Campbell’s Casino Royal e reimagines Le Chiffre as more of a direct counterpart to Bond, a reckless and feckless gambler who takes massive risks in the hope that they will pay off. While the small scale of the character’s ambitions played against Fleming’s attempt to portray him as a sinister father figure, they work much better here. Here, he loses rebel funds in a botched get-rich-quick scam. In the novel, he wasted union money of a string of brothels. Instead, Le Chiffre is a man outside his depth desperately struggling to stay afloat long enough to replace the money he lost from his employer. He isn’t plotting to destroy London or conquer the world, or even to play kingmaker. In particular, Le Chiffre feels relatively small fry when measured against various Bond villains, whether in the novels or the books. Big in Live and Let Die, before managing to fully realise it with Hugo Drax in Moonraker, but Le Chiffre never quite felt fully formed in the novel. Fleming would get considerably closer to the archetype with Mr.
In particular, Le Chiffre does not seem like a fully-formed Bond villain. When Fleming wrote Casino Royale, he had yet to fully realise the tropes and clichés of his Bond novels, which would then be translated into another distinct sets of rules and expectations for the feature films.
