Casino royale length

Since before the birth of the year-old Daniel Craig, the new James Bond, we have been waiting for an authentic cinematic version of the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, widely regarded as the best thing Ian Fleming ever wrote. In , there was an hour-length TV adaptation with an American Bond (Barry Nelson) and the great Peter Lorre as the villain, while in , there was a witless, non-canonical comic version of the novel. This was the only Bond book to which the North American producers of the series hadn't acquired the rights, though they only had a share in Thunderball which had started out as a screenplay before Fleming turned it into a novel.

Casino Royale was published in , the year John F Kennedy, Fleming's most famous admirer, became a senator, and the year Playboy was launched by Hugh Hefner, whose hedonistic, man-of-the-world philosophy Bond came to embody. The book was reviewed at the end of that year in Time magazine, along with Raymond Chandler's last significant work, The Long Goodbye, and the reviewer perceptively noted that Fleming had created a brutal, amoral hero more suited to our times and tastes than Chandler's knight-errant private eye, Philip Marlowe.

Essentially, Fleming's Cold War thriller turns on a battle of wits between the licensed-to-kill British agent and the gambling addict Monsieur le Chiffre, a bagman for the Soviet terror organisation Smersh, who is in serious financial trouble. The problem facing the production team was whether to make a straight version of this harsh, serious book, retaining the original setting, or to transform it into a characteristic Bond movie, a smooth, jokey, sexy confection replete with technical gimmickry, extended chases, stunt-work and elaborate setpieces.

In the event, though they follow the original's basic plot pretty closely (and even use Fleming's famous closing line: 'The bitch is dead'), they decided to have it both ways and there is an uncertainty of tone that, as with Dr No, the franchise's modest beginning in , is not unendearing.

First off, Fleming's hard-line Cold War approach has gone, but this has always been the case: the novels' Soviet figures, like Rosa Klebb, invariably become renegades in the films. The setting is now the present and le Chiffre (Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen) is an Albanian-born banker and money launderer for international terrorists. But although bizarre (his left eye bleeds and he's asthmatic), he isn't a megalomaniac super villain who divides his time between a baroque mansion and a futuristic underground headquarters of the sort that made Ken Adam virtually the co-author of the Bond films he designed.

Instead of the usual extravagantly comic pre-credit sequence, there's a tough black-and-white opening that cuts between Bond murdering two men, one in Prague, the other in London, which purport to be his first killings. Where the book is set chiefly in the French resort of Royale-les-Eaux, the film has Bond flitting from Madagascar to the Bahamas, Florida, Montenegro and finally Venice.

There is much less ingenious technology on display (probably because everyone nowadays is equipped with the devices that were once Bond's prerogative) and the violence is more realistic and not accompanied by Monty Norman's famous theme music. There is a lot of blood (in a single evening at the casino in Montenegro, Bond gets through three blood-drenched dress shirts) and, in a truly disturbing torture scene, le Chiffre beats the genitals of the naked, bound Bond with a knotted rope. This seems even worse than the cane carpet-beater used in the novel.

The sex is played down as it was in the 'safe sex' period of Timothy Dalton. One Bond girl pays for her pleasure by being found dead the next morning, but the central romantic relationship that Bond has with Vesper Lynd (the beautiful, dignified Eva Green) is handled with a certain tenderness and sophistication. She's the woman from the Treasury sent with him when he plans to bankrupt le Chiffre in a poker game in Montenegro. On the train through the Balkans, they engage in serious banter about interpreting character and this may well be a homage to those dining car scenes that were once a feature of Hollywood movies, especially perhaps the one with Cary Grant and Eva Marie-Saint in North by Northwest, which Fleming often spoke of as his favourite movie. Switching the game between le Chiffre and Bond to poker is no doubt because most audiences are unacquainted with baccarat, though it could be that it reminded the producers of Burt Bacharach, who wrote the music for the Casino Royale

While the major setpieces go on a little too long, they are expertly mounted. The first is an extended pursuit on a building site in Madagascar that ends up with mass slaughter in an embassy - 'Quite a body count you're building up,' says Judi Dench's acerbic M. The second centres on an attempt to destroy a giant Airbus at Miami airport. The third and most spectacular is the finale on the Grand Canal which starts as peril in Venice and concludes as Venice in peril.

But what of Daniel Craig's Bond? Certainly he's the most athletic and agile since Connery and among current actors, only Tom Cruise does as much running. He's also one of only two Bonds (the other being Timothy Dalton) to hint at an inner life. Connery only acquired this skill in the movies he made for Hitchcock and Sidney Lumet between the Bond pictures. At present, Craig seems happier with the serious aspects of the role and he gets his best laugh when, in a moment of major anxiety, a waiter asks if he wants his vodka martini shaken or stirred. 'Do I look as if I give a damn?' he snaps backs.

Anyway, he'll do. But then I'm one of those people who thought George Lazenby wasn't so bad and that On Her Majesty's Secret Service was one of the best in the series, an opinion shared, I'm happy to say, by Kingsley Amis, Fleming's most discerning admirer.