Rogue Royale
This article is part of the free ebook Need to Know, which can be read on this website or downloaded here.
Author’s Note
In this short book I look at some early attempts to film Ian Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale, and in particular the surviving material by screenwriter Ben Hecht. Some of this research featured in an article I wrote for the Sunday Telegraph in March 2011 and two articles I published on my website in August 2010, but the majority of what you’re about to read is previously unpublished. I hope you enjoy it.
Jeremy Duns
Mariehamn, Åland, September 2013
In 2006, audiences around the world flocked to see Daniel Craig play James Bond for the first time, in an adaptation of Ian Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale. The film was a commercial and critical triumph, but it wasn’t the first attempt to adapt the novel—in fact, it was the third, and the book had had a rocky journey at the hands of screenwriters and producers over several decades.
Fleming had started writing the story in January 1952, by his own account to counter his ‘hysterical alarm at getting married at the age of forty-three’[1]. He wrote the book at his holiday home in Jamaica, inspired by some of his own experiences and memories of the Second World War. The resulting short novel was a heady brew of espionage, gambling and betrayal in northern France that deftly merged the traditions of vintage British thrillers with the more brutal style of hardboiled American writers such as Dashiell Hammett. Published in 1953, it was well-reviewed in Britain, but failed to become a bestseller. Fleming nevertheless had high hopes that James Bond would become a success, either through his books or through screen adaptations of them.
He didn’t have to wait too long for the latter to appear. The first adaptation of Casino Royale was a one-hour play performed live on American television in October 1954: Barry Nelson starred as crew-cut American secret agent Jimmy ‘Card Sense’ Bond, on a mission to defeat the villainous Le Chiffre, played by Peter Lorre, in a high-stakes baccarat game. Due to the format, this was a much-simplified and stagey version of Fleming’s novel, with little of its extravagance or excitement. The book features a wince-inducing scene in which Le Chiffre, desperate to discover where Bond has hidden a cheque for 40 million francs that he needs to save his life, ties Bond naked to a cane chair with a cut out seat and proceeds to torture him by thrashing his testicles with a carpet-beater. This clearly couldn’t be shown on television in 1954, so instead Bond was shown being placed fully clothed in a bathtub and viewers watched him howl with pain as, off-screen, Le Chiffre’s men attacked his toenails with pliers.
Other changes included transforming the character of Felix Leiter, an American agent in the novel, into Clarence Leiter, a horsey British agent who at times seems more sophisticated than Bond. The novel’s characters of Vesper Lynd and René Mathis were combined to form Valerie Mathis, a French agent, and the major plot twist of the novel, that Vesper is a traitor, was dropped.
To Fleming’s disappointment, CBS’s adaptation of Casino Royale came and went with little fanfare: however, other plans to film the novel were already afoot. A week before CBS had bought the television rights to Casino Royale, Gregory Ratoff bought a six-month film option on the novel, and in 1955 he bought the rights outright.
An extravagant bear of a man who had fled Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ratoff was a well-known actor, producer and director—he had directed Ingrid Bergman’s first Hollywood film, Intermezzo, in 1939. He was also a close friend and confidant of two of Hollywood’s most powerful men, Darryl F. Zanuck of Twentieth Century-Fox, and Charles K. Feldman, the playboy super-agent of Famous Artists who represented Marilyn Monroe, Gary Cooper, Richard Burton and Lauren Bacall. Feldman was also a producer, and had already had huge success with A Streetcar Named Desire and The Seven Year Itch.
Shortly after buying the rights to Casino Royale, Ratoff set off on a tour of Europe, ostensibly to seek out locations. ‘In fact, he was gambling,’ says Lorenzo Semple Jr.[2] Now a well-established scriptwriter, having co-written Papillon, The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor and, most relevantly, Never Say Never Again, Semple was then an unknown in his early twenties: Ratoff had scooped him up as a promising new talent and invited him along for the trip.
‘Charlie Feldman and Darryl Zanuck were helping Gregory out by sending him money, as they did for years,’ Semple says. ‘He was a friend and someone they liked playing poker with, and Gregory knew where all the bodies were buried. But it all had to be above board—had to be for work. So there had to be a script we were working on.’
Semple says he was essentially acting as Ratoff’s ‘slave’—a term he uses without rancour—working on a variety of scripts for him as well as performing errands and writing letters on his behalf. Semple says that although Ratoff was genuinely interested in filming Casino Royale, he also used it as a pretext to travel around Europe, ostensibly researching locations but mainly gambling with funds from Feldman.
‘We were going around everywhere,’ Semple says, ‘Paris, Lisbon, Estoril.’ Ratoff was an eccentric master. In Estoril, he discovered that Intermezzo was playing and he and Semple went to see it. In the middle of the showing, Ratoff suddenly leaped out of his seat and pointed at one of the actors, shouting out that he was dead. ‘Everyone thought he was crazy,’ says Semple, ‘some crazy guy in the audience.’
But when he wasn’t gambling or interrupting film screenings, Ratoff was thinking about Casino Royale. One wild idea he mentioned was to have Bond played by Susan Hayward, but Semple says ‘that was just Gregory talking’[3]. He was also putting decidedly more serious wheels in motion. In January 1956, the New York Times reported that Ratoff had formed an independent production company, Maribar, which he had set up in partnership with Michael Garrison, an actor-turned-agent who would go on to create the TV series The Wild Wild West. The article mentioned that Maribar was working on two projects: an adaptation of Sylvia Regan’s 1953 play The Fifth Season, which Ratoff had directed on Broadway, and Casino Royale:
‘The company also has acquired rights to “Casino Royale”, a novel by Ian Fleming, and the plan is to film it in CinemaScope and color this summer in England, Estoril in Spain and San Remo. Twentieth Century-Fox is slated to release this feature, too.
Although the author has written an adaptation, Mr Ratoff, who is now in Paris, is negotiating with a “noted scenarist, as well as with two well-known stars to play the leads,” Mr Garrison said. “Casino Royale”, he explained, “may be described as a World War II spy story, set partially in the gambling casino of the title and dealing with a search for stolen Government secrets which take the principals through such colorful places as Estoril and San Remo.”’[4]
It seems that, notions of gender-swapping 007 notwithstanding, 10 months after he had bought the rights to Casino Royale Ratoff was still serious enough about filming it to be announcing the project in the New York Times, and had even secured an agreement from Twentieth-Century Fox to release it. He also appears to have been negotiating with well-known actors and a scriptwriter, and had decided where he was going to shoot the film. He knew the Italian port of San Remo well, having filmed Operation X, starring Edward G Robinson, there in 1950. Estoril is in Portugal, not Spain, and is a very interesting location to have chosen, as Ian Fleming’s visit there in May 1941 had been an inspiration for the novel. Fleming mentioned this incident many times—here he is discussing it with his editor William Plomer in an interview from 1962:
‘Well, the gambling scene in my first book is more or less a blown up version of what happened to me during the war, because I was flying to Washington with my chief, the Director of Naval Intelligence, and we came down at Lisbon and were told that if we wanted to go and meet some German secret agents, they were always gambling in the Casino at Estoril in the evening. So we went along and my chief didn’t understand the game of chemin de fer they were playing. I explained it to him and then it crossed my mind to have a bash at the Germans who were sitting around, and see if I couldn’t reduce their secret service funds. Unfortunately, I sat down and after three bancos my travel money had completely disappeared. Now that, greatly exaggerated, was the kernel of James Bond’s great gamble against Le Chiffre in which he took Le Chiffre to the cleaners.’[5]
The New York Times’ article mentioned England as another filming location and the Second World War for the setting, so it may be Ratoff was considering cleaving the story more closely to Fleming’s own wartime experiences instead of making a modern-day version, or one with an American agent as its hero, as CBS had done in 1954.
But the most intriguing aspect of this brief item is the passing comment that Ratoff was negotiating with a scriptwriter even though ‘the author has written an adaptation’. The idea that Ian Fleming himself wrote a film adaptation for Casino Royale is a highly tantalizing one. Could it be true? On the one hand, articles such as this, even when in newspapers as respected as the New York Times, often contain inaccuracies—the location of Estoril, for instance—and the grand plans discussed in them don’t always come to fruition. On the other hand, the information about Fleming having written an adaptation was not being cited to build up the film, because Michael Garrison was quoted as saying that they were choosing not to use it but were instead in negotiations with a ‘noted scenarist’. Garrison was promoting the idea that a well-known screenwriter would be used, so it’s hard to see what would be gained from inventing the idea that the relatively-unknown Fleming had written an adaptation they wouldn’t use. In context, it seems an unlikely thing to have fabricated.
In addition, Fleming had already written a film adaptation of his own work, and would do so again. In 1955, the Rank Organisation had optioned his third novel, Moonraker, but had failed to develop it. Frustrated by his dealings with Rank’s script department, Fleming had written his own screenplay of the novel.[6] Two years later, Rank paid £12,500 for the film rights to Fleming’s non-fiction book The Diamond Smugglers, which collected a series of articles he had written for The Sunday Times. According to trade publication The Bookseller, Rank also ‘commissioned Ian Fleming to prepare the film treatment’.[7] Fleming apparently agreed to provide Rank with a ‘full story outline’ for a further £1,000, but declined writing ‘the master scene script’ or to be available in England for consultations.[8]
The rights to The Diamond Smugglers were later bought by producer George Willoughby. In 1965, he claimed that Fleming had written a film treatment for the book for Rank that had had very little in common with the articles he had written for The Sunday Times, and that, for the film he was planning, the basic story ‘would be based mainly on the treatment written by Ian Fleming himself’.[9]
Neither Fleming’s screenplay of Moonraker nor his treatment for The Diamond Smugglers have yet come to light. Could it be that there is also an undiscovered film adaptation of Casino Royale from the 50s, written by Ian Fleming? If so, what could it be like? Is it set in the 1950s, like the novel, or based on his experiences during the war? And how might it differ from the James Bond films we know and love? These questions remain unanswered—for now, at least.
Despite the promise of the New York Times’ item, Ratoff doesn’t seem to have made any progress on Casino Royale following it. Before long, he had an added complication in the form of competition—from Ian Fleming. Along with his friend Ivar Bryce, Fleming had teamed up with a young producer called Kevin McClory and they were planning on filming a newly written Bond adventure, which would eventually become Thunderball. In his dealings with McClory, Fleming didn’t fully consider the ramifications of his having already sold the rights to his first novel to Ratoff four years earlier. Instead, he promised McClory and Bryce the right to make the first Bond feature film, based on a treatment he would write.[10]
By the summer of 1959, Fleming and McClory were feeling confident enough to give an interview about the film to the Daily Express. Fleming had a close relationship with the Express: it had been serializing his novels since 1956 and had been running comic strip adaptations of them since the previous year. On June 11, the paper published an article titled ‘Who do you think fits the part of James Bond?’, which featured a gentle—and fairly obviously staged—disagreement between McClory and Fleming as to who should be cast in the part:
‘James Bond, the tough action hero who has made £30,000 for author Ian Fleming in six best-sellers, is to be brought to the screen in a British film.
But last night author Ian Fleming was not satisfied with the star selected to play his hero: Trevor Howard. Which is likely to cause complications for producer Kevin McClory, who is keen for Howard to have the part…’[11]
This was a more intriguing way of letting it be known that the film was forthcoming than a simple announcement. McClory gave the argument for Howard, who he felt looked as though he had ‘lived it up’ enough to be convincing as Bond. Fleming then provided the knock-down to this:
‘Howard is not my idea of Bond, not by a long way. It is nothing personal against him. I think he is a very fine actor. But don’t you think he’s a bit old to be Bond?’[12]
Howard was 43 at the time, and Fleming stated that Bond was in his early thirties, adding:
‘I wonder how many people who follow the James Bond strip in the Daily Express would see Howard as that character. Not many, I bet.’[13]
Fleming said he felt that Peter Finch was ‘nearer to it’. When it was pointed out to him that Finch was just a year younger than Howard, he reconsidered, saying:
‘I would be happier if the part could be given to a young, unknown actor, with established stars playing the other roles.
Otherwise I am keen on the project. The film will not be an adaptation of one of my books. I am writing an original screenplay for it.’[14]
The authorship and ownership of the resulting story would later be a matter of much more serious disagreement between Fleming and McClory, but for now they had succeeded in stoking a ‘controversy’ over who should play Bond in a national newspaper, and as a result readers wrote in with their own choices, some of which were printed in the paper’s letters page of June 15 1959: picks included Richard Burton, Michael Craig and Richard Todd.[15]
Peter Finch, British-born but Australian, and now best known for his role as the deranged news anchorman Howard Beale in 1976’s Network, may seem an unusual actor for Fleming to have picked, but in the ‘50s he was a leading man and his latest film, which had been released by Rank in Britain in January, was Operation Amsterdam, a thriller about commandos trying to secure a stock of diamonds during the Second World War, with a key scene featuring a spectacular bank raid.
McClory, Fleming and Bryce continued with their plans, for the time being. On June 28 1960, The Times published an article titled ‘Big American Film Plan For England’, which began:
‘Mr. Spyros P. Skouras announced at a meeting in London yesterday that 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation, of which he is president, has decided to make almost the whole of seven films in Britain and to release 12 British films now in the course of being prepared. The cost, placed at $20m., was estimated as probably being higher than it would be if the same programme were to be carried out in Hollywood, where the corporation’s normal output of films will not be reduced as a result of the work now to be done in Britain.’[16]
The article detailed some of the proposed films:
‘Of the British films to be released by 20th Century-Fox, Casino Royal [sic], based on a novel by Mr. Ian Fleming, will have a cast including both the recent interpreters of the character of Oscar Wilde—Mr. Robert Morley and Mr. Peter Finch…’[17]
This was once again news of Ratoff’s production. Ratoff, it seems, had not yet given up on making Casino Royale, and still had interest from Twentieth Century-Fox—enough for the president of the company to include it in its future roster and announce it to the press.
The two actors named are also interesting. To be announced to the press in this way by Skouras, it seems likely they had both committed themselves to the film—they may even have signed contracts. Finch, of course, had been Fleming’s pick for James Bond the previous year. Was his involvement coincidence, or had Ratoff or Skouras read the article in the Express? If so, what did they make of the fact that there was another Bond film in production, and one that Fleming was promoting? Had they snatched Finch from under the rival production’s noses—and had he committed to being the first film Bond? In a further ironic twist, Finch had played the lead in The Trials of Oscar Wilde, which had opened in cinemas the previous month. That film was made by Warwick Films, and was co-produced by Cubby Broccoli, who had yet to enter the Bond fray. Ratoff had directed his own film, Oscar Wilde, starring Robert Morley as the playwright, which had also been released the previous month. It is unclear whether Ratoff was considering the avuncular Morley for the part of M, Le Chiffre or another character.
The news that Twentieth Century-Fox was planning to release Casino Royale was also reported in the Los Angeles Times, on July 7 1960, mentioning Ratoff as the director and Finch as the star.[18] McClory read it and was furious. He had been told that his company had the right to make the first Bond film. He confronted Bryce, and the acrimony spiralled towards litigation.[19]
On December 14 1960 Gregory Ratoff died, and his widow subsequently sold the remainder of the rights to Casino Royale to his former agent, Charles K. Feldman. But within months of securing the rights Feldman was leapfrogged, when it was announced in the press in June 1961 that some new players had entered the arena:
‘The remarkable James Bond thrillers are to be filmed at last.
This will be splendid news for the several millions fans—which includes President Kennedy—of Ian Fleming’s blood curdlers.
They have been bought by English producer Harry Saltzman, who produced “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning”, and Albert “Cubby” Broccoli.
“Actors are falling over themselves to play Bond,” Saltzman says. “Cary Grant, David Niven, Trevor Howard, James Mason, all are interested. But I want to use an unknown…”’[20]
In July, the New York Times filled in some of the details:
‘WHOLESALE LOT: In the frenetic business of acquiring properties for the movies, it is standard procedure for a company to buy a book, play or script in competition with others. But it is extremely rare for a producer to snag practically all of an author’s works for filming. Such was the case the other day when the independent production team of Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, in association with United Artists, bought no fewer than seven novels by Ian Fleming, British newspaper man, to be made under the Saltzman-Broccoli corporate banner of Lowndes Productions for U.A. release.’[21]
Ironically, Broccoli was a former employee of Charles Feldman, having worked as an agent at Famous Artists early in his career. Broccoli and Saltzman would soon settle on a different name for their company, Eon Productions, although Saltzman would later form his own production company called Lowndes independently of Broccoli, with which he made such films as The IPCRESS File and Battle of Britain. The article said that the first of the films would be filmed in England and the West Indies that autumn, that it was likely to be Dr No, and that they were in negotiations with Wolf Mankowitz to write the script.
But in the meantime, Charles Feldman was sitting on a potential goldmine. In March 1961, Life magazine had listed From Russia, With Love as one of John F. Kennedy’s 10 favourite books, and sales of the Bond novels were now soaring in the United States. At some point in 1962, Feldman approached Howard Hawks to direct Casino Royale, and the two met with screenwriter Leigh Brackett to discuss it. Hawks liked the idea of Cary Grant as Bond, but after seeing a print of Dr No, which premiered in London that October, he dropped out of the project.[22]
Unbowed, Feldman commissioned Ben Hecht to write a script. Known as ‘the Shakespeare of Hollywood’, Hecht was an acclaimed novelist, poet and playwright. He had worked on several classic screenplays, including The Front Page, based on the play he co-wrote, and had been nominated for six Oscars and won twice, for Underworld at the first Oscars ceremony in 1927 and for The Scoundrel in 1935. With Underworld and Scarface, he created the template of the modern gangster film, and he also had a fruitful collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock, writing Spellbound and Notorious, as well as working uncredited on dozens of other classic screenplays, including Gone With The Wind and Foreign Correspondent.
Feldman had worked with Hecht before: in 1954, he had commissioned him to ghost-write the memoirs of his client Marilyn Monroe, although Hecht’s resulting work would not be published for another 20 years. Hecht had also worked for Feldman uncredited on the scripts for Walk on the Wild Side and The 7th Dawn.
Hecht’s papers are stored in the Newberry Library in Chicago. According to Alison Hinderliter of the library’s Manuscripts and Archives section, the collection arrived in ‘total chaos’ in 1979 as the result of the death of Hecht’s widow, which resulted in the urgent need to gather everything from her apartment in New York before it was thrown out. Much of the sorting of the 94 cubic feet of material was done by a single volunteer in 1981.
The Newberry houses over 3,000 folders of material relating to Hecht’s prodigious output, including drafts, correspondence and other material related to over 70 screenplays, many of which are classics, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the contents of Box 3, Folders 131-136, ‘Casino Royale, 1967’, have never received any critical analysis or attention from outside the library. But these papers shed light on an extraordinary lost chapter of cinema history, and feature some of the most surprising and exciting adaptation of Ian Fleming’s work, written by one of the greatest screenwriters of the 20th century.
The Newberry’s Casino Royale folder contains over 500 pages of material, including six screenplays, at least five of which are by Hecht. An early screenplay dated April 20 1957 with no name on the title page may be a vestige of Ratoff’s European excursions, and is a faithful adaptation of the novel in several ways but for one crucial element: James Bond isn’t in it. Instead of the suave but ruthless British agent, the hero is Lucky Fortunato, a rich, wisecracking American gangster who owns a string of casinos and is an expert poker player.[23] Semple says he didn’t write it, but there were others Ratoff might have called on, including his assistant George St George. Some of Charles Feldman’s papers are stored at the Louis B Mayer Library in Los Angeles, but they were unable to yield a date or further context for the following note from Feldman to Hecht:
‘Dear Ben,
Please call me after you have read the enclosed script and attached notes. My telephone number at the house is CRestview 5-2339. Am sure I’ll be there. Best,
Charlie.’[24]
It may be that the 1957 draft is this ‘enclosed script’ Feldman sent Hecht, perhaps as a starting point to see what he could do with it. With Hecht’s expertise in gangster films, he would have been a natural choice.
Of the remaining material, two of Hecht’s drafts are undated and the rest are from various points in 1964. There are also hand-written notes, correspondence (one letter mentions it has enclosed two cheques for his work, valued at $2,000 each[25]) and some notes for an outline dated December 17 1963—just two months after the premiere of the second Bond film, From Russia With Love, in London. The last dated pages are from April 14 1964, so it looks like for at least four months Hecht worked on adapting Ian Fleming’s first novel.
For Hecht, this was a remarkably long time. He was an infamously fast writer, often working around the clock; he wrote Nothing Sacred in two weeks and finished the script of Scarface in just nine days. But Casino Royale was a problematic novel to adapt for film. On the one hand, it is one of Fleming’s strongest novels (Raymond Chandler and Kingsley Amis both felt it his best): intense, almost feverishly so, and rich in characterization and atmosphere. But it is also very short—practically a novella—with little physical action other than the torture scene. Bond falls in love with his fellow agent on the mission, Vesper Lynd, and even considers proposing marriage to her before he discovers that she has been coerced into working for SMERSH and has betrayed him, leading to his being tortured. Vesper kills herself, and the novel ends with Bond savagely reporting to London that ‘the bitch is dead now’.
Hecht was approaching the novel 10 years after it had been published, but these aspects of the book still presented a challenge. His December 1963 outline notes appear to be his first attempt at coming to grips with the novel, and particularly the problem of its brevity. Across eight pages, he sketched out a prelude to the novel’s plot that would serve as a first act and bring the running time up to scratch.
The set-up he outlined is that M sends Bond on a mission to find Gloria Dunn, a beautiful young singer and the daughter of England’s leading nuclear scientist, who has gone missing. Hecht had clearly read Fleming’s Thunderball—published in 1961 and soon to lead to legal action from Kevin McClory—as the main villain here is not SMERSH operative Le Chiffre, but ‘Number 1’, the head of international crime syndicate ‘Specter’, an Americanised spelling of that novel’s SPECTRE. Number 1 has built a sex- and drug-trafficking empire using 5 million rubles he has been given by Soviet intelligence, and he now invites a Russian intelligence officer, Tautz, to join Specter and help them all become richer. His plan is to sell Moscow highly classified intelligence, which he will obtain by extorting senior figures around the world: Gloria Dunn has been kidnapped and fed drugs until she has become an addict, and the threat of her becoming a prostitute will force her father to work for them. The action moves from Baghdad to Algiers to Naples, and culminates in a raid on a German castle that Specter is using as a brothel: Gloria and her father are both tortured and killed, and Hecht ends the notes with the phrase: ‘Here begins the Casino Royale plot’.[26]
These pages contain plenty of intriguing ideas, but as a whole the plot isn’t an exciting one: several elements of it feel hackneyed, and apart from Bond and M none of the characters from the novel feature, making the fact that it has been tacked on all the more obvious.
Hecht soon abandoned the missing daughter plot, which feels a little too run-of-the-mill for a Bond film—though it’s interesting to note how similar it is to recent films such as Spartan and Taken—but developed another strand from these pages much further. Fleming’s novel opens with Le Chiffre already in trouble: he has embezzled SMERSH funds to run a string of brothels in France but has lost huge sums as the result of a new law that has closed many of them down. Now he is desperately hoping to win his money back at baccarat before SMERSH discover it is missing and kill him. Bond, the British Secret Service’s finest gambler, is sent to the casino in France to make sure he loses.
Le Chiffre’s brothel-keeping establishes that he is villainous, and seedily so, but we never see him in that line of business in the novel. Hecht made vice central to his plot, with Colonel Chiffre, as he becomes, actively controlling a network of brothels in which he secretly films powerful figures in order to extort secrets out of them for Specter.[27] So just as the theme of Fleming’s Goldfinger is avarice and power, the theme of Hecht’s Casino Royale is sex and sin. It’s an idea that seems obvious in hindsight, and Hecht used it both to raise the stakes of Fleming’s plot and to deepen the story’s emotional resonance.
This is visible in the surviving pages of two separate but overlapping drafts. Neither has a date attached, but judging from some of the scenes both were written after the December 1963 notes but before drafts from February and April 1964. Among the few surviving letters about Casino Royale in Hecht’s papers is one he wrote to Feldman on January 13 1964 in which he says he has 110 pages of ‘our blissful Casino Royale’ ready to be typed and sent, but that if Feldman can wait three days he will have finished the finale, resulting in 130 pages of what he refers to as a first draft. As there is no other material dating from January 1964 in the folders, it seems likely that these excerpts are from then. Hecht also added that he had ‘never had more fun writing a movie’.[28]
Both drafts feature a British secret agent called James Bond, who gambles against a Colonel Chiffre, alias Herr Zero (there are no references to ‘Number 1’ here or in any subsequent drafts), is aided by an American agent called Felix Leiter and a French agent called René Mathis, and falls in love with Vesper Lynd. Both drafts stick very closely to the atmosphere of the novel, while adding several new plot elements and characters. These include one of Chiffre’s former brothel madams and a former lover of Bond’s: at different points she is named Mila Brant, Mila Vigne and Giovanna Scotti, but in all guises she is a classic femme fatale, trying to seduce Bond by breaking into his bedroom:
‘Bond becomes alert in the shadows. He listens intently. He hears a faint sound in the adjoining bedroom.
Gun in hand, Bond moves cautiously to the bedroom. He switches on the bedroom light, and stands with his gun aimed at the lovely occupant of his bed. It is Giovanna. She is in a transparent nightie.
BOND
(politely)
Good evening, Giovanna.
GIOVANNA
You are not surprised?
BOND
No.
He starts undressing.
How much did you pay the concierge to get in?
GIOVANNA
Twenty francs. A bargain. May I have a cigarette?
BOND
(handing her one)
Here. Don’t set the bed on fire.
GIOVANNA
I do not need a cigarette for that.’[29]
The dry cynical wit and unashamed sexual appetite are more in keeping with Sean Connery’s version of Bond than Ian Fleming’s, although both elements had already become synonymous with the character, and have remained so. For James Bond, the natural response to finding a semi-clothed beautiful woman in his bed is to start undressing himself, and a subsequent stage direction has him continuing to do so ‘as calmly as if he were alone in the bedroom’. Giovanna notes his lack of hesitation:
‘GIOVANNA
(smoking)
You remind me of my first lover. No kissing. No hugging. Boom!—his clothes off and into bed.
She pats his naked belly.
Darling, you’re adorable.
BOND
In what way?
GIOVANNA
You know I am employed by Colonel Chiffre. And you say nothing.
BOND
It would only spoil an interesting night for both of us.’[30]
Hecht pulled off a very neat trick here: the dialogue sounds as though it must have featured in a Bond film before, and yet is wholly original. That’s hard enough to do for any writer, but Hecht was tailoring his story to fit a formula that was being established as he wrote. Elsewhere, he has Bond wine and dine in much the same way as in the novel—he even creates a new cocktail, mixing Black Velvet for Vesper in a crystal pitcher with Champagne, Bass Ale and rye whiskey as they eat caviar.[31] But the tone here is unmistakably that of the cinematic Bond, recalling some of the more overtly sexual moments in the early films, such as this exchange in From Russia With Love:
‘TATIANA
I think my mouth is too big.
BOND
I think it’s a very lovely mouth. It’s just the right size—for me anyway!’
Hecht takes the innuendo just so far, and then withdraws. Bond’s banter with Giovanna is suddenly interrupted by Vesper telephoning the room, claiming she has been poisoned. Bond leaves at once, disappointing Giovanna. ‘Be brave,’ he tells her as he closes the door.
Another new character in these drafts is Dr Mesker, who is also working for Chiffre. However, he is a much weaker addition than the playful Giovanna. He can read minds, and scratches his cheek and taps his nose while watching the baccarat to signal to Chiffre which cards his opponents have. When Felix Leiter implausibly figures out what is happening, Bond responds in the next round of the game by thinking of different cards when he looks at his own, so that Mesker transmits the wrong signals to Chiffre, who then starts to lose. This is absurd and rather hammy, though it leads to an effective scene in which Chiffre accuses Mesker of betraying him, and Mesker reads Chiffre’s mind and realizes that his own death is imminent at the hands of a brutal henchman:
‘MESKER
Never! I did not! No, no! I never betrayed you. Don’t! Colonel Chiffre, don’t say it! Don’t say it! Oh, God, don’t speak it—no!
CHIFFRE
(quietly)
Erik. Finish.’[32]
Hecht may have been inspired here by Fleming’s second novel, Live And Let Die, in which the villainous Mr Big is aided by a fortune-teller, Solitaire, but it’s hard to imagine film audiences accepting the idea in this form. There is no ambiguity about Mesker’s telepathic powers—it’s no trick but a real supernatural gift—and Bond accepts the possibility too readily to be convincing.
Much more effective is a scene that directly follows, in which Chiffre is informed that Bond and Vesper have been spotted on the beach at Royale. One of his henchmen, Black Patch—the novel’s character, given more to do—suggests killing Bond with a telescopic rifle:
‘CHIFFRE
No shooting. Bullets inspire police inquiries. Inquiries might interfere with my Casino play tonight and tomorrow. I have no more time than that. The death of Bond must seem an accident.
BLACK PATCH
(smiling)
The boat?
CHIFFRE
Yes. Bond will go swimming.’[33]
This is followed by Black Patch and another henchman, Anton, attacking Bond’s boat on water-skis. Anton places a bomb on board, but Bond kills him by skewering him with a boat hook and leaps into the water before the explosion, later to be picked up by Réné Mathis and the French coastal patrol.[34]
These two undated drafts share a lot of similar material, but only one continues to the end of the narrative: Bond returns to London following Vesper’s death, where M tells him to take a holiday in Jamaica. Bond says he would rather stick around in case M has any errands for him, clearing the way for his next mission.[35] Perhaps Feldman planned to slot Casino Royale into the existing Eon series, as he didn’t have the rights to any other Bond novels—or perhaps he felt there was a possibility of creating sequels of original Bond stories using his existing rights.
The 47 surviving pages of the draft dated February 20 1964 elaborate on many of the scenes and ideas from earlier pages, with varying degrees of success. The draft opens with a pre-titles sequence—itself a nod to the ongoing films—in which Felix Leiter arrests senior United Nations diplomats and several beautiful prostitutes who have ensnared them in honey traps.
This is followed by the most unusual sequence in all of Hecht’s material, and his boldest departure from both the source material and the film series. On the surface it’s the traditional briefing scene between M and Bond, complete with a prelude of Bond flirting with Miss Moneypenny, but for one change—he is no longer James Bond. Instead, he is an unnamed American agent who M gives the name James Bond. M explains that ‘since Bond’s death’ MI6 has put several agents into operation using his name: ‘It not only perpetuates his memory, but confuses the opposition.’[36] He adds that Bond, as he will henceforth be known by everyone, will have to change his tailor, haberdasher and gun to fit in with his new identity.
The new Bond comments that he won’t drink martinis but will stick to his bourbons, and there is some discussion of his having previously owned a casino in Jamaica. But after this scene the character is referred to as Bond both in the script and by all the other characters, and is in every way indistinguishable from Bond. It’s a very odd addition, but there may have been pragmatic reasons for it: Feldman could have decided to make the film with someone other than Sean Connery as Bond, and instructed Hecht to add a short scene to explain it. Perhaps he had an actor in mind, as the obvious strategy would have been for M to give the operation to another British agent rather than an American one.
M briefs his new Bond on Specter’s extortion operation in the United Nations and elsewhere, and sends him to Hamburg to work with fellow MI6 agent Vesper Lynd to investigate one of Chiffre’s palatial brothels. Bond isn’t keen on the idea of a woman being involved in such a mission:
‘BOND
I should think a female on this job would be sort of coals to Newcastle.
M
Not Miss Lynd. Extremely upright, honorable and moral.
BOND
Sounds like quite a novelty.
M
Her father Jonathan Lynd was an 0-0-7 man. Killed in our service two years ago. Vesper has been in training to take his place. Fine linguist, and her target score for last year was ninety five, point four.’[37]
Hecht introduced some new characters in this draft. One of them is cleverly extrapolated from Fleming’s novel: in Chapter Two of the book, there is a passing reference to an MI6 agent who has infiltrated Le Chiffre’s set-up as one of his mistresses, ‘a Eurasian (No 1860) controlled by Station F’. From this, Hecht created Lili Wing, a beautiful but drug-addicted Eurasian madam working for Chiffre. Like the earlier Mila/Giovanna character, she has previously had a fling with Bond, but she is bisexual and is now doted on by her girlfriend Georgie, who carries a black kitten on her shoulder.
This draft has a notably dark, adult sense of humour. The theme of vice corrupting virtue is writ large: Vesper is poised, graceful but initially priggish, while Bond is an unrepentant lady-killer who makes fun of her innocence—until he falls in love with her. Some of the sexual references are politically incorrect even for the 60s—even for a Bond film in the 60s—with politicians attracted to children and a car chase through Hamburg’s red light district concluding with a sequence in which Bond escapes his pursuers by diving into an arena where two women are mud-wrestling. He accidentally tears the wig off one, and eventually manages to escape in a blizzard of confusion and laughter from the crowd:
‘His body covered with mud, the bewigged Bond rises out of the ooze…’[38]
It’s Roger Moore’s Bond a decade in advance, with some added kinkiness. It doesn’t really work.
The draft peters out, with several of the latter pages paraphrasing passages from the novel, and the final scenes are missing altogether. The most significant—and successful—addition is the character of Gita: Chiffre’s wife. She returned in the final surviving drafts, which are dated April 8, 10 and 14 1964. The April 8 section is 85 pages, and covers most of the plot: a handwritten scrawl above the date on the first page marks it as ‘Incomplete Script’. The April 10 screenplay is 157 pages long and is a complete script, from ‘FADE IN’ to ‘FADE OUT’—the title page also has a handwritten note by Hecht saying ‘Copy of the draft sent to Feldman 4/10/64’. The April 14 material is 49 pages long and is marked ‘Rewrite’: this contain variations of many scenes from the drafts of April 8 and 10, as well as additions and improvements to earlier material. Combined, these drafts give us Hecht’s final and complete screenplay of Casino Royale.[39]
Much of the material is familiar from earlier drafts, but gaps are filled in and it’s now noticeably more assured and coherent. The dialogue crackles throughout. Bond has several bone-dry one-liners, and one can easily imagine Connery’s style and delivery when reading them. In one scene, he drives around hairpin bends overlooking the Mediterranean at four o’clock in the morning, and Vesper notices a car in pursuit. Bond wants to slow down to let her jump out, but she insists on staying to help and crawls over the top of her seat into the back of the car:
‘VESPER
(as she does)
I’ll shoot at their tires.
BOND
No. At their heads, if you don’t mind.’[40]
In two lines, Hecht punctures a cinematic cliché and nails James Bond’s laconic but ruthless humour. There are many such satisfying moments, particularly in the interplay between Bond and Vesper. She feels Bond is rash and sexist, while he sees her as a school-marmish irritant. It’s very recognizably the relationship of the novel, as well as of a thousand mismatched cop films since, but Hecht makes it sing. The 2006 adaptation had a few scenes along these lines, with Vesper’s initial meeting with Bond on the train being perhaps the highlight. That flirtatious needling dynamic suffuses the April ‘64 pages. When Vesper gives Bond twenty million francs from M, she asks him to turn away as she takes it from a money belt beneath her dress. ‘It’s going to be quite a strain working with you,’ Bond notes wearily.[41]
The first third of the story follows Bond and Vesper as they track down thousands of rolls of film incriminating leading politicians that Chiffre has collected for Specter, which are being transported from a warehouse in Hamburg by guarded van (Specter itself is, as SMERSH is in the novel, a largely unseen threat). Vesper infiltrates Lili Wing’s brothel as one of the escorts, and Bond pretends to be one of her customers while they are being filmed, but with no sound, trying to prise information from her while feigning a seduction.
The Hamburg chase—the mud-wrestling scene remains—culminates in Lili Wing being captured by Chiffre’s men and fed into the crusher of a rubbish truck, while Bond uses Chiffre’s beautiful wife Gita as a shield. She is shot by Chiffre’s men by mistake. Bond manages to commandeer the van by impersonating one of the henchmen in the darkness, but during a subsequent car chase across the Swiss Alps the van goes over a cliff and explodes with the film rolls in it, Bond naturally escaping at the last moment.
This means Bond has wrecked the extortion operation, and Chiffre has lost half of the funds Specter has allocated to him to boot. Chiffre now needs to get the money back before Specter realize it is missing and kill him. The action relocates to the resort of Juan-les-Pins on the Côte d’Azur. Bond, in a white-jacketed tuxedo at the wheel of his Bentley, waits outside a hotel for the glamorous young Giovanna. They visit a nearby casino, where Bond coolly wins two thousand dollars at roulette, but he is then summoned to his room, where Vesper is waiting for him with instructions and twenty millions francs from M. They’re to leave at once for Casino Royale, a five-hour drive down the coast, where Chiffre is determined to win back the money he lost at baccarat. The car chase ensues, they arrive at Casino Royale, and we are into the main plot of the novel.
There are many bold and ingenious ideas here. In the book, Le Chiffre and Bond duel without ever having met previously—there is also little build-up to it, as Hecht realized in his earliest outline ideas. By making Bond directly responsible for Chiffre’s precarious situation, and the reason he sets up the baccarat game in the first place, Hecht uses the main body of the novel as a second act rematch between the two men. In addition, Chiffre’s wife has been facially disfigured as a result of Bond’s actions, so she and her husband are doubly hell-bent on vengeance.
The character of Gita Chiffre served another purpose for Hecht, who felt that the novel’s extended torture sequence was seriously flawed. In a handwritten letter, unaddressed but most likely to Feldman, and undated but from context probably written after the release of From Russia With Love in October 1963, he explained that he felt that Le Chiffre’s monologues while he tortured Bond in the novel were ‘fatally inept’, ‘cheap’ and ‘comical’, and that to feature one man torturing another while naked in any film adaptation would seem not only to be indulging in ‘a far-fetched and unmotivated type of cruelty’, but that Bond himself would come across as a ‘yelping pansy’.[42]
The language is distasteful, but these were the times Hecht was working in, and he was being paid to write a film that would appeal to a mass audience—anything that didn’t serve that aim would have to be changed. Like many supremely talented people, Hecht could be arrogant and scathing about flaws he perceived in others’ work: ‘Even Saltzman has known better than to let such Fleming pitter patter seep into his two movies,’ he wrote in the same letter.[43] Hecht knew Harry Saltzman, as he had worked on a 1956 Bob Hope-Katharine Hepburn film Saltzman had produced, The Iron Petticoat—Hecht had become so incensed by Hope’s gag writers reworking his script that he had insisted his name be removed from the credits, and had even placed an advert at his own cost in The Hollywood Reporter denouncing Hope.[44]
The second and third acts of the April ‘64 pages are broadly faithful to the novel. In a closely followed game of baccarat, Bond beats Chiffre and cleans him out to the tune of 80 million francs, with Chiffre taking ‘loud slow sniffs’ from his inhaler as the tension rises. The mind-reader Mesker is still present, but there is no subsequent scene in which he is killed while foreseeing his own death, which leaves the possibility for undiscovered deception rather than supernatural gifts. As it becomes clear Bond is winning, Chiffre’s henchman Otto approaches Bond’s chair and sticks a cane in his spine, announcing it’s a silent gun and Bond will seem to have fainted if he doesn’t withdraw his bet by the count of ten. The tension mounts as he counts quietly in Bond’s ears, before Bond heaves back and smashes down on the cane with the crossbar of the chair, breaking it in half. The crowd is shocked as Bond goes sprawling across the floor, but he is soon back at the table and the game resumes. This is all almost identical to the corresponding scene in the novel.
Bond wins, leaving Chiffre slumped at the table to collect his winnings, then Vesper is seemingly kidnapped from the casino and he pursues her. He is waylaid by iron spikes thrown on the road, only to be captured by Chiffre, who wants Bond’s cheque to save him from Specter’s wrath. Now we have Hecht’s version of the torture sequence—and it is a virtuoso piece of writing. Bond is stripped naked and tied to a chair with the seat cut out, as in the book, but now Chiffre is accompanied by his wife, who we see for the first time since she was shot as a result of Bond’s actions: part of her jaw is missing, so that the right side of her face ‘hangs unhumanly boneless’, and she speaks metallically through a tube inserted into her ripped out larynx:
‘GITA
You remember me, Mr. Bond?
BOND
(coolly, as he stares up)
You’re a bit changed.
GITA
You will be changed, too, Mr. Bond.’[45]
Chiffre demands that Bond tell him the location of his winning cheque, while goading his wife into thrashing him with a special weapon:
‘It is a thin, four-feet-long wooden rod. On its end is a thin slab of wood, six inches square. The implement looks like a cross between an oversized fly-swatter and undersized rug beater.
Gita’s misshapen face grimaces at the implement in her hand. She is possibly smiling.’
Gita strikes Bond repeatedly, but Bond still refuses to reveal where he has hidden the cheque. At one point Chiffre tells his raging wife to stop hitting Bond for a moment, adding, in a line a hundred European character actors would surely have sold their grandmothers to deliver: ‘M’sieur Bond may want to change his mind while he is still a m’sieur.’[46]
Bond still refuses to break and, when asked about the cheque again, manages to force out a reply through the pain: ‘Up your gizzard, you fat pimp.’[47]
Chiffre also waterboards Bond with whisky in an attempt to get him to talk, forcing his mouth open with the barrel of a gun while he pours the liquid down his throat. The whole scene is watched by two Doberman Pinschers, who howl excitedly along with Bond. It’s an electrifyingly sinister scene.
Just as it seems that Bond is destined to die, he is rescued by masked Specter agents, who scar his hand so they will be able to identify him in any future operations, rather as happens in the novel. The agents then shoot Chiffre, who has hidden in a cupboard. The ‘brothel Napoleon’, as Bond calls him, dies fittingly, with silk dresses and négligées draping his blood-soaked corpse.
Bond recovers, but is rendered impotent, and Vesper visits him in his clinic, all much as in the novel. After Vesper acts suspiciously over a mysterious phone call, Bond accuses her of lying to him, but when she becomes hysterical Bond apologises, explaining he is ‘a bit of an amateur about love’[48]:
‘VESPER
(softly)
Don’t hate me.
BOND
You’re quite mad.
He holds her in silence for a moment. Then –
Will you marry me, Vesper?
VESPER
(whispering)
Marry you?
BOND
Yes. I think we ought to legalize our quarrels. Care to answer me, now?
VESPER
Yes! Yes! I’ll marry you! For as long as you want.
BOND
Good.
VESPER
(clinging)
Only—don’t look at me with 007’s eyes.
BOND
(grinning)
I guarantee the bridegroom will wear a grooming look. I’ll dig up a parson tomorrow—in London.
They stand locked in an embrace.’[49]
But, as in the book, it all goes wrong. The next morning, Bond waits in the lobby of the Royale with suitcases packed, ready to fly back to London, but Vesper isn’t answering the phone in her room. Perturbed, he runs up the stairs and enters: Vesper is lying, undressed, on the bed. Bond thinks she is ill, but she tells him she has written him a letter explaining everything, and he sees that her eyes are cloudy:
‘BOND
What have you taken?
VESPER
Cyanide. You can’t help. It’s almost over. Painless and efficient.
BOND
Why?
VESPER
I think you know.
Bond is silent.
You’ve known, but you refused to believe. That I’m a fraud. A double agent. For M—and for Specter. That telephone call last night—Specter insisting I continue my activities—for them. I’ve been very remiss, for some weeks.
Bond sits in silence and stares at her.
I was going to be married a year ago. My fiancé worked for M. he was captured by Specter. Death sentence. I pleaded for him. They made a deal with me. They’d let him live and hold him as a hostage for three years, if I worked for them. I agreed. Because he was young, and I thought I loved him very much.
Her voice has lowered.
Can you hear me darling?
BOND
Yes. Plainly.
VESPER
It was easy at first. They were after Chiffre—same as you. It was like working together—with you.
BOND
You kept Specter informed of my movements.
VESPER
Yes.’[50]
Unlike in the novel, Vesper didn’t stage her kidnapping, as she was working for Specter, not Chiffre, but she knows Bond can never believe her or trust her again, so she has taken her own life. Bond tells her he believes her anyway, and the scene ends with her dying, Bond sitting motionless beside her.
Also unlike the novel, there is no payoff of Bond calling M in London and uttering the infamous line ‘The bitch is dead now’. Instead, a grief-stricken Bond is consoled by his doctor, who prescribes him with testosterone. A minor character, Georgie, returns to offer her consolations, and Bond embraces her. He is delighted to find that his body responds, and order is restored as he plants two solid kisses on her mouth and we fade out.
Despite this conventional ending, Hecht’s April 1964 draft is phenomenal, and could have made for an extraordinary Bond film. Hecht captured all the best elements of the novel and wove them into a rich, thrilling adventure. His James Bond is a blend of Fleming’s character and Connery’s interpretation of him, and yet—impossible to imagine before reading it—with greater depth than either.
In parts it’s reminiscent of one of his most famous scripts, that for the Hitchcock classic Notorious. Like Casino Royale, Notorious is both a spy thriller and a love story. Cary Grant plays T.R. Devlin, a suave and ruthless secret agent who is charged with looking after Alicia (Ingrid Bergman), the ‘notorious’ daughter of a neo-Nazi who drinks too much. But the cynical Devlin slowly falls in love with her, and becomes increasingly desperate to protect her from the dirty espionage game he has brought her into. Hitchcock’s North by Northwest is often cited as an influence on the Bond films, but the character of Devlin is much closer to the character of 007 than advertising executive Roger Thornhill, even if the action in the film is much more subdued. In Hecht’s Casino Royale, the cynical agent also falls in love with the woman he initially sees as a nuisance, although Bond drinks almost as much as Alicia.
The Bond films Hecht’s drafts most resemble are From Russia With Love and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. As in the former, the plot involves sex extortion, although it is not Bond who is the target here. And as in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Bond falls in love and proposes, only for his woman to die—although these are also similarities in the two novels, of course. Hecht’s treatment of the romance element is powerful and, even with the throwaway ending, it’s perhaps darker than any existing Bond film. There are several false notes, particularly with the sexual shenanigans, but the drafts are stuffed to the brim with ideas, the vast majority of which are dazzlingly effective. Hecht managed to cram in all the excitement, glamour and dry wit one would expect from a Bond film, and several moments of fantasy, but the themes are adult, and the violence is brutal rather than cartoonish—just as in Fleming’s novel. It’s a master-class in thriller-writing.
But, of course, it was never filmed. On Thursday April 16 1964, Hecht sent a letter to Feldman saying he would write up a critique of their ‘current script’ on Monday. He added some comments on Bond, including that he felt the character was ‘the first gentleman-Superman to hit the silver screen in a long time’, as opposed to Spillane, Hammett and Chandler’s ‘roughneck supermen’.[51] But Monday never came: Hecht died of a heart attack at his home on Saturday April 18 while reading.
Feldman went on to try to strike a deal with Broccoli and Saltzman, asking them to loan Connery to him for Casino Royale. When they turned him down, Feldman offered to make the film in partnership with them. According to Broccoli, he entered negotiations with a completely untenable offer: 75 percent of the profits for him, the remainder for Broccoli, Saltzman and United Artists:
‘I loved Charlie. We had been friends for years. But the deal he proposed was so bizarre, if he had been my agent he would have tossed the offer—and the person making it—out of the window.’[52]
Having finally managed to get his hands on a working screenplay for Casino Royale, it does seem bizarre that Feldman made such an offer. But perhaps the time it had taken, together with the expense, had led him to feeling he needed that sort of stake for it to have been worth it. He may also have overestimated how far he could push his former employee. The truth was that Broccoli no longer needed him—and wasn’t afraid to say so.
The deal fell through. It seems that at one point Feldman even claimed that the film of Goldfinger plagiarized ‘a key situation’ from Casino Royale, and threatened to sue[53]—it’s unclear what the basis for this claim is, although the scene in Goldfinger in which gangster Mr Solo is crushed at a scrap yard is somewhat reminiscent of Lili Wing’s death.
Furious that he had not come to an agreement with Broccoli and Saltzman, Feldman then approached Sean Connery to see if he would be interested in jumping ship. Connery said he would for a million dollars, but this was too much for Feldman’s blood and he turned him down.[54] He decided to take a new tack, signing an unknown Northern Irish actor, Terence Cooper, who he kept on salary for two years, and recruiting Orson Welles, David Niven, Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, Woody Allen and several others to the project, which was now to be a wacky send-up of the Bond films. A set report in Time in May 1966 revealed that after Hecht’s ‘three bashes’ at the script, it had been completely rewritten by Billy Wilder, after which Joseph Heller, Terry Southern, Wolf Mankowitz, John Law and Woody Allen had all taken their turn at it. Much of the film was improvised on the spot.[55]
Very little of Hecht’s material made it to the screen, and parts that did—such as the blackmail films and the idea of calling other agents James Bond—mushroomed to absurd proportions, joining a plot that featured Bond’s daughter by Mata Hari being kidnapped by a flying saucer. Feldman’s budget and ambitions spiraled out of control: Time noted that, having failed to secure Connery, he had decided to make Casino Royale ‘the Bond movie to end all Bond movies’,[56] while in an interview with Look Woody Allen said Feldman wanted to ‘eliminate the Bond films forever’.[57]
If any film could have done that, it was this one. Eventually released in 1967, it was a bloated and incoherent comedy that wasted the prodigious talent it had assembled, and the title Casino Royale was linked for decades with a cinematic disaster rather than Fleming’s novel. Finally, in 2004 Eon gained the rights to the novel, and set about filming it with Daniel Craig soon after.
There are still several intriguing gaps in the Casino Royale story. Who wrote the 1957 Lucky Fortunato script? Did Fleming write a script or treatment, and if so, what was in it and what happened to it? Little research has been done into some of the other scripts for this film, some of which were by world-renowned writers. But Hecht’s material nevertheless fills in a missing chapter in the history of the James Bond series.
Perhaps the most significant question raised by Hecht’s drafts is what would have happened if Feldman had come to an agreement with Broccoli and Saltzman, and Casino Royale had been made around 1965 or 1966, or if he had gone it alone and made the film much as Hecht scripted. Perhaps such a film would have flopped, with or without Eon and with or without Connery, as even a disfigured villainess and water-ski chases might not have been enough for viewers so recently awestruck by Odd Job’s hat and the Aston Martin DB5’s ejector seat. There are very few gadgets—although in one draft Vesper saves Bond’s life with a purse that has a pistol built into its side—and although Hecht’s Bond is as suave, ruthless and laconic as Connery’s incarnation of the character, as in the novel he falls in love, and pays the price for it, both of which would have been radical departures at this point in the series.
Then again, perhaps such a film would have been a commercial and critical success. Hecht’s drafts deepen Bond as a character, but they’re still breathlessly exciting. A film based on this material would have taken the series in a different direction, and if popular might have averted the superficiality and excess that afflicted many of the films after Goldfinger. If Hecht’s Casino Royale had been a success, more heavyweight scriptwriters might have been tempted to write Bond films, and the series might have gained far greater critical stature, perhaps being seen more along the lines of Hitchcock’s films. Casino Royale might have been regarded as not just a great Bond film, but as a great thriller.
The idea that a Bond film could be a great film in its own right has been unthinkable for most of the series’ duration. But Hecht’s scripts represent the possibility of a Bond film that combined all that was great about the early Connery films and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and might even have bettered them. Writing after the 2006 version of Casino Royale starring Daniel Craig, the fact Hecht managed to do this doesn’t seem quite as unbelievable as it would once have been. Before then, the idea of Fleming’s first novel as a straight adaptation seemed fraught with problems. Would the title, tainted by the 1967 farrago, resonate with new audiences? How could one ever hope to update a taut novel set solely in a small resort in northern France for the expectations of a modern Bond film?
The 2006 film proved it could be done, and expectations of what can be done with Bond have been pushed still further in Skyfall. But it is nevertheless almost head-spinning to think of the possibility of Connery doing something like this in the 60s, bringing all we think of as great in his performances and, without losing any of it, managing to bring even more. That’s the truly enthralling what-if of this film that never was. We’ll never know, of course, but Hecht’s surviving material offers a glimpse into a cinematic genius at work, and an alternate James Bond adventure as rich, compelling and visceral as anything yet brought to the screen.
With many thanks to Alison Hinderliter and the staff of the Newberry Library, and to Ihsan Amanatullah for his perceptive advice.