Leaning In All the Way

It’s difficult to imagine that the team of artists and craftsmen working on the film From Russia With Love, did not understand the enormous debt owed by the book’s author to Disney’s Cinderella.

For those new to the thread, Fleming’s book and to a surprising degree, the movie, are based on the French version of the fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty," which had been adapted as a Disney film in 1959, two years after Fleming’s book was published.  Red Grant is the dragon while Rosa Klebb performs the role of the old crone who has a thing for poisoned needles.  Tatiana plays the slumbering princess, Bond is the stalwart prince, and so forth.

So where does Cinderella come in?  Well, as I’ve pointed out, a film version of "Sleeping Beauty" was in the works as Fleming toiled over his manuscript, but the author obviously couldn’t have seen it yet.  So he worked with the Disney fairy tale which he had seen, the 1950 animation masterpiece, Cinderella.  Fleming knew his story would need a princess, an old crone and probably a dragon, but minor characters had to be drawn from the 1950 classic. 

Thus early on in the tale Rosa Klebb mirrors Cinderella’s stepmother, Lady Tremaine.  She is a strict disciplinarian who seems to take sadistic delight in dominating the girl.  The movie version of Fleming’s novel takes the comparison a step further by giving Klebb a riding crop which she wields as a symbol of her authority, much like lady Tremaine’s jeweled walking stick.

The feature-length cartoon stratifies the household into humans and animals, with a harmless rivalry between clever mice and annoying chickens, but also the lurking threat of a cat named Lucifer, the movie’s diabolical villain with claws and teeth. 

Fleming follows this template, populating his chessboard with players from various social strata, engaging in a friendly cat-and-mouse game involving Soviet spies, but with the villainous Krilencu and his ruthless Bulgars hovering in the shadows, watching and waiting.

Even the racy girl-fight in the gypsy camp, toned down in the film from a pornographic interlude in Fleming’s book, has a corollary in Cinderella, a scene where the stepsisters rip and tear at the heroine’s makeshift ball gown, provoking an emergency visit from her fairy godmother. 

A moment invented for the second Bond film, the one in which Tatiana Romanova waltzes with the “trousseau” Bond gives her on the Orient Express, seems to mirror a hopeful interlude from Cinderella.

The staging of Krilencu’s death is another instance of Disney providing the storyboard for a scene in a Bond film.  In Fleming’s book Krilencu climbs out of an aperture in a wall, dropping ten feet to the ground before Kerim shoots him dead.  

In the film version he begins to wriggle down a rope when Kerim fires, causing Krilencu to plummet to the cobblestone street, imitating the terrified cat in the Disney film.  The actor playing Krilencu even seems to mimic Lucifer’s reaction to his imminent doom.

Some ways in which the film departs from Fleming’s novel should have been catastrophic, yet somehow weren’t.  The plot is burdened with unnecessary complexity in order to introduce a faceless Blofeld, shifting blame away from the Soviet Union and towards the fictional organization, SPECTRE.

Perhaps because of this added baggage, filmmakers fretted that viewers might forget who Red Grant is by the time he boards the Orient Express.  Their solution was to sprinkle footage of the menacing agent throughout the film, hiding in corners and shadows while dispatching minor characters here and there.   

By trying to solve a problem which they themselves had created, the filmmakers deprive the film of what should have been a shocking reveal, when Grant introduces himself to Bond as his supposed ally and boards the train.  Instead, the audience’s reaction is a mere, “Look, there’s that guy again.”  It’s as anticlimactic as watching a magician stuff the rabbit into his hat before pulling it out.

However, the movie sometimes improves on the book.  Since Grant is meant to be a dragon, trying to finish off his quarry by circling his neck with deadly coils is a step up from shooting him with a gun concealed in a hollowed-out copy of War and Peace.  

Happily, a magic sword still appears in Bond’s hand at a key moment, though it does not inflict a fatal wound, as Fleming assures us it does in his novel.  Mind you, Bond also shoots the beast in Fleming’s version, but only to keep from being damaged during Grant’s death throes.

Having Tatiana transported on a bed of flowers while menaced by a fire-breathing chopper (which resembles an oversized dragonfly), was a brilliant notion that also makes for an exciting action set piece.  Though it reminded viewers of a scene from North by Northwest, it’s also a fair approximation of the climax of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, which finally had its premiere in 1959, the same year as the Hitchcock film.  For those who hadn’t noticed that Bond saved the princes from a dragon a few minutes earlier, he does it again, with fireworks this time.

Once again, the most unsettling change from book to film is Bond’s treatment of Tatiana as they hurtle westward on the Orient Express.  In the book he dismisses the girl’s suspicions about their new friend Norman Nash, while remaining tender and caring even if somewhat mystified by her growing sense of danger.

By contrast, the Bond of the film grills her roughly after the death of Kerim Bey, shaking her and even striking the sobbing girl while demanding that she tell him what she knows.  

Quibbles aside, paying homage to Fleming’s text probably reached its zenith with From Russia With Love, the final Bond film to be released in Fleming’s lifetime.  Respect for the source material, like Bond’s treatment of women, was about to get worse.