The below column originally appeared in The Orchard Press Online Mystery Magazine in 2006.
A British Royal Navy
Commander visited Jamaica in 1944 for a conference on the threat of Nazi U-boats
in the Caribbean. He fell in love with the island.
Commander Ian Fleming was a
slim and athletic 6'2", with black hair and blue eyes. Many of his women
friends described him as having cruel good looks, his broken nose adding a
touch of ruggedness.
Fleming returned to Jamaica
after the war and purchased an old donkey race track in Oracabessa on the North
Coast. His built his villa – called Goldeneye - on a bluff overlooking a
private beach and the Caribbean. He would spend every January and February
there until his death in 1964.
To get over the shock of getting
married at the age of 44, he often said, he sat down at his typewriter at Goldeneye in 1952 and wrote his first
novel Casino Royale. The novel,
published in 1953, introduced the world to a debonair and deadly British secret
agent named Bond, James Bond.
Casino Royale,
the 21st installment in the world’s most successful film series featuring
Fleming’s Bond, opened on November 17th. The thriller features a new actor in
the role of Bond, Daniel Craig.
“It has been a long time
ambition for us to film the first book in the series, Casino Royale, which
defined the complex character of James Bond,” said the producers, Michael G.
Wilson and Barbara Broccoli. “Daniel is a superb actor who has all the
qualities needed to bring a contemporary edge to the role. Casino Royale will
have all of the action, suspense and espionage that our audiences have come to
expect from us, but nevertheless takes the franchise in a new and exciting
direction.”
The film was directed by
Martin Campbell, who also directed Pierce Brosnan’s first outing as Bond in GoldenEye in 1995. Casino Royale was filmed in the Czech Republic, the Bahamas, Italy
and the United Kingdom.
The film has opened to rave
reviews and box office success and the film has fueled a renewed interest and
respect for Ian Fleming, who died in 1964 at the age of 56.
Since first viewing Dr No in a South Philadelphia movie
theater in 1963 when I was eleven years old, I’ve been a serious Bond fan. I
went on to read the Fleming novels as a pre-teen and teenager and I was amazed
that they were darker, more complex, and far more intriguing than the films.
I’ve been a Fleming aficionado ever since.
Born on May 28th 1908 and
educated at Eton and Sandhurst , Fleming worked as a journalist at Reuters
prior to WWII, reporting from London , Berlin and Moscow. He was a special
correspondent for The Times of London in Moscow in 1939 and entered British
Naval Intelligence later that year.
He served as the assistant to
the Director of Naval Intelligence. After the war, he became The Sunday Times' foreign manager. His
experience as a naval intelligence officer and a journalist enabled him to
write knowledgeably about espionage, crime and terrorism.
The character of James Bond
found in the novels was based in part on the WWII commandos, secret agents and
intelligence officers Fleming met during his service. He conceived of Bond as
merely a cipher, a blunt instrument for Her Majesty’s Secret Service. But
Fleming said he also infused Bond with his own personal quirks and characteristics.
The Bond character in the
films had become exaggerated to the point of self-parody, so I was pleased that
the producers were returning to the first novel as source material and made Casino Royale as a true thriller.
The choice of actor to
portray this back-to-basics Bond set off a heated debate in work places, bars,
cafes and on the Internet. The selection of the blond and not particularly
handsome Craig enraged many fans that preferred Brosnan, the previous actor to
portray Bond in four films. But for many of the older fans, like me, there is
only one actor who is the ideal Bond - Sean Connery.
Beginning in 1962 with Dr No, the Bond films attracted a
world-wide audience that loved the suave, yet rugged Connery as Bond. From Russia With Love and Goldfinger followed and the James Bond
craze ignited, creating imitators in film, TV, novels, advertisements and
launching a huge business in merchandising and collectibles. To date, the Bond
film series has earned more than $4 billion, according to the-numbers.com.
Prior to the release of the
new film, I set out to talk to a number of other Fleming aficionados about the
film, the new actor and the cultural influence of Ian Fleming and his blunt
instrument, James Bond.
“Bond had a tremendous
influence on film, television, style and the political spectrum,” said Steven
Watt, an English Professor at Indiana University and the author of Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural
Politics of 007.
“Fleming was way ahead of his
time when he invented SPECTRE, a mobile, multi-national group, headed by a mad
genius, mostly made up of cells of hardened criminals, loyal to no nation, only
to each other, and that one of their principle objectives is to produce terror.
They would be a lot more difficult to beat than a clunky Soviet machine – and
he was right!”
“Who else in the 1960s was
talking about nuclear blackmail and chemical and biological warfare?” Watt
added.
Watt noted that there was
much to be learned from Fleming in terms of the evolution of the enemies of the
West and on the level of sexuality, ethnicity, global politics, and popular
culture.
Watt was one of the
organizers of a conference on Ian Fleming at Indiana University in 2003. The
University’s Lilly Rare Library purchased Ian Fleming’s entire library in the
1970s, including his papers, the literature he owned, naval and military
histories and unpublished and little-known works.
“For people interested in
Fleming, the Lilly Library has become a depository of great interest,” Watt
said. “Fleming was an extremely literate man, a collector of high modernist
work. I think he was an excellent writer. He was a great craftsman and his
prose style, though be it fairly direct and simple, is interesting. And
certainly he was writing from a pretty intense knowledge of some exotic
cities.”
“I think he holds up pretty
well in the context of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler,” Watt said.
Watt explained that the
English Department and the Lilly Library sponsored the conference, which
attracted academics, historians, scholars and writers. Watt explained that one
group took the position that if you don’t know anything about Britain during
the Cold War, you don’t know anything about Fleming and the audience for whom
he wrote these novels, and there was a second group, a series of younger
scholars, who said they were not interested in the novels, they were only
interested in the way the characters evolved on film.
Watt, a scholar of
Anglo-Irish culture, whose major interests are 19th and 20th Century Irish
culture, has published books on James Joyce and Sean O’Casey and a book on
Samuel Beckett. He also considers himself a scholar on Fleming and he teaches a
course on Cold War culture that includes Fleming in the 1950s and 60s.
Watt said that as the Connery
era grew, the films became less and less reliant on the novels and by the time
Connery came back for Diamonds Are
Forever and Roger Moore assumed the role, they left the novels behind. Watt
said he was glad the producers were returning to the novels as a source for the
newest film.
“The novel Casino Royale is
extremely interesting, extraordinarily sinister and very dark,” Watt said.
“Casino Royale has never been given its proper due. As the first Bond novel and
one of the darker Bond novels, it never received anything resembling an
adequate film treatment.”
“I think Craig will turn out
to be an excellent choice. Terrorism is a huge, serious, important issue - much
more important than 25 years ago when Roger Moore was cavorting around – and
the James Bond of today has to be a tough guy, a serious guy.”
He saw Dr No and From Russia With
Love on their original theatrical release in the United Kingdom , but
Graham Rye said it wasn’t until he saw Goldfinger
in 1964 that he was inspired to read the Fleming novels. He was so hooked,
he said, that his interest in Bond has been his career for more than 25 years.
“I think the success of both
the books and the films are down to both appearing at just the right time in a
historical sense,” said Rye , who is the editor and publisher of 007 MAGAZINE
OnLine (http://www.007magazine.co.uk/) and the author of The James Bond Girls.
“In 1953 when Jonathan Cape
published Fleming’s first Bond novel Casino
Royale, Great Britain was still going through post-war doldrums; it was a
very grey time,” Rye explained. “Fleming’s books achieved just the right
strength cocktail of exotic sex, violence and adventure to lift the reader out
of the harsh realities of everyday life and into the pages with his hero secret
agent James Bond.”
Rye went on to say that after
all the kitchen-sink/social dramas and neo-realism of British cinema of the
Forties and Fifties, film producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman came
together at exactly the right time to form a partnership in cinema that remains
unequaled to this day.
“Their partnership developed
a series of films that have brought untold happiness to billions of people
around the world, and still do, and wealth to many of the creative participants
in the most enduring film franchise of all time,” Rye said. “I think the world
has a lot to be thankful for from Messrs Fleming, Broccoli and Saltzman. Not to
mention a certain Scottish knight – Sean Connery!”
“There has only ever really been one actor for
me who was and will forever remain James Bond – Sean Connery,” Rye said. “Other
actors have put in some good performances as Bond, but the gap between them and
Sean as Bond is the Grand Canyon.”
Rye said that George Lazenby
could have grown into a Bond who would have given Connery competition, judging
by his first and only outing in 1969’s On
Her Majesty's Secret Service. Rye believes the film is the best overall
depiction of Fleming’s Bond in the film series, due mostly the film’s director
Peter Hunt, and it’s his favorite Bond film and book.
“Roger Moore could never take
playing Bond seriously, which was fine by me because I could never take Roger
Moore playing Bond seriously, and for the following seven films over the next
12 years I’m afraid my interest in the Bond film series reached an all-time
low,” Rye said.
Rye said that Timothy
Dalton’s fresh new approach to the Bond role in 1987’s The Living Daylights won him and the series many new fans in a
debut that Rye felt was as exciting as it was impressive. Unfortunately, Rye
said this all fell apart in his second Bond picture, 1989’s Licence To Kill. Rye explained that the six-year delay between
Bond pictures caused by legal wrangles between EON Productions and the
financing studio MGM, made it clear that EON should search for a new Bond actor
for their 17th film.
Pierce Brosnan, who
ironically lost out to Dalton in the role for The Living Daylights, took over as Bond in the 1995 GoldenEye. Rye said the film made
significantly more than its predecessor, but was far less impressive.
“Brosnan became christened
MGM’s ‘Billion Dollar Bond’ in all the trade ads, before eventually being
unceremoniously dumped by the producers after the huge financial success, but
almost universal panning, of 2002’s Die
Another Day,” Rye said.
Rye believes that Daniel
Craig will make an excellent Bond. Noting that the world has changed almost
beyond recognition in his lifetime, and since Dr. No in 1962, the 44-year life cycle of the series of films has
reflected the changing world in which they are made, so it seems sensible to
Rye to “reboot” the character for the 21st century-style of film making.
“While not all of this new
turn of affairs is to my own personal taste, Bond is bigger than anyone and
will no doubt continue to live on beyond many lifetimes,” Rye said. “I
certainly hope so because it has given me a great deal of fun and excitement
and I’d like to think kids of the future will have the same chance to see and
enjoy this wonderful series of films and read Ian Fleming’s novels.”
I agree with Rye, but differ
on his assessment of License To Kill,
which I very much liked. I liked that the film took material from Fleming's
novels, such as the bait warehouse scene in Florida. I especially liked Robert
Davi as the drug kingpin villain. And I also liked Dalton's portrayal of Bond.
In my view, he offers the second best Bond portrayal in the series, with
Connery, of course, being the best.
Now a new generation will be
reading the Fleming novels in part due to the new film and in part to the
re-issue of the novels by Penguin Press’s Modern Classics.
“Ian Fleming has shaped
British sensibilities now for over half a century and by almost any standard
the Bond novels have to be viewed as modern classics,” said Simon Winder, the
publishing director of Penguin Press and the author of The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World
of James Bond, a humorous look at the Bond phenomenon.
“At a time when many of his
contemporaries from the 1950s have dropped from view, Ian Fleming's invention,
thanks to the overwhelming success of the films, continues to resonate in a
world fantastically different from the one in which Bond was invented.”
Winder ran Penguin Modern
Classics and was involved in buying the rights for Penguin to publish the Bond
novels. He said it struck him as both provocative and correct to put the
Fleming novels in the series.
“Fleming is one of the three
great 1950s visionaries in British literature--together with Arthur C. Clarke
and J R R Tolkien - all despised at the time as 'genre' writers, but who have
between them had an incalculable effect on world literature, while their
notionally more serious contemporaries have almost faded from sight,” Winder
said.
Winder said he wrote his book
on Fleming and Bond as he was trying to make sense of his own experience – that
of a fan in the early 1970s, who at age ten, first watched Live and Let Die.
“I thought it was the pinnacle
of sophistication, only to realize as an adult that it was rubbish,” Winder
said. “The book takes this point to go back over Ian Fleming's life, the books
and the early films to pick apart, in a jokey way, what made them tick.”
“Bond sprung into being in
the 1950s because Britain was in a sort of horrible free-fall - the empire
falling to bits, the economy in tatters, no real friends, and run by a gang of
weird gentlemen with no real vision of how to get out of the mess.”
Bond was invented by Fleming,
Winder explained, to reassure the British that while the day-to-day reality was
a humiliating fiasco, in secret they were still saving the world. This struck
him as an amusing, though admittedly not entirely original, perception and the
book plays with this idea through Fleming's life, through the books and the
films.
Winder said that he would
like to see the producers remake Live and
Let Die, Diamonds Are Forever, and the other poor Bond films, with the
second try being more faithful to the Fleming novels in the way Casino Royale has promised to be. I
agree.
“Daniel Craig seems to be
really good - he was terrifically nasty in Munich
and has a sort of fish-eyed menace which certainly gives him the potential,”
Winder said.
I was initially displeased
with the choice of Craig, thinking that Clive Owen was the only young actor to
fit Fleming’s physical description and who could deliver a Bond comparable to
Connery’s Bond. Having now seen the film, I still think Owen would have been
the better choice, but I was pleased with Craig’s portrayal and the film.
Although I would have
preferred the film to be a period piece set in Bond’s true time – the 1950s and
early 60s – and I truly miss John Barry’s music, the producers did a fine job
of updating the plot from the threat of post-WWII communism to the threat of
modern terrorism. The film is fast-paced, gripping and intelligent. The
introduction of Bond, pre-00 status, was very clever, as was the ending of the
film, which made one anxious for the next film.
The producers believe that
Craig has the right stuff to play Bond truer to Fleming’s character and have
enough faith in him that even before the film’s release, they announced that he
will reprise the role in the 22nd Bond film, which will released on May 2,
2008, the year of the centenary of Fleming’s birth.
Ian Fleming Publications Ltd,
which is run by Fleming’s family, has commissioned a well-known author to write
a new James Bond novel, marking the centenary. The author will be kept a secret
until the publication.
“There will be a broad range
of events and publications designed to celebrate the life of this literary
legend and to examine his legacy,” Corinne Turner of Ian Fleming Publications
said. “The program includes a major exhibition featuring never-before-seen
material and events will reflect Fleming’s passions and experiences in the
worlds of art, literature, journalism, sport, motoring and travel.”
“The Ian Fleming Centenary
presents an exciting opportunity to celebrate an extraordinary life,” Turner
said. “The Bond novels are, however, just one aspect of a fascinating life that
combined the flamboyant elements of 007 with a unique creativity. Fleming was
not only a novelist, but also a journalist, sportsman, naval commander,
traveler, intelligence officer and bon-viveur.”
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