CASINO ROYALE'S COLD OPEN IS FOUR MINUTES OF GENIUS

I cried after the cold opener of Casino Royale, real tears, and lots of them. There were some contextual factors in play; it was the premiere of the film, and I’d just gotten out of hospital a few hours earlier after having a heart attack. I’d been in hospital for the last two weeks (and knew I’d have to go back) but had made it to the premiere with some hours to spare, and everything was being enjoyed extremely.

I’d been to the beach, I’d eaten a schnitzel, and now I was watching a Bond film. All of it wanted to make me cry, but especially the start of Casino Royale, which I thought was four of the greatest minutes in modern film. With the Spectre trailer being released yesterday, I revisited Casino Royale’s opening today and I still think is a towering triumph.

We start with a black and white shot of a building in Prague. The frame is shadow-filled and lowly-slung. Senior MI6 agent Dryden emerges for a car and looks around suspiciously. He’s shot from underneath, and looking every bit like Orson Welles from The Third Man. As he ascends via an external lift, we see Dryden again from a similarly extreme angle, this time above, with shadows crossing his face. This now obviously and deliberate noir filmmaking. We’re going back in time. As Dryden strides into his office he finds his safe open, and Bond waiting for him. “M doesn’t really mind you earning a little money on the side, Dryden. She’d just prefer it if it wasn’t selling secrets.”

This is some classic, cold war shit. Dryden is unfazed, and unworried. He knows Bond is inexperienced (benefits of being a section chief), and Dryden is a master of a game that men like him have been been playing since the end of the Second World War. But wait, Bond intimates that he has killed Dryden’s contact, a swarthy subcontinental that we meet in a flash back set in Pakistan. That man is in a fight with Bond, but this is no tête-à-tête, this is an existential battle, like the one that Private Mellish lost in Saving Private Ryan. Doors are broken, so too walls. Every punch sounds like a porterhouse thrown on a counter-top. Such a fight never existed in the time of George Smiley.

Back to Prague and Dryden has decided perhaps Bond is a threat. He pulls his gun and tries to shoot Bond, but…no bullets. You think I’m fucking stupid, Hans? Then Dryden choose his last words, deciding to ask how his Pakistani contact died. No geopolitics or hubris, but the question of how a man that Dryden cared for died. Turns out he didn’t die well. Bond is not yet a surgeon but a blunt instrument and had to beat, strangle AND drown Dryden’s contact.

With the contact dead (or so Bond thought) we see the longest shot of the sequence by a factor of three. It’s Bond looking at the lifeless man. Bond is looking at death. We’ve veered wildly from the well-trodden paths of spy fiction. We’re not supposed to care how anyone like this contact died; we’re usually just to know that they’re off the chessboard. When we come back to Prague, Dryden has now has reconciled to his fate. He has another moment of humanity, concerning himself again with the welfare of another, this time Bond, explaining that he shouldn't worry about how his first kill made him feel, his second kill is…BANG. Dryden dead. Yes. Considerably.

We’ve transitioned from the coolly familiar to the violently chaotic in three minutes. It's as though we're a British agent dropped into Kabul in 2001 armed with little more than conversational Russian and a deep understanding of how the Gentleman’s Game is played. To ice the cake, the whole sequence is shot in a very photochemical-looking black and white, until Bond shoots Dryden’s reanimated contact. Then the screen is covered in thick, vibrant and very realistic looking blood. What a great sequence, what a great film, what a great night.