Far from trying to hide his sources, Fleming took care to leave clues at every turn.
After being told by his mentor Raymond Chandler that each of his recent Bond thrillers had been worse than the last, in 1956 Ian Fleming decided to step up his game.
It had been Fleming’s custom to spend two months in Jamaica writing a first draft which would receive a cursory touchup before being whisked away to his publisher, Jonathan Cape. Only rarely would an editor at Cape demand substantive changes, as when Fleming tried to kill off 007’s CIA buddy Felix Leiter in Live and Let Die, a move which was certain to alienate readers in America. In the spirit of compromise Leiter was allowed to lose a hand and one leg, but lived to pop up in later novels.
After his dressing-down by Raymond Chandler, Fleming spent the greater part of a year polishing his latest James Bond adventure to a high sheen. The basic story of From Russia, With Love, a clever blending of a 1946 Alfred Hitchcock thriller with Disney’s Cinderella, takes its time to evolve into a particularly sinister version of “Sleeping Beauty,” a fairy tale which was at that moment making its way through the animation pipeline at Disney.
Cementing the Disney connection, most of the characters and many of the situations in From Russia, With Love were copied directly from the animated 1950 Disney film.
In Fleming’s version, Wicked stepmother Lady Tremaine becomes the sadistic Rosa Klebb, while Cinderella’s stalwart hound Bruno is transformed into Bond’s faithful ally Ali Kerim Bey, and the devious cat Lucifer takes the form of the repugnant SMERSH assassin Krilencu. Krilencu's fate in Fleming’s novel is arranged to mimic Lucifer’s exit from the Disney film almost exactly, albeit in somewhat more graphic terms. Even the notorious girl-fight in the gypsy camp in From Russia, With Love was likely suggested by a memorable tussle between the lovely orphan girl and her jealous stepsisters in Cinderella.
Fleming’s ingenuity and perseverance paid off. From Russia, With Love was a hit with readers and critics. When John F. Kennedy counted it among his ten favorite books, sales of Fleming’s Bond thrillers took off like a Mercury-Redstone rocket.
Beauties, Bloodhounds and Skulking Villains from Walt Disney’s Cinderella and MGM/UA’s From Russia With Love
The author generally stuck to his new creative method of shaping a time-honored tale into the basic framework of an espionage thriller, and then festooning it with the trappings of popular entertainment from his own day.
He immediately set to work on Dr. No, such a blatant nod to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu pulp novels that readers managed to overlook the wholesale pilferage of Walt Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It probably helped that the Verne adventure is also shrouded in layers of Greek mythology, particularly the tales of Theseus and the labyrinth and the thwarted sacrifice of Andromeda to a sea god.
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Fleming’s Goldfinger, a riff on “Rumpelstiltskin,” reimagines the fairy tale as it might have appeared in the pages of Uncle Scrooge comics, a heist attempted by a cartoonishly gold-obsessed miser, in cahoots with that inept crime family the Beagle Boys. The author would later branch out into what we might call his Tolkien period, taking on the Middle-English classics Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Orfeo, supplementing the first with the plot of an episode of an American TV Western, the second, with the subplot of a popular Italian peplum epic starring American bodybuilder Steve Reeves.
It’s interesting to imagine a reality in which Fleming’s gamble to invigorate his series of spy novels hadn’t paid off, a Twilight Zone dimension where Bond’s entire onscreen career was encapsulated by American actor Barry Nelson's agent “Jimmy Bond" on a live CBS broadcast in 1954.
No Bondomania, no Man From Uncle, no Get Smart, none of the hundreds of attempts to copy, satirize, or cash in on the Bond craze that swept the planet. It’s a bleak prospect.
LINKS TO RECENT POSTS
Looking Deeper into Marnie
One Solution to an Old Problem
Probably Not the Year You’re Thinking of
The Origin Story of Krilencu
Why Noon is the Hour of the Gun
Casting Bond from Then Till Now
Firing on All Cylinders
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