The Adventures of Jimmy Bond

We’ve covered the EON era of James BondThe world's most famous secret agent, James Bond has starred not only in dozens of books but also one of the most famous, and certainly the longest running, film franchises of all time. quite extensively on the site. They controlled the license for nearly all of the James Bond franchise since 1962, releasing twenty-five films under their watch (with Amazon only recently taking over stewardship of the franchise) along with countless licensed video game tie-ins. There are only a few very rare exceptions to this, with 1983’s Never Say Never Again coming from the fact that Kevin McClory (who produced that film) co-writing parts of story for the originating novel, Thunderball, which gave him some rights to the story, characters, and associated materials (right up until he lost in court and the rights reverted back to EON).

The other exception was 1967’s Casino Royale, a comedic take on the James Bond material. This film could happen because producer Charles K. Feldman purchased the rights to the 1953 novel Casino Royale in 1960, before EON’s producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman had a chance to snatch up the rights to the rest of the franchise. And while that film is not generally well loved, it does illustrate that the various bits and pieces of the franchise were out there, for people to grab up as they could, if they knew where to look.

Of course, Casino Royale’s rights were floating around because of an even earlier adaptation. That one is probably the least well known, and certainly was the hardest to find for the longest time. It was part of Climax!, an American anthology series that ran for 166 episodes from 1954 to 1958. Most episodes were presented in color, with their scripts performed live on air. And right there, in its first season, sits the third episode, “Casino Royale”, a loose adaptation of Ian Flemming’s novels long before anyone took a crack at adapting the Bond character.

At the time these live episodes were performed once and then lost in the archives, kept only as black-and-white kinescope transfers before eventually getting destroyed. “Casino Royale” was one such episode that was presumed lost to time until, in 1981, a copy was discovered. Later efforts to restore the footage have been done, and now a fairly clean and watchable copy can be found on YouTube, free for all due to the fact that the copyright on the episode has long since expired. And so we can watch this episode and see just how well Climax! acquits itself as the earliest known adaptation of James Bond.

And the short answer is pretty well, if you allow for a fair bit of strangeness owing to how the story is adapted. Climax! episodes are, in effect, live stage plays. You get a couple of connected sets, actors doing their performances live, and any flubs or errors that occur have to be taken into account and worked around. Watching a Climax! episode is, in effect, watching that live stage play, presented to you with minimal fuss outside a couple of camera setups to take into account all the action. In effect that means that the action of “Casino Royale” has to take place across just a couple of sets – the main casino floor and a hotel room setup – distilling the whole of the story down to what feels like a bottle episode.

That actually feels less weird, though, than the other major change the story makes; in the Climax! episode, the hero is now Jimmy Bond (Barry Nelson), CIA agent, and he works with a fellow contact from British Intelligence, Clarence Leiter (Michael Pate). Functionally the show flips the two nationalities of the characters, which is simple enough in the script but actually feels quite strange when you’re used to James being British and Felix/Clarence being American. Likely this was done so American audiences would feel comfortable rooting for an American hero, but all these years later it’s just such an oddity for the franchise.

Still, the basic action plays out about how you’d expect. Jimmy Bond (Nelson) shows up at the casino with a specific mission: take on a Soviet asset named Le Chiffre (Peter Lorre) in a game of baccarat. The goal is to clear out Le Chiffre, who is playing with money given to him by his handlers, taking all his money so Le Chiffre is no longer valuable to the Soviets. This, in turn, would likely cause his “retirement”, leaving one less goon out there to cause problems for allied intelligence.

Things get messy, though, when Jimmy’s former lover, Valerie Mathis (Linda Christian), arrives on the scene. Jimmy assumes she’s an asset working for Le Chiffre and, despite her protestations, Jimmy refuses to let her get close. She’s the one, though, that gives Jimmy enough money to win the game against Le Chiffre, ensuring the criminal’s bankruptcy. But Jimmy still has to get out of the hotel, with the money, alive, ideally with Valerie as well. And when she goes missing after the final cards are played, Jimmy suspects Le Chiffre has her, which puts all of their lives in peril…

The Climax! version of “Casino Royale” is competent, if not exceptional. It does cover many the basic beats of the story (which you can also see in the later, 2006 version of Casino Royale) but it has to work hard to deal with the fact that this is, functionally, a stage play version of the events, so many of the hallmarks you’d expect from a James Bond story, most specifically the globetrotting to various locales, is completely scrapped. We get one location, and not even a particularly fancy one (owing to the limitations of a television episode budget), and not much action. This is James Bond stripped down to its basic story.

With that said, the episode does get through the story well enough. While the acting feels a little stiff in places, and the episode has to pause more than once to explain baccarat to its American audience (who likely had never played the game before), it does build well once the game is on. The final act, which culminates in a tense standoff in Bond’s hotel room, feels particularly well done, letting all the tensions of the episode build and boil over. This last act feels like a proper James Bond story, even if it does take forty minutes or so to get there.

But then I think we have to be somewhat forgiving considering the era this was made and the format it was released in. I credit the producers of Climax! for even trying to take a James Bond novel and convert it into a single location episode. That couldn’t have been easy to pull off, and the episode, for all its flaws, does a solid job with the task at hand. You could certainly get a worse version of this story (and we did, in 1967).

With that said, I doubt many people outside of true completionists (and those, like me, that are documenting all they can about the franchise) will really care about this episode. It’s more of a curiosity than a real, solid adaptation. It tries very hard, but better, more fleshed out versions of Bond’s adventure would come along soon enough, and that franchise is still going to this day. Anyone wanting a good fix of James Bond has plenty else to watch instead. The Climax! episode wasn’t bad for its time, but it absolutely was made irrelevant once EON’s film series started up.