The Early Model of a Modern Major Criminal
When Christopher Nolan decided to recreate a cinematic climax for one of the dream sequences nested inside his masterful Inception, he chose the storming of Piz Gloria from the sixth Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The battle which he quotes visually, contains all of the ingredients Bond fans know and love: a massed assault on a reclusive villain’s lair, remote and nearly inaccessible. Within its walls, a damaged mastermind broods over past griefs and devises an imaginative new scheme, which he aims to carry out with the aid of advanced technology and an army of disposable minions.
The recipe is so familiar it’s surprising to realize that those ingredients appear as a set only in that single book by Fleming, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, written near the end of his output. The other thrillers often contain one or more of those elements, but never all of them, all in one place.
Goldfinger’s Kentucky stud farm has a nice meeting room, but we wouldn’t call it a lair. In Thunderball Blofeld conducts business in a sort of corporate boardroom from Hell, though actually located in Paris, and a long way from the book's climactic action in the Bahamas. Perhaps the most outlandish and iconic den to appear in the movies is the volcanic hideaway featured in You Only Live Twice, a film which also endows Blofeld with a signature scar, actually suggested by Fleming’s description of his appearance in the pages of OHMSS, though executed with significant artistic license.
While no one actually storms it, at least not within the book’s narrative, the father of all HQ’s for a Bond villain is clearly Dr. No’s fantastical underground compound on the fictional island of Crab Key. It also appears to be an artifact which Fleming boldly pilfered from Jules Verne by way of Walt Disney.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the Disney studio's first big live-action adventure film, released in 1954, is practically a blueprint for what we think of today as a typical Bond extravaganza, lacking only the element of Bond himself. Instead of a solitary spy, the 007 role is split up among three personalities in the Verne book and the Disney movie: a French naturalist named Professor Aronnax, his Belgian assistant, Conseil, who provides comic relief in the film, and Ned Land, a boisterous North-American seaman, popular with the ladies, who can hurl a mean harpoon. Captain Nemo, on the other hand, is the spot-on 19th century model for the 20th century Bond villain, a brooding, vengeful genius on a mission to shake up the world order with his futuristic undersea war machine. His earliest and most recognizable literary descendant in Fleming’s novels is the menacing figure of Dr. No.
Where the wrathful Nemo scuttles warships on principle, Dr. No is paid to misdirect American missiles. Psychologically, both entrepreneurs seem cut from the same cloth. They enjoy toying with guests, conducting cruel experiments to test their mettle. Both patiently explain their motives to a captive audience. Both happen to be connoisseurs who collect fine art, treat their prisoners to lavish meals, and offer spectacular views of the undersea depths through massive crystalline windows. Nemo terrorizes the seafaring world with a submarine which is widely mistaken for a sea monster; Dr. No frightens superstitious locals with a tractor decked out to resemble a fire-breathing dragon.
There is also a deliberate streak of Greek mythology embedded in both works. Dr. No puts Bond through an obstacle course which parallels the famous labyrinth of King Minos, and fastens a helpless Honey Rider to the beach in an imitation of the sacrifice of Andromeda to a sea god. In Homer’s Odyssey, when the cyclops Polyphemus asks Odysseus his name, his reply is “Nemo,” meaning “nobody." Like his Greek counterpart, Captain Nemo is adrift, destined to spend rootless years wandering the sea. At the end of Dr. No’s labyrinth a giant squid waits for Bond, who, like Ned Land, is armed with a spear.
In many cases where Fleming draws inspiration from a recognizable source, instead of accidentally tipping his hand, he lays down a distinct calling card. While the tragic ending of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service already conformed to an uncanny degree to the outline of “Bitter Ashes,” an episode of the TV Western The Tall Man, written by Samuel A. Peeples, Fleming takes the added step of giving the love of Bond’s life the same name as lawman Pat Garrett’s doomed bride in the 1960 teleplay. It seemed to be Fleming's particular method of acknowledging his sources, whether they’re from Greek mythology, TV Westerns, or Middle-English poetry, playfully leaving clues which practically function as footnotes.
The sudden appearance of a giant squid, a monster which had enthralled audiences in cinemas only three years before Fleming wrote Dr. No, may be the author's conscious salute to Verne, a writer who in his own day had popularized the concept of the mad scientific genius with a master plan, a concept which Fleming seemed to rejuvenate for the Atomic Age. Where Verne’s antagonists bore psychic scars, Fleming made them visible, with artificial hands or a disfigured face, and throwing in a few sexual hangups.
Disney’s own creative team added new elements that make Verne’s work seem to closely prefigure Bond films of the next decade. Nemo’s submarine docks at his secret base on Volcania, which is stormed by an assault force of soldiers in uniform. Rather than let his secrets fall into the hands of warmongering nations, Nemo destroys his island in a fiery cataclysm and scuttles the Nautilus. His trio of prisoners make their getaway on a small boat and head into open water to await rescue.
The final scene seems only a stone’s throw from the ending of every one of the first five Bond films, particularly Dr. No and You Only Live Twice. Dr. No’s compound suffers a nuclear meltdown, while Blofeld’s volcanic lair is consumed in a garish Technicolor eruption, which Blofeld himself initiates.
It may be worth noting that Verne originally wanted to make Nemo a vengeful Polish nobleman, but changed the captain's origins to the Indian subcontinent for political reasons. It’s possible that Fleming gave Blofeld a pedigree that is half Polish, half Greek, to acknowledge his own source materials.
Probably not, but I wouldn’t put it past him.