I agree with this. I’ve never forgotten the Batman story ‘An Innocent Guy’. A nerdy creep who dreams of killing a big name, just to do something bad in his life for once. He decides it’ll be Batman. His death not coming from a known supervillain but a random nobody without any serious motivation. Then just disappear and live a normal blameless life.
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Jaws always got me feeling that after his enjoyment of cruelty in TSWLM he mellowed a bit - but remained quite daft nevertheless.
He probably did not notice that he is not the kind of special specimen Drax had in mind (while Drax probably took him into space as insurance against his master race rebelling against himself who is, let‘s face it, also not master race material).
As for Dolly, we all know that Drax must have a fetish for something. Why not braces?
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Braces… eh…? 
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I was astonished to find him as part of the attempt at killing Bond in the pts. Was he even the leader of that team? Acting to avenge Stromberg? If so, why leaving the fun of confronting him to that girl (clearly not in on the joke of the plane landing early) and that bizarre pilot-in-Blofeld-drag? Jaws’ presence makes no sense at all the way the scene plays out (and it’s conspicuously absent from Wood’s novelisation, so it was likely added late in the production).
Jaws frequently comes across as daft, true. But in TSWLM he’s clearly the top dog amongst the hit squads in Egypt and Sardinia. Once Drax hires him he’s yet again acting either independently - that clown costume - or as team leader with Drax’ regular forces. He must have at least some measure of competence in the hired goons department. And he was part of a depopulate the Earth scheme before. So he should know how these things walk and quack.
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He‘s the „I‘m only following orders“-type, I guess.
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That is where my deficiency comes in–I never think Bond might not win, so there is never tension on that level. When I go to see THE ODYSSEY next week, I will not wonder whether or not Ulysses will see Penelope again.
For me, the threat of global surveillance is truly scary, and I find it a real threat–even one manifested to some extent already. Similar the DAF–the threat of a criminal enterprise camouflaged by a multinational corporation.
I can see that–sort of. I came to Bond with movie #7, having read a few of the books. In my experience, Bond won–just as Tarzan, Superman, Poirot, Miss Marple, and Columbo did.
Also, when I think and write about Bond–it is about Movie Bond far more than Book Bond. I read the books decades ago, and with the exception of DAF for research purposes, I rarely go back to them (MR is the only one I have successfully re-read in recent times). So when Dustin writes about “Bond’s fallibility,” I wonder if I do not see it since my focus is on Movie Bond. Fleming developed Bond over the course of his writing, deepening the character. Bond on screen changed actors, who brought varied strengths and styles to the portrayal, but that is different from the development that Bond underwent with Fleming. So for me, Bond’s literary fallibility becomes on screen a movie being ironic/having fun by simultaneously presenting a standard issue hero (with various trimmings depending on the film), and also showing him fail, thereby undercutting the hero image the film is constructing. The transition is from Book Bond’s personal attribute of fallibility to Movie Bond’s act of failure–he is not deep enough on film to seen as fallible.
Because the film needed him to do it. How/where does Bond get the white lab coat and clipboard in DAF? From the prop department. Why? Because Movie Heros always have the tools they need when they need them.
Which is about Book Bond.
Which seems more Movie Bond to me.
I do not get Bond’s underdog status in the movies. He may go in alone, but often the cavalry is waiting just offscreen to come to his assistance.
And that is the big difference for me. In the film, Bond is a Movie Hero, and Movie Heroes always win. The fun is in watching if/how the movie undercuts/satirizes its presentation of its own hero. The films can be–and often are–meta in their approach. The novels never are.
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Well, there is a tiny bit of meta in You Only Live Twice:
The inevitable publicity, particularly in the foreign press, accorded some of these adventures, made him, much against his will, something of a public figure, with the inevitable result that a series of popular books came to be written around him by a personal friend and former colleague of James Bond. If the quality of these books, or their degree of veracity, had been any higher, the author would certainly have been prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. It is a measure of disdain in which these fictions are held at the Ministry, that action has not yet - I emphasise the qualification - been taken against the author and publisher of these high-flown romanticised caricatures of episodes in the career of an outstanding public servant.
It’s probably fair to say Fleming invented his James Bond numerous times, starting with a postmodern antihero, moving to a more conventional adventure style, then again imagining him as an early cinematic version, which he tried to make stick at least three times with Moonraker, Doctor No and Thunderball (and was hoping to sell as a tv production in between, even at times willing to drop the name and start with a more generic Commander Jamaica).
Then again, Fleming also nursed literary aspirations and his From Russia with Love is still one of THE cornerstones of the thriller genre and on par with Greene and early le Carré. If he wanted Fleming could be every bit as sharp-eyed and perceptive as his wordier colleagues - in half the page count. Only his naïve romanticism kept him from reaching higher recognition with the literary circles. At his heart Fleming wasn’t a writer but a dreamer. Maybe that’s what makes his creation so enduring.
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Interesting. So the suspension of disbelief never works for you since you look at a film from a more formalistic angle?
Absolutely. And I do like SPECTRE, even more so since my last rewatch. But it drops the ball on making that threat felt. Just that control room does not heighten the tension. Silva mentioning gleefully that he can destable a country with a few keystrokes is more effective.
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You know the novels so much better than I. I am sure that it exists. I just find Fleming to be more in the late modernist lane than anywhere else.
And a certain amount of nastiness and bias. His work is a) interesting because of the insight it gives into the reality of a dying Empire and the mindset that mourns its death, and b) simultaneously tedious because of these attributes. Fleming is a fabulist who has exquisite reportorial skills, and one can love one side without cottoning to the other. In fact, in some ways they work at cross-purposes.
As I was writing my post, I did say to myself “My MrKiddWint, you have become quite the formalist.”
Suspension of disbelief? I believe that Bond finds the lab coat and goes from Subbasement 5 to Ground Level without being detected because the film’s formal, aesthetic properties make it convincing, thereby earning a suspension on my part. I do not a priori go into a film saying “Well, this is all going to be fantastic, so I just better turn off my narrative coherence neurons.” The artwork needs to earn its suspension of my disbelief.
It is more dramatic, and depending on a viewer’s taste, it can feel more effective. But that room full of busy drones surveilling, while not dramatic, is effective for me.
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Fully agreed.
The labcoat never was a problem for me, simply because people in labcoats were at that place, and Bond will have found it somewhere.
Bond films do make it easy to suspend disbelief, of course, due to the nature of its main character who always perseveres and never dies (until that last moment of the last regular films).
Other films have to work harder.
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Fleming, while born 1908 was actually closer to the 19th century, raised by people coming from an Empire mindset and everything that included, the Victorian/Edwardian undertow of imperialism and xenophobia that was based on an unshakable belief in - white! - British superiority. Read George MacDonald Fraser’s excellent Flashman Papers and you’re likely to find a good deal of that mindset satirised in a century of wars, battles and catastrophic debacles spreading from Afghanistan, the Indian Mutiny, Crimea, the slave trade and American Civil War as well as frequent slaughter of indigenous peoples and the looting of their lands. Such was the spirit of the 19th century - only for the people raising Fleming it wasn’t satire but their real lives and the basis of their worldview.
Ordinarily we distance ourselves from our elders during puberty and young adulthood and much of social progress stems from questioning the decisions of previous generation(s). Fleming couldn’t easily go this route in his time. His father was an early victim of the Great War, a hero praised by Churchill himself. Any criticism or distancing from this idol was sacrosanct.
Likewise, there was no escaping the reach of his overbearing mother whose grip on the family finances kept her kids in line and whose deeply ingrained nouveau riche snobbery would haunt Fleming for the rest of his often deeply unhappy life. It may seem absurd from our perspective, but Fleming wasn’t able to change his spots although he certainly tried to over the years.
However, there are signs he mellowed towards the end, maybe also because other contemporaries gave an example. And Fleming was always interested in the human condition, as for example Greene or Simenon explored it in their work. Plus, he held some surprisingly progressive views on city planning and public transport one wouldn’t expect from him. Fleming was a remarkably multi-faceted character and a lot of it shows in his work.
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The entire catalogue of Bond movies are in themselves a suspension of disbelief.
DAF Connery’s smile to camera as he flips the car for a second time is saying to us … I don’t believe this either but isn’t it fun!
You are watching a series of movies that are basically one movie remade 25times which is beautiful.
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Occurs to me that i havnt done a Bond marathon in a while - do I just keep on the EON films or i add CR (54) CR (67) and NSNA?
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With 25 films, why not add three more?
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And that logic gets me part way to a suspension. What seals the deal is that the film is suffused with doubles, masquerades, and pretending, as well as the elegance of having the False Hergersheimer go out one door, immediately followed by the Real Hergersheimer coming in another. The larger poetry of it quells any disbelief.
Agreed. Just for me, I find the spots he could not change often predominant. Maybe that is why I like DAF–his like/dislike of the United States and its culture is fun to engage–and the later work, where the mellowness and struggle come to the surface more.
I wonder if Hamilton suggested the smile, or if Connery just did it.
Be capacious. I know that I look forward to your reports.
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Forgot Peter Lorre was in this. Mostly know him from M (brilliant film)
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Casino Royale (54)
It’s low budget as a TV epiaode does show. The cast do have a nice charm to them but it does come across as a student theatre veraion of the book more than once.
The mixing of Vesper and Mathis was certainly a choice…
I will say in it’s favour that it made me do research into how you play Baccarat - something the EON films have never made me do but i think that’s down to their pacing as even the slower ones are faster than this adaptation.
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DR. NO (1962)
What to say about this film that hasn’t already been said…Monty Norman’s score is awful, it often feels like he hadn’t read the brief of what the film was going for. The film also has such a change of tone when it hits Crab Key that you get whiplash - the only other film in the series that has such a sharp change to the point it feels like a totally different film is Licence To Kill, a whole 27 years later.
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Orion-style critique at its most pungent.
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