The story of how this outsider in the Bond canon came to be made is as strange, mad and unlikely as the plot of any of Ian Fleming’s books and the fact that it even made it to the cinemas speaks of a dogged persistence of which Blofeld, Goldfinger or any of a dozen other Bond villains would be justifiably proud. Well, I say six films – there were actually seven, because there was that one, the unofficial one, the black sheep in the Bond family – and its name was Casino Royale. By the time I was born in 1970, the James Bond films were already well established, having enjoyed almost a decade on the silver screen, two Bonds and six films.
