Back to the very beginning.
This is a lie. "The beginning" would surely be a review of Ian Fleming's 1953 novel Casino Royale. But we can skip that. The books have, for all but the most obsessed of us who pegged the ending of No Time To Die the moment the rumor mill told us the working title was Shatterhand (hi), faded into obscurity. (Besides, it's far too much effort for me to hold the novel open while I type this, as opposed to just having a movie running in a different window.) So too can we skip the "Card Sense Jimmy Bond" 1954 American telemovie Casino Royale, the long strange path that the rights to the Fleming novels took to land in the hands of Mr. Broccoli and Mr. Saltzman, and how director Terence Young and writer Richard Maibaum (who had both worked on a 1958 World War II film called, uh, No Time To Die [oh, and take a gander at that cast list]) were brought in to hurl James Bond onto our screens one October evening in 1962.
