Instead, we get a pair of simple visual motifs - playing cards and crosshairs - that are repeated with increasingly invention and complexity. This blending and subverting continues through the opening credits, which features the expected animation but no dancing girls. In the prologue, Campbell subverted our expectations by delaying the reveal of that iconic gun barrel, so that when it finally came - within the narrative rather than disjointedly at the start of it - the image was exhilarating. Recurring ingeniously throughout Casino Royale is a mix of the old and the new. And the song is enhanced considerably by the visuals of this sequence, which do more than tell us the names of the people who made the picture they also tell a story.

The lyrics by Cornell and composer David Arnold are no great shakes (though I do like the verse 'I've seen this diamond cut through harder men'), but the melody has a drive and focus to match Daniel Craig's James Bond, to whom we've recently been introduced in the startling prologue. Casino Royale's theme, sung by Chris Cornell and appropriately titled 'You Know My Name,' is a pretty good one, not quite great (it loses me during the bridge) but better than the Alicia Keys atrocity that kicks off Quantum of Solace. Most of them blur together or else have been forgettable, the exceptions being 'You Only Live Twice' and 'For Your Eyes Only,' songs more memorable that the movies they precede.įor all the many theme songs in Bond history, nearly all of them revolve around a basic motif - living, or dying, or living and dying, or living let dying, or dying let living. The splashy 60s animation, the dancing girls, the pop hit - Goldfinger had all the elements that have been staples ever since.

At the least, that's the one everybody remembers. Perhaps a reader with a better sense of Bond lore can either confirm or correct me, but I believe the first true credit sequence in the franchise began with Goldfinger. That leaves us with, um, the credits.an entire post, really? Absolutely, when the sequence is as justifiably famous as the Bond series' has always been, and when it conveys information as skillfully as the one in Casino Royale. Originally I'd intended to analyze the opening credits and Act I together, but I'm putting off the latter for next time.

Opening song casino royale