On further reflection, this Bond is too good at what he does to accurately reflect the character at what is supposedly the beginning of his 00 career. He’s pretty casual about playing games with M (something even the flippant Roger Moore hesitated to - saving his horseplay for Q) and the whole hotel check-in thing (“He already knows who I am”) doesn’t work because supposedly Bond is still a relative nobody; a novice 00. Who would know or care who he was? This is a bit conflated with an element from the novel From Russia with Love, in which Bond has to travel openly to Istanbul to make contact with a Russian cipher clerk. In the novel Casino Royale, there was no consideration of trying to “recruit” Le Chiffre, just keep him from recovering the money he’d misinvested on behalf of his employers. Personally, I kinda wonder why they don’t just kidnap him, hold him for a week or two until his finances are well and truly screwed beyond repair and say “Okay, you can join our witness protection or we’ll just drop you off at noon under the Eiffel Tower and let you take your chances.”
Novel-Bond’s is indeed blown (how is unclear, though Vesper may have had a hand in it - Mathis is a recurring novel character and his loyalties are never in doubt) and he survives a bomb attack (nowhere near an airport, though). Novel-Bond isn’t a show-off.
Good points from the novels, though: Bond likes nailing married women, being something of a cad who wants to avoid emotional entanglements. He had considered resigning at the end of the novel Casino Royale, but this was because of this epiphany he’d had about the futility of trying to be a hero while having his mommy-daddy button repeatedly rung, and not because Vesper was making him all squooshy inside. “The bitch is dead now” was the final line of the novel, and the movie should have ended there as well, sparing us M’s “she really loved you” post-hoc analysis. Bond’s attitude toward women in the novel is the same as his attitude toward luck - something to be softly wooed or savagely ravaged, not pandered to or pursued. This is what was supposed to (eventually) make Tracy Draco all the more extraordinary - the first woman Bond actually falls for.
Anyway, the big significance of the novel’s baccarat game is that Bond does get wiped out and has a rough couple of moments when he gets an envelope from Felix containing a “Marshall Plan” 32,000 Francs (there had been a recent currency revision and the amount is alternately referred to as 32 million Francs. Bond like reporting his expenses in the modern thousands but personally liked thinking of himself as a millionaire, though the overall value was the same). When he makes the huge bet, there’s a whole scene where one of Le Chiffre’s henchmen slips in behind Bond and, in the crowded room, presses a trick gun against his back and whispers a threat to blow his spine out unless Bond withdraws it. I can see why this was unfilmable, since having people crowded around a poker table wouldn’t fly. The digitalis poisoning and recovery is not quite good enough as a replacement, though. Bond wins that hand (with a nine) and a follow-up hand, taking Le Chiffre’s remaining 10,000 Francs.
Minor note; with the screaming and shooting and such when the black guys show up to threaten Le Chiffre and get into a brawl with Bond, were all the guests out or asleep?
