Collecting Ingredients
Casting More Than Runes
Did Ian Fleming really poach bits of a recent British horror film for his novel Goldfinger? He might have. It wouldn't have been his first offense, nor would it be his last. Aside from borrowing bits of business and broad themes from Night of the Demon, he also may have had the actor who played the villain in that horror film in mind, to play the heavy in a movie he was trying to imagine.
Fleming was an inveterate collector of disparate bits and bobs which he would carefully weave into the procession of characters, settings and plot-twists that kept readers turning the pages of his books. After all, Fleming’s books were set in real locales which the author knew intimately, or at the very least cities which he had spent a hectic weekend learning to navigate. Only on rare occasions did he invent names for his characters. Red Grant, Blofeld, Goldfinger and Pussy Galore, were all real people whom Fleming had met, had gone to school with, or heard stories about. Even "James Bond" was an author whose magnum opus, Birds of the West Indies, occupied a place of honor on his desk.
Now that Fleming was actively involved in churning out books with a hope of one day turning them into money-making films, it only made sense to collect personalities and narrative strands which had already been proven to be dramatically effective.
When he sat down to write the story of Tatiana Romanova for From Russia, With Love in 1956, he must have remembered the audience’s immediate sympathy for another lovely orphan girl living under the thumb of a diabolical tyrant, even if five years had passed since Disney’s Cinderella had exited theaters.
He may have recalled the cheers of delight that rang out when the poor girl's faithful hound Bruno finally bared his teeth and stood up to the devious Lucifer, just as he no doubt remembered his own reaction while watching a pair of jealous stepsisters shred Cinderella’s makeshift gown, leaving the tattered remnants clinging to the poor girl's body by a single strap. Giving serious thought to the latter scene, he made a mental note to set at least one chapter in a camp where jealous, hot-tempered Romani girls battle each other to the death, to win the man they love.
A year later he would write Dr. No based on his own outline for a proposed TV series called Commander Jamaica, though it was mostly based on Disney’s 1954 feature 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In fact, in an early draft of the series pilot, Dr. No was to command a futuristic rogue submarine that wreaked havoc in the Caribbean. While substituting a subterranean lair for the submarine made the concept of a film adaptation less daunting, Fleming still clung to the basic plot of the Disney adventure, making his sixth Bond book culminate in a jailbreak and a fight with a giant squid.
Having already plundered Disney’s Sleeping Beauty for From Russia, With Love, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Dr. No, Fleming may have decided to select a relatively inconspicuous source for his inspiration. If so, he could hardly have done better than Night of the Demon. The taut, unpretentious thriller about the supernatural opened late in 1957, a few months before Ian Fleming made his annual pilgrimage to Jamaica to write his next book.
After a violent introductory scene, the story of Night of the Demon gets underway with a coincidence involving transatlantic air travel. Something similar happens at the start of Fleming’s Goldfinger when Bond reminisces about his recent deadly assignment in Mexico, moments before being recognized by an old acquaintance at the Miami airport where his flight to London has been delayed. The result of this chance encounter is a preliminary run-in with Mr. Goldfinger.
Much like Auric Goldfinger, the villain of Night of the Demon, Dr. Karswell (played by versatile character-actor Niall MasGinnis), is a smug know-it-all who, with grand condescension, lectures the hero of the film about his mistaken notions concerning “coincidence.” The hero (played by Dana Andrews) later conducts a clandestine search of Karswell’s opulent manor, only to be interrupted by a cat. In Night of the Demon the cat shape-shifts into a panther. In Goldfinger the cat which follows Bond as he prowls through the millionaire's mansion, is transformed into Odd Job's dinner.
With movies on his mind as he wrote Goldfinger, Fleming had also begun to venture into casting. Late in the book he drops hints suggesting Cary Grant and Elizabeth Taylor as James Bond and Pussy Galore, or at least he plants the notion in the reader's mind that they would make an ideal pairing. The Auric Goldfinger of Fleming's novel has the voice and bearing of a well-bred but supercillious Englishman, very much like the cult leader, Dr. Karswell, as played by Niall MacGinnis in Night of the Demon. Although eventually portrayed in the film Goldfinger by German actor Gert Frobe, the celluloid Auric Goldfinger ended up bearing a strong physical resemblance to MacGinnes, who is best remembered today for playing Zeus in Jason and the Argonauts.
If Fleming did see the classic horror flick, the early innings of Goldfinger surely owe at least a modest debt to Charles Bennett’s script for Jacque Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, based on the short story Casting the Runes by M. R. James. Beyond its opening chapters, Fleming’s book turns into a freewheeling adaptation of the fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin” with a side-order of Sigmund Freud, seasoned with a generous dash of Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge.
It may be Fleming's ultimate goulash.
The Curse of Coincidence
Examining the Roots of Goldfinger
As Fleming settled into a new formula for his Bond novels after Diamonds Are Forever, he seemed to adhere to the familiar recipe for a lucky marriage from the Victorian Era: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.”
The Bond novels always had a reputation for being a fashionable shade of blue, although the timing was entirely understandable. Fleming's Casino Royale arrived in bookstores nine months ahead of the premier issue of Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine, at a moment when work was feverishly underway to develop a safe and effective oral contraceptive.
Where the Clubland heroes of Ian Fleming’s youth might have celebrated the successful conclusion of a case by guiding a very special young lady around a dance floor, Fleming’s hero ushered his lady of the moment toward the bedroom, even if the pair had met only recently, and the case wasn’t even quite over yet. Although when read today, Fleming’s measured descriptions of Bond’s romantic interludes can suggest a bodice-ripper romance written by an octogenarian dowager, the books were once considered fairly racy.
In From Russia, With Love, the imperiled princess and the dragon from the timeless fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty” provided the dose of antiquity for his new formula, while other plot-points and characters hinted at another fairy tale altogether, one which, if not exactly brand-new, had been brought to the screen only a few years earlier by Walt Disney. Something that was unabashedly borrowed was a plot device from Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, a 1946 film in which Cary Grant convinces Ingrid Bergman to climb into bed with enemy agent Claude Rains. Fleming acknowledged the debt to Hitchcock by embedding the word “notorious” three times in the text of From Russia, With Love, all within the introductory section where a plan to have an attractive young cipher clerk slip into James Bond's bed, is hatched and approved.
In his follow-up, Dr. No., Fleming builds his story on the bedrock of the classic tales of Theseus and the Labyrinth and the sacrifice of Andromeda, while simultaneously borrowing the outline of Disney’s recent live-action adventure, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The trace-evidence for the latter source is acknowledged by the author when he has Bond burst into song as he first spies Honey, and then battle a giant squid with a knife and a spear near the end. In addition, Fleming names his villain "Julius," (the English form of "Jules") and sneaks "Nautilus" into the narrative as the name of the magazine which Honey consults to learn which shells are most valuable.
Judged alongside its two immediate predecessors, Goldfinger can seem a different kettle of fish. Although the story may rest on the foundation of the classic fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin,” (Goldfinger is a wee red-haired man who grants golden wishes and revs up a particularly sinister spinning wheel), nothing stands out as having been borrowed from any recent motion picture. Nothing, that is, unless we consider the case for the horror film Night of the Demon, released in the UK a few months before Fleming set to work on his first draft of Goldfinger.
Night of the Demon (released in the US as Curse of the Demon) was directed by Jacques Tourneur from a script written by frequent Hitchcock collaborator Charles Bennett, based on a 1911 story called “Casting the Runes.”
I decided to take a closer look at the film after seeing a clip of Niall MacGinnis as the diabolical Dr. Karswell on YouTube, in which the Irish actor embodies the sort of supercilious self-proclaimed authority that would have made him a natural for the role of Auric Goldfinger, as written by Fleming - if only MacGinnis had been much, much shorter. On the other hand, as Walt Disney was currently demonstrating with his live-action production Darby O’Gill and the Little People, size was often simply a matter of perspective.
After finally getting a chance to see Night of the Demon in its entirety a few years ago I was struck by how much it has in common with Goldfinger, considering the fact that it has nothing at all to do with plundering the depository at Fort Knox, or even with gold per se.
The horror film does, however, delve deeply into the matter of coincidence. A psychic debunker from America, Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews), is thrown together with the story’s love-interest Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummins), through the happenstance of seating arrangements on a transatlantic flight. He next has a (supposedly) unplanned meeting with the villainous Karswell at the British Museum, where they discuss the very nature of “coincidence.”
Late in the film Holden secretly prowls around Karswell's ornate mansion (the handiwork of longtime Bond production designer Ken Adam) only to have his investigation interrupted by a spooky cat.
If little of this rings a bell with fans of the film version of Goldfinger, rest assured that it all connects neatly with events in Fleming’s novel, which gets underway with a chance encounter in an airport lounge and is famously divided into sections named “Happenstance,” “Coincidence," and "Enemy Action.” Fleming also includes an incident in which a pesky cat observes Bond’s stealthy reconnaissance at Goldfinger’s country house. Being Auric Goldfinger’s pet it is, of course, a ginger cat.
Happily, it is possible to watch the Tourneur film on YouTube for free (Try searching for it under the American title: Curse of the Demon) and note not only the bits that may have influenced Fleming’s novel, but a few scenes that seem to predict touches which were added to the movie version of Goldfinger.
The film opened in England a few months before Fleming began writing his latest thriller. Of course Fleming may not have seen the film, in which case and any resemblence is merely a spooky coincidence.
The Manufactured Bond
A New Model for a New Era
Seven years after taking his first bow on stage as a seaman in the chorus of South Pacific, Sean Connery was ready to strap on a Walther and slip into James Bond’s Saville Row jacket.
In the intervening years he had honed his acting skills in repertory theatre and snagged supporting roles in a dozen films. Where he had truly begun to shine, however, was television, ever since starring as the doomed boxer in Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight in 1957. In 1961 alone he played Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Tolstoy’s Count Vronsky, and Terrence Rattigan’s Alexander the Great on the small screen, while squeezing in featured movie roles in a service comedy and a gangster film.
After bowing out of the Bond series in 1967 Sean Connery would be replaced by an Australian model with no acting experience other than one walk-on part in a cheeseparing European Bond-knock-off and a few pantomimed TV commercials for Fry’s Chocolates. Flush with cash from his modeling career, George Lazenby dropped in on Connery’s barber and his tailor before making his well-groomed entrance at the offices of Eon Productions, where he announced his availability to replace their departing star in the next James Bond movie.
Peter Hunt, assigned to direct the sixth Bond film in the series, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, thought Lazenby just might deserve the gig simply for having conned producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman into believing that he was a real actor. After agreeing to give Lazenby his shot, the Eon team put together a brilliant production with a solid supporting cast.
For the first time ever in a Bond film, audiences would hear both the archvillain of the piece and the leading lady speaking all of their own lines in English, instead of being dubbed by suitable voice actors. In fact the only key player whose actual voice was not used in the film is Gabriele Ferzetti. His lines as Tracy’s father Marc-Ange Draco were replaced by David de Keyser. No other role was dubbed substantially, unless we count Bond, who is supplied with the posh, precise tones of George Baker during the sizable slice of the film when he must pass himself off as Sir Hillary Bray.
In spite of his own inexperience, underlined by the cast of veteran actors surrounding him, Lazenby does not embarrass himself in the role. While he does notr move with Connery’s effortless grace nor speak with Connery’s deadpan condescension, he does, as my son likes to point out, “Stick the landing.” He plays a suddenly-stricken widower believably enough to permit the audience to share in his tragic loss.
Otherwise I suspect that the Saturday Review’s dismissal of Connery’s replacement in 1969 as “a callow youth” may have been the most apt appraisal of that year’s 007. He seems old enough to be a fledgling agent embarking on a career in intelligence work, but not one who has already saved the world several times over.
After paying Sean Connery a princely sum to start the ball rolling again in Diamonds are Forever, Eon would fall back on the redoubtable Roger Moore, three years older than Connery and already engaged in a second career of replacing other actors in popular franchises - on television.
Thus far there have been no further experiments in manufacturing a new James Bond from scratch.
Connery’s Big Year
Or How Success Ended a Promising Streak
In 1961 a London newspaper polled readers to discover which actor the public wanted to see cast as James Bond in a planned series of films based on the Ian Fleming thrillers.
Notable among the also-rams was Roger Moore, who had played Ivanhoe a few years earlier in a Saturday morning program aimed at a younger audience, and was just ending a brief run as Beau Maverick in a Western series imported from the US. Surprisingly, it was a relative newcomer named Sean Connery who topped the list of hopeful actors. The poll happened to be taken just as Connery was coming off a banner year.
Few of those who cast ballots would have known about his leading role in Macbeth for Canadian television that year, although he had won the part based on something that had kept millions of Brits tuning in week after week, one year earlier.
In 1960 the BBC embarked on an ambitious staging of the Bard’s history plays, to be telecast live, mostly in hour-long chunks, once each week over the course of 15 weeks. According to Julian Glover, who played Westmorland and assorted minor roles in An Age of Kings, actors were promised:
You get one really good part and play what you’re told in all the other episodes.
Glover’s only regret was not getting the one role he coveted most, Harry Percy, “Hotspur of the north,” the part that went to Sean Connery, who played Hotspur and only Hotspur across four episodes.
Although Connery adds a jolt of adrenaline to the production whenever he turns up, by episode three his Hotspur transforms into a full-tilt Medieval rock star, prowling the halls of his castle like a caged panther and bouncing into bed to tease his wife as his blouse falls open to tempt her with his manly chest.
In a 1945 production Laurence Oliver may have started the tradition of giving Hotspur a nervous stammer on the letter “w.” While Connery honors this tradition, words seem to be spinning off Hotspur’s tongue at such a fantastic clip that when he brings his lips together to form a “w,” syllables seem to jamb up in his mouth for an instant before tumbling out.
It is such a showy part that I wondered if there might be an outtake from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in which, before firing a bullet into the abdomen of Dr. Henry Jones, Sr. (Connery), the villainous Walter Donovan (Julian Glover) halts for a moment to growl, “This is for Hotspur.”
In addition to snagging him the lead in Macbeth, Connery’s flamboyant turn as Hotspur a year earlier may have led BBC director Rudolph Cartier to cast him as Alexander the Great in Terence Rattigan’s Adventure Story, and shortly afterward as the passionate Count Vronsky, romancing Claire Bloom in Anna Karenina.
Busy as he was on television, Connery also found time to create a stir on the big screen in the UK that year in The Frightened City as a playboy-gangster in London’s underworld, who undergoes a last-minute change of heart. However, it was in a service comedy with Alfie Bass called On the Fiddle that he caught the eye of the film’s editor, Peter Hunt. Knowing that producers Broccoli and Saltzman were searching for the perfect actor to play James Bond, Hunt thought he might have found their man. Albert R. Broccoli’s wife Dana agreed with the choice after her husband asked her to watch a print of Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People.
However, while quickly making a name for himself with British audiences, Connery remained almost a complete unknown in America. The Frightened City had not caught on with US filmgoers. Only a handful of adults were likely to recall him as the charming young groundskeeper in a Disney flop or as the snarling, virile thug in Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure.
Any vestige of his anonymity was about to disappear towards the end of 1961 when Sean Connery was officially announced as the big screen’s first James Bond.
Dr. No premiered October 5, 1962 at the London Pavilion with its producers, director, star and author Ian Fleming in attendance. The first Bond title out of the gate would end its run in 1963 as the fifth highest-grossing film in the UK that year. Making its debut exactly one year and five days later, From Russia With Love would soar to the top of the UK box office chart.
In the wake of an advertising blitz which included a barnstorming tour by its star, Dr No finally reached American shores in May 1963, where it was a moderate success. The film would double its take in re-release in 1965 when paired with the more recent From Russia With Love, a film which, during its solo tour of the US in 1964, had taken in more than twice as much as its predecessor.
American moviegoers arriving late to the parade in 1965 had the chance to catch up with the Bond saga from the very beginning, while waiting for Goldfinger to make its way to a local cinema. Released in America during Christmas week of 1964, the addictively popular third Bond film played to packed houses, often for weeks at a time, as prints percolated slowly through the country. Meanwhile, Thunderball was already chugging along the production pipeline, en route to its big splash in late December 1965.
Heralded by a one-hour television special, The Incredible World of James Bond, airing on NBC one month ahead of the premiere, Thunderball would be the first Bond film to open simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic in a tidal wave of Bondmania.
For two years in a row, film distributors named Sean Connery the top box office draw in the world. The actor clearly had a tiger by the tail. Now he had to consider just how one went about letting go of it.
Laying the Golden Egg
Or Not Quite Ready to Leave the Nest
I was in high school when I first read Ian Fleming’s Incredible Creation, a cheap paperback which reached the book racks of corner drugstores just in time to cash in on the Bond Bandwagon, a few months after Fleming’s death. The book consisted of two parts, an essay by Jacquelyn Friedman and an introductory memoir penned by Paul Antony, a man sometimes described as Ian Fleming’s occasional drinking partner.
In Paul Antony’s view, the death of Fleming’s father when Ian was only eight years old may have stunted the boy’s emotional development. As evidence, Antony cited an occasion when he had noticed the adult Ian “reading a boy’s comic with obvious enjoyment.” Of course the 14-year-old version of me wanted to know which comic book he was reading, because one candidate had immediately popped into my head: Walt Disney’s “Uncle Scrooge.”
By that age I had already come across the reference to Walt Disney squirreled away in the pages of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, though I had not yet read You Only Live Twice where a mention of Disney’s California amusement park lay waiting. Several more years would pass before I would learn about the connection between Fleming’s friend Roald Dahl and the Disney organization, or Fleming’s fear that someone might connect the flying car in Disney’s Absent-Minded Professor with his own Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
However, a year earlier I had read Goldfinger, in which the vertically-challenged villain pours out his heart to James Bond:
Mr. Bond, all my life I have been in love. I have been in love with gold. I love its colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness.
I love the texture of gold, that soft sliminess that I have learnt to gauge so accurately by touch that I can estimate the fineness of a bar to within one carat.
And I love the warm tang it exudes when I melt it down into a true golden syrup.
If Auric Goldfinger’s ode to gold invites comparison with any other confession in modern literature it is surely the credo of Scrooge McDuck:
No man is poor who can do what he likes to do once in a while!
And I like to dive around in my money like a porpoise! And burrow through it like a gopher! And toss it up and let it hit me on the head!
If they had been been published in reverse order, I would be tempted to call Uncle Scrooge’s speech a lampoon of Goldfinger’s.
And make no mistake, it wasn’t just money of any stripe that Scrooge McDuck coveted - it was the golden kind. By the time Fleming’s novel Goldfinger rolled off the presses, Uncle Scrooge had gone “Back to the Klondike,” sought “The Seven Cities of Cibola,” escaped a “Golden Fleecing,” and pointed a rocket ship at a “Twenty-Four Carat Moon.”
Scrooge kept his golden hoard in a concrete money bin which was in constant peril of being robbed by a gang of cartoonish criminals known as the Beagle Boys. The Beagles were a clan of single-minded recidivists, repeatedly paroled or otherwise on the loose from the criminal justice system, who were forever drawn to Scrooge’s money bin like moths to a searchlight.
While there was no real-world Uncle Scrooge in possession of a squat gray structure containing heaps of gold, there was a certain Uncle Sam who was widely known to keep one.
For his breakout thriller, From Russia, With Love, Fleming had adapted Disney’s 1950 Cinderella as a spy thriller, spliced to an even more sinister version of the climax of “Sleeping Beauty.” His follow-up, Doctor No, was essentially Disney’s 1954 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, rethought as a jailbreak from an island prison instead of a submarine, with a side-order of Green Mansions and scraps from Robert Graves's The Greek Myths.
After tapping two Disney movies in succession to energize his latest Bond thrillers, Fleming may have decided to search out a different category of Disney property for his follow-up, although, as George Lucas pointed out in a preface to Uncle Scrooge: His Life and Times, Carl Barks’s Uncle Scrooge stories very nearly were movies, or at least storyboards for movies.
They have a clear beginning, middle, and end, and operate in scenes, unlike other comic strips and books. Barks’s stories don’t just move from panel to panel - they flow in sequences - sometimes several pages long, that lead to new sequences.
Imagine Uncle Scrooge summoning the Beagle Boys to help him knock over Uncle Sam’s gold reserves, and you could have Fleming’s elevator pitch for Goldfinger, and perhaps one reason why Pussy Galore’s code name for Auric Goldfinger is “uncle.”
After all, Fleming wasn’t just writing novels by this time, but novels intended to be turned into movies, which was where the real golden treasure lay waiting to be discovered.
The Power of Two
Ian Fleming’s +1 Formula
If this site has a major theme, it is the abundance of literary playfulness going on in Ian Fleming’s James Bond thrillers, or at least in the ones written after 1955.
Spurred on by his mentor to try for “a little higher grade,” Fleming began mixing ingredients from classic tales into his Bond stories beginning with From Russia, With Love. And yet readers often don’t recognize the archetypes at the bedrock of Fleming’s later Bond novels, having been thrown off the scent by deliberate misdirection.
For instance, we might not notice the essential elements of “Sleeping Beauty” percolating through From Russia, With Love, because, for starters, the players associated with the fairy tale are introduced in the wrong order.
The first character described in Fleming’s book turns out to be the dragon, who only appears near the end of familiar versions of “Sleeping Beauty,” when it tries to stop an intrepid hero from waking the princes. The evil fairy whose spell starts all the trouble, parades around in a military costume in Fleming’s novel until the final few pages when she turns up in her more familiar guise as an old crone with a set of poisoned needles.
Between the extended introduction of Red Grant as an apocalyptic dragon in Chapter 1, and the moment when a concealed princess downs a sleeping potion in Chapter 25, the author freely adapts an impressive number of scenes, characters and props from Disney’s 1950 Cinderella:
Spying on the embassy through a mouse-hole, Klebb’s flirtation with Tatiana, jealous girls battling over a beau, Tatiana’s black choker, the antique splendor of the Kristal Palas, Kerim Bey’s watery, bloodshot eyes, and the death of Krilencu (staged to resemble the exit of Lady Tremaine’s evil cat Lucifer) are among the book’s many audacious borrowings from an animated Disney classic.
So, although the book is loaded with a rich variety of references, it boils down to the simplest plus-one formula for any Fleming novel:
From Russia, With Love = Sleeping Beauty + Disney’s Cinderella.
Having raided the Disney vault to lift numerous details from their 1950 Cinderella, as well as the basic outline of an animated work-in-progress (Sleeping Beauty), Fleming returned to the scene of the crime for his sequel. He would resurrect Bond in a book based on Disney’s most expensive live-action film to date, a production that had nearly bankrupted the studio. Ever the gentleman-thief, he would do so openly, leaving behind numerous monogrammed calling-cards.
As “M” briefs 007 on MI6’s official response to a series of mysterious deaths and disappearances in Jamaica, he muses, “So I’m supposed to do what? Send a submarine to the island?”
He doesn’t of course, but even without undersea transportation, “M” manages to dispatch Bond on an adventure that is strikingly similar to Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
When first confronted with the task of adapting the book, Disney screenwriters had been dismayed to discover that it has no plot. Verne’s classic tale is simply an extended underwater travelog which concludes when a small team of reluctant sightseers make a sudden dash towards freedom in the final chapter. The screenwriters solved their problem by structuring the film as the story of a jailbreak from an undersea prison.
Despite the lack of a vessel, Bond and his companion are treated to a magnificent view of the undersea world while enjoying a splendid meal. Bond is then forced to navigate Dr. No’s “gauntlet,” a dark metallic shaft full of nasty surprises, after which he must battle a giant squid with a knife and a spear, the very same weapons Ned Land used to fend off an identical threat in the 1954 Disney film, after escaping from the brig of the Nautilus.
Dr. No’s first name, “Julius,” may signal the oversized ambition of a would-be Caesar, but it is also the Latin form of the French name “Jules,” as in Jules Verne. And while there may be no submarine for Dr. No’s captives to escape from, “Nautilus” just so happens to be the name of the magazine for shell collectors which Honey Rider frequently consults.
If, in spite of the clues, we’re slow to recognize Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as the prototype for Fleming’s Doctor No, it’s because of additional characters from the Victorian Era (and slightly later) which the author also weaves into his tale.
Dr. No himself seems to be a fusion of Verne’s Nemo and Sax Rohmer’s fiendish Dr. Fu-Manchu, a “Yellow Peril” supervillain introduced to the public in a series of short stories in 1912. Because there are were no ladies among the guests on Nemo’s submarine, Fleming had to look elsewhere to find a literary antecedent for Bond’s comely companion on this adventure.
The spirited girl whom Bond first ogles on the beach at Crab Key is named Honeychile Rider, surely a wink and a nod at H. Rider Haggard, the prolific author of adventure stories who specialized in tales of lost worlds. The suggestion is reinforced when we learn that the girl whom Bond meets has an “imperious attitude” with a voice that is “sharp and accustomed to being obeyed,” reminding us that one of Haggard’s most durable creations was Ayesha, known to her subjects as “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed,” a central figure across several novels.
Although Honey at first appears to be a modernized version of Ayesha, her role as the nature-loving protector-goddess of Dr. No’s island probably owes a larger debt to another denizen of the “lost worlds” tradition, Rima the Bird Girl from W. H. Hudson’s 1904 Green Mansions.
Fans who are familiar with only the movie version of Doctor No might be unaware that in the book, the entire MI6 investigation is set in motion by the deaths of Audubon Society wardens, or that Dr. No’s darkest sin is ecological - the wanton destruction of bird habitats on the fictional Crab Key. The justice which Bond metes out to the book’s villain is thus amusingly appropriate.
With avian wildlife taking a prominent role in Fleming’s sixth Bond novel we’re also reminded that the author’s own master spy was named for an ornithologist who specialized in birds of the Caribbean, and that Bond’s Chelsea flat was only a brisk walk from the W. H. Hudson Memorial Bird Sanctuary in Hyde Park.
Fleming’s second novel after getting his second wind seems to boil down to a simple formula:
Dr. No = Disney’s 20,000 Leagues + Mysterious Jungle Goddess
However, any book which also playfully blends the myths of Theseus and the Labyrinth and the sacrifice of Andromeda to a sea-god with imagery suggesting the adventures of Ned Land, Captain Nemo, Fu-Manchu, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and Rima the Bird Girl, is surely in a league of its own.
Fleming had used From Russia, With Love as an opportunity to pay tribute to writers who penned the thrillers that inspired him or which he simply enjoyed reading in his youth. Authors such as “Sapper” McNeile, P. G. Wodehouse, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler are given walk-ons in Fleming’s thriller. Red Grant is reading Wodehouse in the opening chapter of FRWL and later makes verbal references to McNeile’s “Bulldog” Drummond and Greene’s The Third Man. Bond travels under the name “Somerset” and slips an Eric Ambler paperback inside his cigarette case to stop a bullet.
In Dr. No Fleming reached back further in time to acknowledge the Victorian writers who had spawned the traditions of crazed inventors and the breed of sure-shot adventurers who uncover hidden worlds operating within our own. With the benefit of hindsight we’re privy to a further line of connections which almost beg to be acknowledged.
Fleming’s From Russia, With Love is at heart a Disney cartoon for adults, while his Dr. No is a grittier Disney adventure film. The actor cast as James Bond in 1962 came to the attention of producer Albert R. Broccoli’s wife when she saw him in Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People. It was Sean Connery’s first leading role in an American film. Connery’s final appearance in a film with a tenuous connection to James Bond, The Rock, was a Disney production.
Besides She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, H. Rider Haggard is remembered today chiefly for his big-game hunter Allan Quatermain, hero of the 1885 novel King Solomon’s Mines, and whose meeting with Ayesha is the subject of She and Allan, a book written more than three decades later. Sean Connery would play Quatermain in his final live-action film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which also featured Captain Nemo, among several other notable characters from Victorian literature.
Ursula Andress, the Swiss actress who played Honey Ryder in Dr. No, starred as Ayesha in the 1965 Hammer adaptation of H. Rider Haggard’s She. The movie also features John Richardson, an actor who had been on the shortlist to replace the departing Connery in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Andress was urged to take the role in Doctor No by her houseguest Kirk Douglas, who had played Ned Land in Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. After reading the script Douglas must have sensed the box office potential of adding a statuesque bikini-clad beauty to an already-proven formula.
Conspiracy Theories
The Final Breakout
Terrorists take over a U. S. landmark situated on an island in shark-infested waters, threatening to launch a strike against a nearby American city unless their demands are met. A veteran MI6 agent played by Sean Connery leads a squad of undersea commandoes on a mission to infiltrate and retake the island before the deadline expires and innocent civilians die.
If the 1996 film The Rock immediately comes to mind, I should point out that the island is not Alcatraz but Liberty Island in New York Harbor, the endangered city is New York, the terrorists are agents of SPECTRE, and the sharks are robotic. With only slight artistic license the paragraph above actually describes a proposed remake of Thunderball called Warhead, dreamed up by Connery and British writer Len Deighton in the 1970’s.
Warhead or James Bond of the Secret Service was conceived as a full-blown underwater spectacle with SPECTRE launching multiple threats from an elaborate undersea base in the Bermuda Triangle. When Eon Productions began filming The Spy Who Loved Me in 1976, their lawyers complained that Connery and Deighton’s rival production was too similar to their own film. Hearing the news Connery fumed that a leaked version of their screenplay had somehow reached Cubby Broccoli.
Although I saw no mention of it in the press, something similar happened a few years later when Never Say Never Again went into production. The 1983 remake of Thunderball cast Barbara Carrera as Fatima Blush, a SPECTRE assassin who sees herself as a manifestation of the Hindu goddess Kali, although the name “Kali” is never uttered during the film.
By an amazing coincidence, Eon not only decided to shoot a number of scenes for their competing Octopussy in India, but featured Maud Adams as a many-armed goddess in poster art for the film.
If Connery never raised a fuss over similarities in the screenplay for The Rock, which at least superficially seems closer to the concept he and Deighton dreamed up for the climax of their film Warhead, he may have been placated by the staggering paycheck he earned from Disney for starring in The Rock.
As you may have heard, there is a rather weird but quite creative theory that The Rock was intricately tooled to make it the final chapter of Connery’s story as James Bond. I generally dismiss the theory, while acknowledging its breathtaking ingenuity.
To be sure, there are little clues provided here and there by dates of John Patrick Mason’s incarceration and escape that at least seem to have been designed to make Bond fans sit up in their seats and start doing math in their heads. There is also the matter of naming the former spy “Mason,” because Fleming had hoped to hire actor James Mason for the role of James Bond. Mason would have been expensive, however, and did not wish to be tied down to a series of films.
In addition to elements which were already in the screenplay for The Rock, Connery wanted writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais brought in as script doctors to shape his role, to make him sound more British, even more Bond-like. The television writers had performed a similar service, also uncredited, for Never Say Never Again more than a decade earlier, and were pleased to do it one more time.
Watching The Rock over the decades has cemented it in my mind as Connery’s sendoff in the Bond series. In fact, when he was interviewed on the promotional tour for The Rock, Connery explicitly told reporters that he had enjoyed playing James Bond in a film where he wasn’t called “James Bond.”
Thus Connery had a go at playing the role on five occasions in the 1960’s, once more in the 70’s, again in the 80’s, yet again in the 90’s (if we count The Rock), even crossing the threshold into the early 2000’s to deliver voiceover for the video game release of From Russia With Love.
Connery famously broke out of the series but kept coming back whenever he felt he had something more to add, or needed to shore up his fortune or jump-start his career. It seemed to do the trick every time.
East by Southeast
The Path to "You Only Live Twice”
You Only Live Twice is one of those movies that I can watch any time, and even if I catch it somewhere in the middle, I will probably stay until the end. It is one of a handful of films that delivers an actual jolt of nostalgia for me.
Not that it takes me back to my own childhood or what seemed to be a simpler era. It’s simply the early Bond saga’s well-earned valedictory lap.
Plus it’s a movie that just works. Each scene fires on all cylinders and whisks us along to the next one. Its breezy pace made film critic Pauline Kael dub director Lewis Gilbert “an efficient traffic manager,” and while she’s not wrong, much of the credit should go to screenwriter Roald Dahl and editor Peter Hunt (taking over for Thelma Connell, whose three-hour cut was considered tiresome) and an ensemble of actors who knew what sort of film they were in.
Additional credit should also go to Alfred Hitchcock, whose North By Northwest added the secret sauce to the spy genre: the great action scene that’s so expertly assembled that it packs a kick even if it makes no sense whatsoever. The celebrated crop duster scene may be particularly effective because it makes no sense. The audience can’t predict what will happen next, when it seems that absolutely anything might happen at any time.
Hitchcock’s crop duster sequence definitely inspired Bond’s encounter with a grenade-spewing helicopter in From Russia With Love. Without it, the 1963 film would hew closer to the standard espionage thriller of the era. The helicopter attack and the scene in which a whole flotilla of boats is trapped in a wall of flames, boost the energy level late in the film, despite the fact that, as critic Stanley Kauffman’s complained, it seemed to end a few times before it finally ended.
Death by gold paint already sounds like a means of homicide that Hitchcock might have cooked up or wished he had, but it’s a case where a death that’s merely reported to James Bond in the book, becomes the on-screen starting pistol for the film, as well as the centerpiece of the ad campaign. After the success of From Russia With Love, filmmakers quickly began amplifying the more outrageous elements of the books at every opportunity.
To take another example from Fleming’s Goldfinger: The one gangster who opts out of the Fort Knox heist takes a fatal tumble down a stairwell, a death evidently deemed much too prosaic for a Bond film. While much of the movie’s charm is its pervasive nuttiness, crushing Mr. Solo together with his gold bars and a Lincoln Continental does seem a weirdly roundabout way to accomplish a very simple goal. However, it was hard to argue with the box office gold rush that ensued when the film reached theaters.
Oddball flights of fancy take wing right off the bat in the film version of Thunderball. No more grappling hooks for Bond, who apparently enters and exits a chateau by scaling the wall with a Bell Jet Belt. By the time he straps on the aquatic equivalent while muttering “And the kitchen sink” for the climactic undersea battle, any shred of realism has long been abandoned in favor of high-tech hijinks.
Judging from the all time high ticket sales, audiences evidently found the trade-off more than satisfactory.
The fifth film with Connery in the role of Bond, You Only Live Twice, was given full rein to concoct its own plot, so long as the result was seasoned with locales and just enough characters and bits of business from Fleming’s novel that it could be considered an adaptation. Thus it became the first Bond movie to establish a basic formula: assemble a program of audacious, loosely interrelated scenes that keep the story moving forward until Bond finds the correct button to press or to prevent someone else from pressing.
The bustling pace of You Only Live Twice works in tandem with the “crop duster” effect, which comes into play in many of the big action scenes, giving the audience little time to reflect on whether anything they’re watching makes a whit of sense. In fact, the death of Henderson, which really gets the ball rolling, seems to have been staged as a salute to the murder of the U. N. diplomat who dies in Cary Grant’s arms with a knife sticking out of his back in North By Northwest. After all, that movie made no sense, and audiences found it delightful.
After Henderson’s death there is a brief fight between Bond and the killer, which leads to a brilliantly-staged ruckus in the Osato Chemicals building, then a high-tech bit of safecracking, followed by a running gunfight, a brief chase, and Bond’s fall through an oubliette that deposits him neatly and only slightly stirred, in Tiger Tanaka’s office.
Between the time Henderson dies and Bond drops in on Tiger, we hear one quip from Bond and a brief exchange of dialogue between Bond and a female Japanese agent named Aki. Otherwise the whole extended sequence is a visual Rube Goldberg contraption with each surprise triggering the next. Even though no single part is grounded in reality we accept them all, perhaps because we’ve witnessed the chain of causation every step along the way.
Freed of any plot constraints imposed by the novel, You Only Live Twice became the prototypical Bond movie, a synthesis of Fleming and Hitchcock, with Hitchcock taking the upper berth.
Everyone on the team seemed to sense that this movie marked a turning point in the series. Money was spent freely but wisely. Ken Adam had a million dollars to build Blofeld’s volcanic lair. David Lean’s frequent collaborator Freddie Young lit it using nearly every available lamp in London and designed the overall super-saturated Technicolor palette for the film.
John Barry’s title theme, dubbed “instant nostalgia” by the composer, is a bittersweet lament which seems to acknowledge that, while this film marked the end of the road, there just might be an afterlife.
Cinderella Story
A Case of Mistaken Identity
A few years back I made a YouTube video about From Russia, With Love, characterizing it as a bleak, cold-war version of "Sleeping Beauty" for a modern age.
Unfortunately I had never seen Disney’s 1950 Cinderella, and thus had no idea Fleming was riffing on that other animated fairy tale throughout most of his book, until the dragon finally showed his fangs.
The plot of Cinderella boils down to this: An orphan girl tries to get into the Palace wearing something becoming, so that a handsome prince will fall in love with her. That’s it in a nutshell.
The mission is accomplished with remarkable ease in From Russia, With Love, when Tatiana Romanova slips into Bond’s bed at the Kristal Palas wearing Cinderella’s signature black velvet choker, and nothing else.
In addition, the laundry list of story elements which Fleming obviously lifted from the 1950 Disney film would include the following:
An ominous maternal figure violates a an orphan girl's personal space
Good guys spy on the opposition through a mouse hole in the woodwork
Jealous girls in love with the same beau engage in a clothing-ripping tussle
A faithful friend has bloodshot, watery eyes and a talented nose
An evil, skulking villain is chased out a window and falls to a cobbled street
The story makes a sharp turn on the Orient Express where it does become Sleeping Beauty. Fortunately, the wizards at “Q” Branch have equipped Bond with a dragon-slaying sword that pops into his hand as if by magic.
If anyone objects that the weapon is really only a dagger and that Bond also pumps a few bullets into Grant, I always point out that the blade is from “Wilkinsons, the sword makers,” and Fleming goes to some lengths to convince us that the wound it inflicts is indeed lethal. The bullets only let Bond put down the dying beast before those “violet teeth” can reach his tender flesh.
What I really should have said from the beginning is that From Russia, With Love is the story of a girl who keeps hoping she’s in a Cinderella story, until shortly before the chloral hydrate kicks in. If not for Bond, she just might sleep forever.
OHMSS / Book v Film
The Hour of the Gun
Before 2006, the 1969 film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service seemed the closest moviegoers might ever come to seeing a faithful cinematic adaptation of one of Fleming’s James Bond thrillers.
From Russia With Love seldom veered too far off course, despite the unnecessary complication of having Rosa Klebb report to Ernst Stavro Blofeld instead of her former bosses at the Kremlin. The film also ends on a sprightly note, unlike the book which concludes with Bond collapsing to the floor as his vital signs fade.
At least the movie version permits Bond to be imperiled by Rosa Klebb’s poisoned shoe-blade, only to be saved at the last second by a timely shot fired by Tatiana. It was an ending which the filmmakers surely borrowed from Fleming’s Thunderball, and would reuse when it came time to film that book.
Fleming’s Bond was not invincible and occasionally did need rescuing. Alas, some of his confederates seemed to pay the toll for Bond’s unlikely escapes. Felix Leiter loses parts of himself in Live and Let Die, Kerim Bey dies on the Orient Express in From Russia, With Love, Quarrel is immolated by dragon-fire in Dr. No, while neither of the Masterton girls lives long enough to witness the final chapter of Goldfinger.
Goldfinger, the breakout hit of the series, quickly became the glittering gold-standard of Bond films. The producers came to believe, somewhat superstitiously, that at minimum one young lady needed to be offered up as a sacrifice during the story, though dispatching two would be ideal.
Thus in the film version of Thunderball two women are marked for death, Bond’s ally Paula, and SPECTRE assassin Fiona Volpe. When it came time to write the screenplay for You Only Live Twice, Roald Dahl dutifully penned a touching death scene for Aki (who ingests a dose of poison meant for Bond), and then arranged for a school of piranha to feast on the devious Helga Brandt.
Like the plot itself, these characters had to be invented for You Only Live Twice, since a strict translation of Fleming’s book would have made no sense, the work having been conceived by Fleming as a sequel to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
With the cooperation of the Alpine snow season in 1969, O.H.M.S.S. was adapted rather faithfully for the screen that year, although a few significant events had to be restructured, and Bond was permitted to be naughtier in the film than he was allowed to be in the book.
In the film, Bond treats Tracy rather roughly at the start of their relationship (even if she did pull a gun on him first), and he seems determined to sleep with any number of the young ladies cooped up in Blofeld’s dormitory. Amusingly, the surname of his first conquest has been changed from “Windsor" to “Bartlett," perhaps to avoid offending the British Royal Family.
In the book, details of Blofeld’s scheme must be pieced together from clues Bond provides when he makes his way back to London. In the film, Blofeld has confidently spilled the beans out loud before Bond escapes. The timing of that escape has also been shifted slightly during its transfer to the screen. In the book our hero hightails it while an associate is being tortured to extract information which would surely put Bond in peril. In the film, however, Bond’s cover has already been blown when he begins his breakneck descent from Piz Gloria on a pair of stolen skis, and his only confederate on the mountain has already been exterminated.
Although Tracy helps Bond elude Blofeld’s henchmen in the book, she is not captured during their pursuit. Therefore the later assault on Piz Gloria is not a rescue mission, as it is in the film, but merely another round in the high-stakes match between Bond and Blofeld.
The wedding of James Bond and Teresa di Vicenzo, a suitably lavish affair staged at the Draco estate in Portugal in the film, is a simple ceremony performed at a the Munich consulate in Fleming’s novel. But potentially the most significant detail from the book omitted from the film is the tidbit Bond receives about a phone call placed to the consulate by a German woman claiming to be a reporter, who inquires about the timing of the happy event.
The book sometimes casts an unflattering light on James Bond in its depiction of him as a latter-day Gawain, a knight who fails to live up to a code of honor. Besides risking a roll in the hay with one of the young ladies under his host’s supervision, Bond skedaddles, leaving a comrade to be tortured to death. He asks Tracy to marry him just before setting off for another inning of the dangerous game with his enemy, and immediately after the wedding ignores a suspicious call which should set off alarm bells.
For those aware of the book’s debt to Middle-English literature, Fleming provides a ticking clock as the newlyweds ride away after their thrifty nuptials. Glancing at his watch Bond notes the time as 11:45. Readers are informed that more than ten minutes have elapsed when the Maserati, which had appeared behind them as a distant red dot, suddenly begins to make its move.
It may have been the exact timing of the Green Knight’s return-blow on New Year’s Day in the Middle-English poem, that gave Fleming the idea of merging Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with an episode of a TV Western, one featuring a famous lawman who decides to hang up his guns for good and settle down with a beautiful but troubled young lady named Teresa. She was doomed, of course, as was almost any frontier lass who agreed to tie the knot with the leading man in a Western series.
It must have struck Fleming as more appropriate to end his modern take on the story of a failed Arthurian knight, not with the swing of a blade, but a flash of gunfire at high noon.
Pat Garrett holds his slain Teresa in “Bitter Ashes,” an episode of The Tall Man which aired months before Fleming wrote a similar scene for OHMSS