The Way Fleming Saw It (Mostly)
The latest additions to this site are a few cartoons that illustrate some of my own notions regarding Fleming’s thrillers. Although they have more to do with the books than the films, two contain likenesses of Connery.
One of these is meant to resemble a Japanese print overlaid with an image of the actor in a lion skin, because Fleming clearly wrote You Only Live Twice with the muscular Connery in mind as, among other heroes, Hercules in the Underworld.
The one seen below casts him as the handsome prince in Fleming’s riff on “Sleeping Beauty,” even though the actor was barely a blip on the cinema radar when Fleming wrote his novel. Depicting Connery in the part still feels appropriate because Fleming didn’t seem to have anyone in particular in mind, and the EON production of From Russia With Love is the Bond film that hews closest to its source.
Yes, they’re all in the book, though the cat never makes it to the train station.
Other cartoons with movie-themed designs depict alternate actors in key roles, actors who are quite likely, I think, the very stars Fleming saw in his mind’s eye as he labored over Thunderball and Goldfinger.
After From Russia With Love and Dr. No had rolled off the presses at Jonathan Cape, Fleming appeared to dig into Goldfinger with the giddy assurance of an author whose book was destined to be made into a film. He may have deliberately tipped his hand about his preferred casting by having Mr. Goldfinger drop the names of a pair of A-list actors supposedly signed to star in a project the tycoon claimed to be making, in order to justify a reconnaissance flyover.
If Fleming had such a firm idea of who should play James Bond and Pussy Galore, I’ve wondered whether he had anyone in mind to star as his gold-fixated imp.
Auric Goldfinger is described as an Englishman with red hair and a large, perfectly round head, but one who stands only five feet tall. Not a dwarf, he is simply an unusually small man, thus, a “manikin,” the term the Brothers Grimm apply to Rumpelstiltskin. Such an eccentric description would seem to shrink the pool of suitable talent. In fact, I couldn’t think of anyone offhand who fit those requirements.
However, that was before I realized that Fleming wrote Goldfinger the same year the Walt Disney Company shot Darby O’Gill and the Little People, a film which employed a large cast of workaday actors, and shrank any number of them to the size of leprechauns with the magic of forced-perspective photography. Some of the shots were so cleverly and painstakingly designed that they manage to leave modern special effects technicians scratching their heads.
I like to think that a roundish head suitable for the part of Auric Goldfinger belonged to six-foot five-inch actor Niall MacGinnis. MacGinnis had just made an impressively charismatic villain in Jacque Tourneur’s British horror film Night of the Demon, although today he is probably best remembered as Zeus in Jason and the Argonauts. He had even appeared with Connery as a fellow member of Anthony Quayle’s murderous gang in Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure.
For the uninitiated I think of MacGinnis as a cross between Gert Fröbe and John Houseman, and an actor who would have excelled at playing a supercilious English B.S. artist who knows less than he thinks he does.
My apologies if I made him look too much like Carroll O’Connor.