Why So Serious?
In 1964 film critic Stanley Kauffmann dished out a modicum of praise for the screen adaptation of Ian Fleming’s From Russia, With Love, while expressing misgivings about what he fully expected to happen next.
Kauffmann complained that as he watched events unfolding on the screen he could imagine the faint clicking of typewriters in the background, and was gripped by a sudden pang of dread.
Someone is doing a close textual analysis of them all, is making a linear comparison between the novels and the screenplays, and especially is delving for myths, for moral comment and significance. The Age of Innocence is indeed past. A writer can’t even be a hack any more — according to the lights of his time — without becoming a Cultural Fact. Children as yet unborn will some day be instructed by a teacher who got his degree in Fleming.
By the time Kauffmann’s 1964 review was reprinted in the trade paperback which I read in 1968, he could pat himself on the back for his prescience.
Postscript. Although there is not yet a doctoral thesis, the first studies of Fleming—one of them by Kingsley Amis—have now appeared.
By my count three studies had been published within a year of Ian Fleming’s death, and by the time I belatedly read Kauffmann’s review the Bond craze had crested for the moment.
I loved poring over every entry in A World On Film, a compendium of Kauffmann’s reviews from the early 1960’s, which brought me face to face with movies which seemed unlikely to make their way to rural Kansas, even by way of television. Kauffmann’s vivid description of a few Ingmar Bergman films and of several richly-imagined scenes in Orson Welles’ film of Kafka's The Trial, a work which the critic panned on the whole, made me almost desperate to see them.
Stanley Kauffmann’s prediction lay dormant in the back of my mind as I first set down a few thoughts on Ian Fleming’s apparent sources in a blog which I created in the early 2000’s, shortly after returning home from visiting my daughter in Lawrence where she was enrolled at the University of Kansas. While in town I had picked up a paperback of You Only Live Twice at the Dusty Bookshelf on Massachusetts Street.
Lying on a mat on the floor of my daughter’s loft I leafed through the book “delving for myths,” perhaps, but finding other unexpected delights. There was that fragment of Hercules in the Underworld, of course, but also a plot thread out of a Steve Reeves peplum epic from 1959, the same way that On Her Majesty’s Secret Service had yielded references to the Middle-English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight along with the story of a doomed romance from an episode of a TV Western that premiered on NBC in 1960.
I had noticed the similarity between the coda of OHMSS and a Samuel Peeples teleplay for The Tall Man way back when I got my hands on Fleming’s latest thriller in 1963, though I would not recognize the obvious allusions to Gawain until I enrolled in a class on Medieval Literature seven years later (at KU, by the way). Similarly, I recognized the references to the fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty” in From Russia, With Love, but was oblivious to the numerous borrowings from Disney’s Cinderella until I finally watched the animated classic last year (strictly a fact-finding mission, mind you).
I’m afraid I can’t claim to be clever at exegesis or even particularly perceptive. Frankly, to see the playful side of Fleming it pays to have read him when you were a kid, a kid who bought tickets to the same movies he saw, watched the same TV shows and read the same comic books, around the same time.
The difference is that while I was just having a good time goofing off, Ian Fleming was doing patient research and collating source material. Later, when he would retire to Goldeneye and his golden typewriter, he would find time to play.