I thought the point was he realized he’d been betrayed during the poker game. He should have won that earlier round. Only Vespa or Mathis could have betrayed him and he let his emotions cloud his judgement and assumed it must be Mathis.
At the end of the movie M made the point “you’ve learned your lesson. You can’t trust anyone.”
Could it be that it was not a QWERTY keyboard? I’ve been told an alternate is popular in Europe.
It’s not a QWERTY, it’s a telephone-style pad. Looked like he pressed the right numbers to me - the password would have been 837737.
When he enters it in, he is clearly pressing the 4 for the second E, when entering it in at the casino. One minor nitpick in an otherwise fine movie.
Stranger
Now I feel bad… a little.
Just found out today that Kevin McClory died on 20 November 2006, aged 80. So, no more “Thunderball” remakes.
Sir Rhosis
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
[li]What tipped off Bond to Mathis’s treachery?: I think he realized that someone must have betrayed him with regard to Le Chiffre’s “tell” and it had to be Mathis (assuming, as he did at that point, that Vesper didn’t). [/li][/QUOTE]
I don’t like this though. He is so sure that Chiffre could not have fooled him by such a simple act as faking an obvious tell, that he assumes someone who has been a lot of help to him, is a traitor.
Well, M did tell him not to trust anyone. The whole “tell” hook was quite honestly a bit of a cheat; a gambler as accomplished as Le Chiffre should have known about and suppressed a tell that blatant, to the point that I was convinced it was an intentional trick until Bond caught him doing it unintentionally after his $5M buy-in. There are a couple of other fairly flimsy premises (did a background check seriously not pick up on Vesper’s “French Algerian boyfriend”? Why mess around with Bond having to gamble against Le Chiffre, instead of just snatching him and threatening him with disclosure after his big loss with the puts?) but that’s just a part of the story, which is obviously not as tight as a Len Deighton or intricately plotted as John Le Carre.
Stranger
Hope this is not too much of a zombification, but I just now saw it, and loved it.
But…
Who was the man who killed Le Chiffle? Was that Mr. White? Was it Mr. White who ended up with the briefcase at the end of the Venice scene?
I’m just bad at recognizing people. It’s quite sad 
(Oh, and poker was completely the right game for them to play, in that large portions of the audience actually understands it. Baccarat would have been a disaster.)
I’m going to try and resurect this as well, since the DVD just came out.
It was the “friend” (their contact, not Mathis) in montangue (?) that killed Le Chiffle and left Bond and Vesper alive… that’s why he was stunned and removed in one of the initial post recovery scenes.
What I didn’t quite understand was why Bond was using M’s accounts and computers… you’d think he’d have access to his own stuff… the only thing I could guess was that (on the second occurance) he was giving M and team the info that they wanted to get from the guy Bond ended up killing in the first sequence.
Loved the expression on Bond’s face when the tanker didn’t explode and came to a halt next to the airplane… that’s good stuff there. (and he still got taken into custody by the locals…even better)
Having just seen this yesterday: Mr. White was the guy in the beginning that set up the meeting with Le Chiffre and the warlord. When Le Chiffre stole the money and tried to get the card game going, it was Mr. White who killed him, saying “It’s more important that we have people we can trust” or something. So, Mr. White was bent. Mr. White was the guy at the end who has the briefcase and was shot by “Bond. James Bond.”
Mathis was bent as well (Le Chiffre: “Turns out your friend Mathis…is my friend Mathis.”). Mathis was the one that stunned and removed in the post recovery scene. M asked Bond if they should let Mathis go now that they knew Vesper was also turned, and he said no, just b/c Vesper was dirty didn’t mean Mathis was clean. IOW, keep interrogating him. That’s what led M to say “You don’t trust anyone, do you?”
yeah, I watched it yesterday… I’m getting ‘mathis’ confused… I thought that was the CIA agent…
well, there’s nothing on tonite, will rewatch…
We don’t know that Mathis was bent. Bond suspects him, because he realizes someone had to tell Le Chiffre that Bond had figured out his tell, and he assumes that it couldn’t have been Vesper. But as we find it, this wasn’t a safe assumption. Le Chiffre claims that Mathis is working for him, but he could have been lying in hopes of making MI6 eliminate a useful agent, or to give more cover to the real turn-coat. It’s questionable as to why Le Chiffre would need to lie at that point in the movie, as he’s got Bond entirely at his mercy, but perhaps he originally intended to beat the code out of Bond and leave him alive, but crippled. It’s also possible that Mathis really is crooked, but I think he’d have met a more definite fate in the movie if he was a bad guy. I expect the character to make a reappearance in a future Bond movie.
simster, the CIA guy was Felix Lieter.
Huh. Never thought of it that way. I didn’t think that Le Chiffre knew Vesper was turned. Unless you mean there was another turn-coat Le Chiffre was using.