One of the six missing Bond scores, Casino Royale, finally gets a pressing on vinyl, 14 years after the film’s release in cinemas. And it’s worth the wait: a beautiful translucent blue double vinyl – to match the bottomless pool of Daniel Craig’s eyes, surely – in a non-gloss gatefold jacket, and two glossy picture inner-sleeves. Also included is a huge fold-out poster, if swooning over Daniel Craig in his Bond debut on your bedroom wall is your thing.
I’m not the biggest fan of David Arnold’s work as a composer when it comes to the Bond films. He was brought on to score the second Pierce Brosnan film, Tomorrow Never Dies, after his Bond theme covers project, Shaken And Stirred: The David Arnold James Bond Project, caught the ears of Bond producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli.
That album contains my favourite interpretation of a Bond theme: the Propellerheads’ balls-to-the-wall cover of John Barry’s instrumental theme to 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, with a neat middle-section containing the Capsule In Space cue from his 1967 You Only Live Twice score.
Arnold’s default setting is as a self-described John Barry fan-boy, and this is evident across his scores to Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day. On those films, he mixed trademark Barry brass and string lines with 1990s breakbeats in an effort to bring the character up to date, creating a mix of old and new that has dated poorly.
His score to Casino Royale seems to hit the reset button and he starts to come into his own as a Bond composer. It’s a shame this only lasted for two films, Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace, before Sam Mendes brought in Thomas Newman for Skyfall and SPECTRE. Arnold’s approach to scoring on Casino Royale, reverting back to what the Bond scores brought to the genre in the 1960s, follows the reboot concept of the film. Gone are the tacky breakbeats that worked so well with the Propellerheads a decade earlier, replaced by a more nuanced electronic sound influenced by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard’s work on Batman Begins.
The first half of the score still sounds a little busy to my ears, covering the action set-pieces that are front-loaded into the first hour of the film. But something happens mid-way through the score, when Bond arrives in Montenegro. The underscoring with the melody to Chris Cornell’s You Know My Name theme song sound gorgeous, and we appear to be entering a new section of the film, both narratively and musically.
In advance of the card game starting at the titular casino, Bond tries on his dinner jacket and looks in the mirror of his hotel room. The score stops dead, and we hear that famous ascending Bond motif from John Barry’s arrangement of Monty Norman’s James Bond Theme, complimented by a slinky bass line with more than a nod to Barry’s theme song to Diamonds Are Forever. It’s easily the greatest moment on a Bond score since John Barry’s final work on The Living Daylights.
More than anything, Arnold’s decision to leave the all too familiar James Bond theme – a safety blanket he had relied on far too much on his Brosnan scores – to the very end of the film suggests a step-change in maturity and confidence.
Casino Royale could have been a disaster. The Bond producer’s previous attempts to reintroduce the character with a new star had always played safe by following the continuity of the previous films. Here, writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (shudder), alongside Paul Haggis (whose major contribution was rewriting the finale of the film), rebuilt the character from the ground up in a similar fashion to how Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer had reinvented Bruce Wayne / Batman in the prior year’s Batman Begins. The end result is a modern masterpiece, and a new yardstick in quality for all future entries in the series.
Out are the regular stalwarts from the Bond series – notably Moneypenny and Q – with only Judi Dench’s M providing any sense of continuity from the Pierce Brosnan films. In a stunning pre-credits sequence, shot in black and white (which led my Dad to abandon the film because ‘the colour was all wrong’), we see Bond earn his 00 status by killing two men, double-agent section chief Dryden and his contact Fisher.
The post-credits section then lands Bond in Madagascar, hot on the heels of bomb-maker Mollaka. This sequence, which makes the most of actor Sébastien Foucan’s unbelievable parkour skills, would have made a stunning pre-credits sequence in itself, and shows Bond as a force to be reckoned with, not only with athleticism, but brute strength also. The film then shifts to Miami, and another great action sequence before we land in Montenegro.
The change of card game, from baccarat in Ian Fleming’s original novel, to Texas Hold ‘Em poker seems to be a bit of an oversimplification for American audiences, but it’s only a minor detail. Mads Mikkelson is brilliant as the villainous Le Chriffre, as is the rest of the principle cast – Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd, Jeffrey Wright’s Felix Leiter and Giancarlo Giannini’s René Mathis.
My biggest gripe with the film is its length. In much the same way that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight weighed itself down by one too many action sequences in the final act of the film (the ferry bombs), here director Martin Campbell gives us an extended finale in Venice. By this point, the film already feels like it has ended, with the assassination of Le Chriffre and Bond’s subsequent convalescence.
The Venice segment, with a lovely allusion to Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, does feel tacked on. Quantum Of Solace remains the shortest film in the Bond series, with a running time of 106 minutes, while Casino Royale is the longest film at 144 minutes. While this could have been evened out by placing the Venice segment at the start of the next film, I wouldn’t want to change how it eventually turned out. The very end scene of Casino Royale – the shooting of Mr. White – and the pre-credits car-chase sequence of Quantum Of Solace, are two of my favourite Bond moments.
One down, five to go.
Hit: The Name’s Bond…James Bond
Hidden Gem: Dinner Jackets
Vinyl Stylus 