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.
