(Spoilers ahead: Don’t gamble and think just because this Bond baddie has been around since the 50s that everyone is familiar with his game—keep your cards close to your chest and don’t spoil anything for new players.)
The stakes have been raised, and you’re sitting across from a man who weeps blood tears. His scarred, blue, near-opaque eye further masks his true intentions, making for an indecipherable poker face. What you do know is that his name refers to him being a genius with numbers and probabilities. If you don’t win this hand, you’ll lose more than simply your money.
With the deck stacked against James Bond, it is a wonder how he made it through one of earliest spy missions in one piece. “The Cypher” a.k.a. Le Chiffre was one of the main antagonists in the 1953 novel Casino Royale written by Ian Fleming, and he is the first major villain Agent 007 encounters in literary form. The book introduced Bond to the world, and popular entertainment—namely the spy genre itself—was shaken (not stirred) up forever. While the masses were easily seduced by Bond’s charm and suave bravado, it took a worthy opponent to put the secret agent on the map. With a name that could also mean “The Number,” Le Chiffre’s original book origins set him to be a devious, high-rolling criminal from the start.
In 1945, Le Chiffre was an inmate in the Dachau DP camp in the US Zone of Germany. Little is known of Le Chiffre’s activities at this time (nor is his real name provided), but the traumatic experiences left him scarred in more ways than one. For a period he goes mute, and it is unclear if it was a self-made vow of some kind or if it was the result of a physical assault. He eventually speaks again and is transferred to Alsace-Lorraine and Strasburg after being issued a stateless passport. He determines that he is perceived as nothing more than a number on a document, so he adopts the name of Le . Chiffre.
Over time, Le Chiffre grows into prominence and even becomes the paymaster for a trade union controlled by SMERSH, a Soviet counterintelligence agency. In addition to a mastery over accounting and predicting mathematically logical outcomes, the Frenchman hungered for a lavish lifestyle. Despite having a cold and calculating nature, his inner desires led him down dangerous paths. Using SMERSH funds, Le Chiffre invested in a string of brothels in France, thinking the world’s oldest profession would be a safe bet. Not long after the millions of francs were spent, a new French law outlawed prostitution, leaving paymaster in a financial crisis.
Taking the remaining SMERSH money, Le Chiffre enters the casino in Royale-les-Eaux with the intent to recover the lost funds. There, he hosts a Chemin de Fergame where he also serves as the banker—Le Chiffre also holds another advantage by being an expert in the card game, also known as Baccarat, MI6 throws a wrench into the scheme by deploying James Bond to play with the mission of bankrupting Le Chiffre. With the SMERSH operative cleaned out, the idea was for him to seek asylum from his superiors who would be after answers for the lost money. 007, a highly skilled baccarat player, would win, and Le Chiffre would be forced to go to the British government for refuge where he’d become an informant. It was a simple enough plan, but James Bond did something he isn’t known for - he lost.
A CIA agent present at the casino entrusts Bond with enough funds to re-enter the game, and this time, Le Chiffre isn’t so lucky. Out of cash and out of patience, Le Chiffre kidnaps Bond’s love interest, Vesper Lynd, to lure him in a trap. Le Chiffre has Bond stripped of his clothing and tied to a chair, threatening to torture the super spy in order to regain his money. It is during this sadistic session that Le Chiffre displays his true dark side. In the novel, he uses a carpet beater to strike Bond, inflicting unimaginable pain onto the agent. In the 2006 Casino Royale film where Le Chiffre is portrayed by Mads Mikkelsen, he uses a knotted rope to deal out the barbaric beatings. The movie adaptation is especially brutal and the torture nearly breaks Bond.
In the film, Le Chiffre demands to know the passwords that will grant him access to the funds, and he further threatens Bond as well as Vesper. Bloodied and semi-conscious, Bond asserts that his and Vesper’s death would ensure that Le Chiffre is left with no intel whatsoever and that his life will be forfeit to vengeful SMERSH operatives. Unfazed, Le Chiffre counters by reiterating the fact that Bond’s British government will protect him in exchange for information. Bond resists even more, leading his torturer to switch from a ship’s thick, knotted lanyard to a razor sharp knife. Before he can castrate Bond, Le Chiffre is shot and killed by a SMERSH agent.
Bond would later wake up in a medical facility and continue to establish a legacy of masterful spycraft. Future movies in the Daniel Craig-led Bond series would reveal Le Chiffre, among other Bond bad guys, to be an agent of Spectre, a mysterious and nefarious organization that frequently plots against Bond. In the video game version of the 2008 sequel Quantum of Solace, Le Chiffre’s birth name is listed as Jean Duran, and has al-Qaeda affiliations.
The 2006 movie also diverts from the book by having Le Chiffre lose millions in a failed airliner scheme. He goes on to be mentioned in Quantum of Solace and 2015’s Spectre. Le Chiffre’s first live action appearance was in the 1954 television adaptation of Casino Royale, played by Peter Lorre. This episode of the anthology series Climax! is of special significance as it is also the first screen adaptation of James Bond (played by Barry Nelson). Though the story is very similar to the novel, it is not considered part of the overall canon of Eon Productions, which had not been formed yet. Eon was the James Bond film production company until the rights were acquired by MGM Studios which produced the famous 007 film franchise and would later “remake” Casino Royale.
Columbia Pictures produced a parody of Casino Royale in 1967, starring David Niven as “Sir James Bond 007.” In this satirical take on the spy genre, Orson Welles portrayed Le Chiffre as SMERSH’s financial agent. Remaining mostly true to the source material, Welles’ Le Chiffre is also desperate to recover the funds he lost in a botched embezzlement scheme.
Le Chiffre’s most notable feature is the way he “cries blood.” This is due to a condition called haemolacria, which is commonly caused by extreme trauma. The origins of Le Chiffre’s tears of blood are shrouded in mystery, but there was a case in our reality of a teen boy who suffered from the same ailment. The Tennessee native teen was reported as having no medical event to cause the blood tears, but rather he had a curious, naturally-occurring condition. As enigmatic as the condition itself was, the bleeding mysteriously stopped on its own, leaving physicians baffled. In another bizarre happenstance, one of the boy’s doctors was named Dr. James Flemming—a strange coincidence to be so similarly named to Ian Fleming, or simply a peculiar twist of fate? Ever the analyst, Le Chiffre would surely deduce every possibility.
Villain ranking: UNCONSCIONABLE
His logical mind and deathly cold demeanor makes Le Chiffre a skilled opponent but it is his inner ruthlessness that unleashed a barbaric beating on James Bond—with blood streaming down his unrepentant face, Le Chiffre paved the way for an insidious legion of Bond villains to come.
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