Casino Royale aired live on October 21st in 1954 as the third episode of Climax!. Fleming agreed and CBS paid him a marginal sum for the rights to the novel. CBS chose to adapt the first novel for their live anthology television series, Climax!. In 1954, there were only two published novels in the series, Casino Royale and Live and Let Die. No premiered in 1962 and Sean Connery redefined masculinity on the silver screen, James Bond was just a character in the novels of Ian Fleming. It’s a dispiriting thought experiment, but also fascinating, like a television version of an alternate reality.īefore Dr. Imagine a world where James Bond was an American! It might look very similar to the James Bond we see in Climax!. Imagine a world where Eon Productions never formed, where Sean Connery never made the role an icon, and Goldfinger, Moonraker, and Skyfall never happened. The oddness of Casino Royale is that it teases us with an alternate iconography for James Bond. It defamiliarizes one of the most famous stories about one of cinema’s most famous characters. Watching the 1954 Climax! version of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale is a jarring experience.
