Fleming's Pathfinder
Few enterprises had a larger impact on popular culture in the middle of the last century than the Walt Disney Company.
As I’ve tried to point out in this blog, Disney’s consummate showmanship and keen business acumen may have provided a guiding light for some of Fleming’s later Bond novels. While the influence is clearly visible in From Russia With Love, what about the novels penned afterward? (Some of this has been mentioned here before)
Consider the following set of circumstances:
• An agent assembles an ad hoc team to investigate strange occurrences involving a mysterious island.
• One member of the team sings a lyric about an island girl.
• Captured by a scientific genius who nurses a grudge against humanity, the allies are fed an excellent meal and shown a breathtaking view of aquatic life.
• The mastermind also subjects his captives to a sadistic test.
• One of the group escapes confinement and battles a giant squid with a knife and a spear.
Each detail from Dr. No has been phrased so that it also applies to Disney’s 1954 film of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Add to this list of particulars, the fact that Verne’s captain has given himself a name which means “No one,” and that both he and Fleming’s fiendish doctor create vehicles which are mistaken for monsters, and the similarities, however tenuous, do begin to add up.
Unlike most of his books, Dr. No was first written for the screen, as an episode of a proposed television series that eventually fell through. The author, who continually complained of being unable to come up with original stories, may have decided to take a shortcut by freely adapting plot-points which had already proved to be crowd-pleasers.
It’s quite possible that after writing a book which rearranged the story of a Disney film currently in development, Sleeping Beauty, while adding details filched from earlier Disney fairy tales, Snow White and Cinderella, the author may have turned to the company’s most-successful live-action film to date, 20,000 Leagues, to provide a rough outline for the latest installment of his spy thrillers.
If so, did he stop there?
I suppose it could it be mere coincidence that in 1958, just as Disney began casting another ground-breaking live-action adventure, a whimsical story about a wish-granting imp who lives inside a mountain filled with gold, where he challenges an imprisoned visitor to various contests, that Ian Fleming was hammering out his first-draft manuscript for Goldfinger.
Remember that the five-foot-tall Auric Goldfinger promises a fortune in gold for key players willing to join his scheme to plunder Fort Knox, and that the little man likes to cheat at cards and golf. The subject of Leprechauns per se even pops up in Fleming’s text, albeit obliquely, when a captive Bond responds to Goldfinger’s generous employment package by asking, “What are we going to do, rob the end of the rainbow?”
Am I making too much of a few assorted similarities? Perhaps, but consider the trajectory of Fleming’s renewed career after 1956.
• Fleming’s popularity shifted into high gear after From Russia With Love, his adaptation of a fairy tale which was at that moment being turned into a film that would become the Disney Studio’s crowning achievement in the art of 2D animation.
• One of Fleming’s early choices for an actor capable of portraying Bond, Richard Todd, had been Disney’s favorite leading man in the early 50’s.
• Fleming relates the origins of the Disney surname in OHMSS and transforms Blofeld’s sinister garden into a gruesome version of Disneyland in the sequel, YOLT.
• The writer raised a ruckus with own his publisher because the illustrator for Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang had shown the flying car created by Fleming’s eccentric inventor, Caractacus Pott, executing a maneuver that seemed to mimic one performed by the flying car from Disney’s Absent-Minded Professor.
In other words, an innocent illustrator may have stepped over the line and given away the game. If Fleming wasn’t quite stealing from Disney, he was certainly (ahem) following Disney’s lead.
I hardly need to append the detail that Fleming’s first novel after Goldfinger (and one with no connection at all to Disney) was the subject of litigation brought by a group of collaborators who believed their ideas had been appropriated by the author.
Sean Connery once described Fleming as a terrific journalist who could sketch out a scene with only a few, carefully selected details, but exactly the right ones. However, Fleming himself conceded that he had run out of story ideas after Goldfinger and might have to stick to writing short stories from then on.
Happily, he did not, and Disney once again may have shown him the way forward. But more about that later.