Sci Fi Bytes: Nuggets, anecdotes, trivia, and more from the worlds of sci fi and fantasy television.
Sir Sean Connery passed away this last weekend, leaving behind a renowned film legacy that spans over half a century. One of the roles he is best known for, of course, is the super-spy James Bond, first portraying the character in the classic 1962 film Dr. No. He would go on to reprise the role six more times on the big screen before moving on to other roles including such iconic genre appearances as the father of Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as well as Ramirez in The Highlander. But Sean Connery was not the first person to play Bond in a live-action adaptation of the Ian Fleming character. American actor Barry Neslon first portrayed the super-spy on American television on CBS in the 1950s, though that production has been mostly forgotten.
It was in the CBS anthology series Climax! that audiences were first introduced to James Bond when the show adapted Fleming’s Casino Royale (the first Bond book) a year after it hit the bookshelves (the network paid Fleming $1,000 for the rights to the story). And this was a very different interpretation of the character than we would later come to expect. The CBS adaptation follows the first part of the novel fairly closely, though it cuts off before the point when Bond goes off with the girl and considers retiring from his life as a secret agent. The TV version is also played pretty straightforward as a thriller without any of the spy fi gadgets that would become a trademark of the movie franchise (almost certainly due to budgetary restrictions). It also never refers to Bond as Agent 007, and the character is an agent of “Combined Intelligence”, not Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The episode does give Bond a colorful villain, though, as horror icon Peter Lorre gleefully plays the evil Le Chiffre, effortlessly adding an element of menace to his character.
Bond himself is not quite the suave and debonair agent that we would later see in the movies, especially with Nelson’s very American, peach-pie looks. But he still has a way with the ladies and he comes off as a formidable enough protagonist. The episode is not particularly Earth-shattering but it does provide a fun little retro-trip to television of the 1950s. It is believed that CBS was considering an ongoing series based on the character and that this episode on Climax! acted as a back-door pilot. But nothing ever came from it and it would be another eight years before Bond would show up again in a live-action production, this time on the big screen with Dr. No. The 1954 episode aired live (typical for television at that time) and was thought lost for many years after that, but a kinescope (a filmed recording of the television broadcast) surfaced in the 1980s. It has since slipped into the public domain and you can watch the full episode on YouTube to get a look at a very early attempt to bring Ian Fleming’s now world-renown secret agent to life (which could have made a monumental shift in film history if it has continued as a TV series).
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