Nelson) is on the case for Combined Intelligence. His mission: Break the bank on Le Chiffre (Peter Lorre), a top Soviet operative in France. To do so, he needs to beat Le Chiffre at baccarat, and not lose his head in the process when his old flame Valerie Mathis (Linda Christian) is threatened with death.I had to give this TV movie a ranking here in order to review it, though it's no fair using the same metric as with the theatrical Bonds. There was no "Take 2" for the cast of 1954's "Casino Royale", working live and without a net. Shadows are cast over actors' faces. A pasty, bloated Lorre stumbles over many of his lines. Nelson crams his shoulder into a lampshade. Someone can be overheard coughing behind the camera during a tense interrogation scene.Nelson, an amiably solid journeyman actor, comports himself well under the circumstances. Once you get used to his accent and flattop haircut, a slight twitchiness in his manner, and people calling him "Card Sense Jimmy Bond", he's easy and interesting to watch, managing to look both cool and concerned while still pulling off a nice Roger Moore-ish quip or two."So it was you those men were shooting at! Why?""Maybe they needed the practice."Christian is a terrific inaugural Bond girl, even if the flat black-and-white camera image does little justice to her face and form. Lorre, oddly, is the weak sister in this acting trio, but despite some obvious discomfort he does use his famous screen presence to some good effect, especially in a card-table sequence which is the best part of this short movie where he smirks and glowers to cold effect.There's also a surprisingly gritty torture sequence at the end, with the bad guys using a pair of pliers on Bond's toes. The producers of "Climax!" and director William H. Brown couldn't copy the Fleming novel too closely; it had Bond getting punished in a more tender part of his anatomy. But they do get much of the nub of the story, not a bad feat considering the time limit and production code.The movie I saw ran just 48 minutes. Apparently there was more to the ending that I missed, though it seemed to have run its course well enough. The last line in my version has Bond saying "Call the police". I don't think you'll hear Bond say that in any of his other movies.Despite or because of such incongruities, "Casino Royale" is a fascinating glimpse at giving birth to a 1960s icon a decade too soon. As a spy story, it only works in fits and starts, but what matters is its place as the somewhat-neglected beginning of a screen legend.

winner55 A lot has to be forgiven here. First, this is a recording of a live performance - when something went wrong, they were stuck with it; and since this is cheaply made, they had little rehearsal time, so a quite a number of things go wrong. Secondly, the surviving recording is incomplete and not very good. Third, the producers of the show were trying to make the British Ian Fleming's break-out novel accessible to American audiences only familiar with American espionage B-movies, a '50s genre that has not gotten preserved, so most people now will not be familiar with the drab back-alley feel of this show drawn from that genre. And that the producers felt the need to go this route shows that they themselves really had little understanding of where Fleming was coming from - which was really Somerset Maugham's "Ashenden, or the British Agent," filmed in the early '30s by Alfred Hitchcock. And really, prime Hitchcock is the director Fleming would have had in mind while writing this book. But despite his popularity, Hitchcock himself remained an anomaly in Hollywood throughout the '50s. His ability to shock audiences was well known, but his capacity for sophisticated wit and subtle irony were not easy for most Americans to grasp at the time.So too Fleming's subversive sense of what at last became known as the "anti-hero" - a man as ruthless as his enemies, able to seduce and destroy women with a glance, then quietly order breakfast in a luxury hotel as if nothing happened. For Fleming, this was a means of preserving the "hard-boiled" detective tradition while at the same time raising uncomfortable questions about what it meant to live comfortably middle-class in cold-war England. Never pointed enough to threaten middle-class readers, but enough to raise their anxiety level to the point of continued interest in the James Bond series.There's none of that here - the romance is played straight, and the only sophistication comes in the gambling scene. The rest bulls through or stumbles along as one might expect from an American genre thriller of the time.The major plus factors here are the performances. Most of the cast is miscast, but performs energetically despite that; Peter Lorre performs very weakly, but he happens to be perfectly cast - he is the definitive Le Chiffre! That surprising discovery is reason enough to find this show and give it a view, at least for Bond aficionados.

Jon Washbrook This film is a bit of an oddity. It was a live TV play, made a decade before Sean Connery appeared in Dr No. It's nothing like the Bond films we all know and love - anyone expecting action set-pieces will be disappointed as the whole play/film takes place on 2 sets.THE GOOD POINTS: 1. A rare little gem, bringing James Bond to the screen for the first time. 2. One of the closest adaptations of Ian Fleming's works. 3. Peter Lorre - very good villain.THE BAD POINTS: 1. Renaming James Bond as "Card-Sense Jimmy Bond". Oh. My. God. 2. Making Bond a Yank. Americans seem to have this need to take credit away from the Brits for everything (Don't even get me started on U-571). 3. They made Felix Leiter a Brit and renamed him Clarence. Sigh...Anyway, gripes aside it IS worth seeking out if you're a fan. It's available in 2 versions as far as I am aware. The version I have is about an hour long, but there are rumours of a longer version which continues from where the other left off in which the villain returns from the dead to carry on the fight a bit more.