Casino Royale

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Casino Royale
2006 UK/Czech Republic/USA/Germany/Bahamas
Directed by Martin Campbell
EON Blu Ray Region A/B/C

Well I always feel a little bit conflicted whenever I watch this film.

It is, of course, the third time that Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale has been adapted - once on TV in 1954 and then again for a big screen spoof version in 1967. This 2006 version, the first to be produced by EON, is the one that troubles me the most because, while it’s certainly a very good film, for me it just doesn’t quite live up to being “a James Bond film” and, given that it’s got a truly delightful script, I find myself even more disappointed by it.

So let’s put the positives up there first... all the actors are great in it, even Daniel Craig (yeah, I’ll get to him in a minute) and the dialogue is pretty good. As are the sets, costumes, lighting, editing... frankly, this movie works really well in a lot of ways. But there are also a lot of things which drag it down to an un-Bondian level too.

Okay, so my biggest disappointment is Daniel Craig and that’s a really unfair thing to say, to be honest, because he’s a fantastic actor and he does really well with the script he’s given. In fact, he couldn’t have done any better... it’s a brilliant performance. However, some roles require the actors to look the part too and Craig doesn’t look like James Bond in any way shape of form. His hair colour is way too light for Bond, for starters. Why the heck didn’t the producers just insist he dye it for the role? I know it’s just a colour but, you know, every little helps. Secondly, I know he pumped up for the part but, honestly, this guy looks like he’s built like a rugby player... and that just seems wrong. I mean, yeah, he absolutely looks like he could handle the situations thrown at him... just not as Bond. He looks too much like a thug and, yes, while I can freely admit, and have argued the point in the past, that Bond is really just a government employed thug... he’s never really looked like one. To be fair to the writers, this is kinda addressed in the script when Judy Dench calls him a blunt instrument and that’s exactly what Bond is... but visually maybe he shouldn’t be.

Now I’m really not having a go at Craig. I even think he may be able to play, not just a brilliant action hero as he does here... but also a good James Bond. But the approach is wrong in this, I think. Not necessarily his fault. For all I know it’s the producers’ doing. And, yeah, I know I’m very much in a minority on this one. I think Craig is absolutely great in this movie... but he’s not inhabiting Bond, just playing a part. And to me that makes Craig as much of an inappropriate choice for the role of Ian Fleming’s well loved character as, oh, I don’t know, right off the top of my head...? Roger Moore. Well, okay, maybe not quite as silly a choice as Roger Moore but, certainly, in the same ball park. He’s definitely my second least favourite of the EON actors in the role... and I really like this guy. So that’s really annoying.

The other big problem I’ve got is that it’s purporting to be an adaptation of the original novel but it misses on so many levels. Now it gets a couple of things right, to be sure. The torture scene, albeit minus the tennis racket, is the most accurate version (although the fifties TV version of a different torture scene seemed somehow more horrific) and there is at least some kind of card game in it. And Bond falls in love. So there you go... that’s three things they got right.

However, they added loads of action scenes, which I don’t blame them for, and it isn’t the first time, but it makes for an adaptation which hits the wrong tone for the book (actually, it’s a weak novel compared to the next couple of novels in the series but, even so, if you state your intention to put Casino Royale up on the screen, then you should maybe make it as sedate as the novel, surely?).

A really big knock, for me, is that they replace Bond’s regular card game, Baccarat Chemin De Fer, with bloody Texas Hold ‘Em Poker. Honestly? How insulting to the character and spirit of Bond can you get? Really stupid. They even run action scenes between the card games. Casino Royale was all about the card game. That was the whole intrigue of the thing.

So for all this, although a blonde American Bond played by Barry Nelson opposite a British “Clarence” Leiter (not Felix Leiter as in the book and in this adaptation here) is way off base, the 1954 version scores big time over this one as being, so far, the straightest adaptation of Casino Royale around. It’s a target this production couldn’t beat and, frankly, it didn’t even look like they were trying to.

One almost Bondian thing, and equally irritating in its “close but no cigar” prowess, is the wonderful composer David Arnold’s score for the movie. The title song really isn’t good but at least it’s on the right track and it has a strong melody line to pilfer, which Arnold enthusiastically utilises in the score. It’s really got some big Barry Bond statements in there but, unbelievably, it’s sadly lacking the full statement of Monty Norman’s original Bond theme until right as the end credits are rolling. Now I know this movie was being seen as a reboot and the theory was that the character earns the theme throughout the movie (there are a couple of small instances where the baseline, at least, is referred to for a short time) but what this actually means is that you have a non-Bond score on something that is already failing to convince me it’s a James Bond film... so this really doesn’t help matters. The gun barrel prelude doesn’t, for the first time since the series started, make it’s traditional appearance before the opening sequence, and this is just another nail in the coffin as far as I’m concerned (one which has been repeated in the series recently and with similar failure).

So there you have it. Great sequences of suspense, intrigue and action. Great actors and actresses (Eve Green’s turn as Vesper is astonishingly good) too. But, for all this, a truly un-Bondian non-event. I wasn’t too impressed by this effort, to be sure but... worse was to come...

EON James Bond Movie Reviews on NUTS4R2

Dr. No

From Russia With Love

Goldfinger

Thunderball

You Only Live Twice  

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Diamonds Are Forever

Live And Let Die

The Man With The Golden Gun  

The Spy Who Loved Me

Moonraker

For Your Eyes Only

Octopussy

A View To A Kill 

The LIving Daylights 

Licence To Kill  

GoldenEye

Tomorrow Never Dies

The World Is Not Enough  

Die Another Day 

Casino Royale

Quantum Of Solace

Skyfall
S.P.E.C.T.R.E

The Music Of James Bond

On Her Majesty's 
Secret Score Vice

The Music Of James Bond
by Jon Burlingame
Oxford University Press 
ISBN: 978-0199863303

I want to point out, up front, that Jon Burlingame’s new book, The Music of James Bond, is an invaluable addition to the bookshelves of any movie score lovers home. There are some negative things I’ve got to say about it but these in no way belittle the fact that this is pretty much an essential purchase if you are interested in the Bond phenomenon and the scores that go with it.

That being said, I did find the writer a little less interested, in most of the chapters, in concentrating on the actual scores to the films themselves and the way they were created and developed, and more interested in the various stories around the genesis and the recording of the actual Bond songs themselves which, although its true they sometimes (not always) provide thematic material for the scores to riff on, are for me the least interesting aspect of a Bond score. Especially now that we have two Bond CD’s, the recent Casino Royale remake and Skyfall, which didn’t even see fit to include the song on the album of the film.

There are some lengthy descriptions of the musical highlights of the film with time references which are displayed in a bottom, grayed out bar on many of the pages, but I found this to be really just place marker kind of stuff and, for the most part, nothing really meaty about the underscore itself. The gray bars also are a bad layout choice in this particular book because both the main text and the grayed out box text are running simultaneously and not ending on the same pages... just continuing over to the next page. So you need to either keep darting backwards and forwards to get the bits you missed, or make a conscious decision to just read one or the other over a chapter and then go back and read all the stuff you missed. Personally, I just see this as bad design and found it to be the one really big weakness of the book.

Another disappointment is the fact that the first Bond production, the 1954 version of Casino Royale, is barely mentioned and only then when it comes to talking about the 1967 version. This ruffled me the wrong way because the 1954 Climax version from TV, quite apart from being the straightest adaptation of the novel (with some obvious and reluctant caveats), pretty much marks the first music for a James Bond adventure. Yeah, okay, the cues used in this were almost certainly library cues tracked in to the production but, even so, I wanted to know who wrote them and what was on the producers’ minds when they chose certain “needle drops”. Unfortunately, this book doesn’t cover this.

It does, however, cover two of the non-EON Bond scores, the aforementioned 1967 version of Casino Royale and the Thunderball remake Never Say Never Again. But again, this book is not called The Music of the James Bond Movies... it’s called The Music Of James Bond and I was a bit underwhelmed with the fact that only the character’s cinematic adventures have been earmarked here for musical exploration when there are also TV spin offs and video games which might have also yielded rich results.

I also found myself surprised that, for what is supposedly a fairly specialist subject area, I actually had been able to glean a lot (95% maybe) of what was gathered here over the years from other sources... I really didn’t think I knew much, or anything, about the subject when I started the book, but as I went through I realised that I did... or at least knew as much as the writer was willing to share anyway (strikes me there are some possible untold stories lurking between the lines of this book which might have opened various cans of legal worms if Mr. Burlingame had told them... but that’s just conjecture on my part).

However, now that I’ve said my piece there, I should probably point out that the information about the Bond songs and scores that is available in this book, is expertly assembled and the writer conveys it all in a chatty, easy to read style which, in some ways, makes you feel like you’re visiting with old friends or relatives who trot out the same but always entertaining stories time after time. And all the good ones you expect are all in here. You know the ones...

The one where Shirley Bassey is singing Goldfinger but her lungs are too constricted to hold the notes so take after take she sheds more clothes until she finally gets it right and is topless in the recording booth. Or the one where Tom Jones almost passes out from holding that high note at the end of Thunderball. Or the one where Nancy Sinatra can’t quite get the hang of it so John Barry has to build her vocal track up from a gazillion little snippets to get You Only Live Twice in a useable state. These little well known comfort stories are all here for your perusal and, importantly, they are all in one place and easily findable on a film by film basis.

Perhaps written for the Bond music novice, rather than for the people who have travelled the road of these stories in little, bite sized chunks over the years, Jon Burlingame’s The Music Of James Bond is, as I said when I started this short review, an invaluable guide to all the main stories on the music of the Bond phenomenon over the years. It’s not technically alienating in its use of the descriptions either, so even “musically illiterate” readers like myself will be able to pick up this book and give it a go. Definitely a big recommend for me and certainly something I’d expect to come across in any soundtrack lovers home.