There’s a scene in which Bond explains the game to his colleague, but it doesn’t help to dispel the tedium of watching the game. It’s a little hard to follow and harder to be engaged in it when it appears to be just a game of pure chance, at least if one is (as I am) unfamiliar with the rules. The baccarat sequence is unfortunately not terribly interesting, despite how important it is.

Special effects are limited to a few gun shots, and action sequences to a few brief fist fights most of the film takes place as the small cast engages in intrigue around the hotel, or as they sit down at the baccarat table. Then the show begins, taking the form of a three-act play. William Lundigan, the host of Climax!, provides a brief intro, talking about the dangers of spying and the risks of gambling. As the show was performed and broadcast live - and had a run time of just under an hour - the format and the story are affected by the medium. The fateful duel will take place at the baccarat table.

James Bond is at the casino on assignment a Soviet agent known as Le Chiffre (among similar code names) is there trying to earn back a small fortune he has lost before his supervisors kill him over it, and Bond is there to prevent him from winning it back.

The story in Casino Royale is fairly simple. “No, Mister Bond, I expect you to bathe you’re a bit ripe.” Watching this film is an interesting experience, as even somebody whose knowledge of James Bond mostly comes from pop-culture references will recognize this as being very different from the standards of the series. 1954’s Casino Royale was a live performance on the anthology series Climax! such a thing could easily have been lost, but fortunately it was preserved, and MGM - knowing full well that their fans could be obsessive - included it as a bonus feature on the DVD for the similarly non-canonical 1967 parody version of Casino Royale. The reviews will come sporadically throughout the year (and possibly into next year), but they start today with a decidedly odd entry in the series.ĭue to some of the little quirks of the property rights, the very first portrayal of James Bond is actually a non-canonical entry. I resolved at the time to start remedying this lack, starting in 2013, by going through all the entries in the series in chronological order - even the few I’ve seen before, even the non-canonical entries - so as to have a proper perspective on the growth and development of the series. A few months back, I revealed some movie franchises I’ve mostly overlooked among them, the James Bond franchise, of which I’d seen only two films - and only one of them a canonical entry.

Cast of 1954 movie casino