A Cup of Mud

The Bond Films versus the Bond Books

A Cup of Mud: The Bond Films versus the Bond Books

Despite it not being the year of a Bond release, I saw plenty of 007 on the big screen during 1978. By the age of nine, my brother and I had come to relish the whole thrilling ritual of going to ‘the pictures’. Everything about it was addictive. The exterior of the cinema with its quad posters and Front of House stills. The queue at the confectionary counter for our packets of Maltesers and Kia-Oras (popcorn was yet to hit big in those days). Then the sarcophagal darkness of the auditorium. The glammy ads for Martini and Marlboro (and the not so glammy ones for local restaurants and amenities, including the dependable Rawalpindi). Then the piping Pearl and Dean theme before the trailers for coming attractions (in 1978 these would include Smokey and the Bandit, Convoy and The Pink Panther Strikes Again). Finally, the closing of the curtain as if the evening was over before it even began, followed by the hush before it pulled back again and the silent appearance of the film’s certificate from the British Board of Film Classification, providing an official seal on what we were about to see. To this day, I love the moments before a film almost as much as the movie itself. It signals that for two hours I’m about to descend into another world and leave my troubles behind.

In the spring of '78, our mother took us to Aylesbury to go shopping. Why she chose this destination is not clear, but we were often on the road to Oxfordshire to see the Bannisters. Since our parents’ separation, this meant that we travelled with either our mother or our father separately, as they both knew Mark and Kathy Bannister equally well, but never together. Our mum must have planned this trip with a degree of cunning, as showing that day at the Aylesbury Odeon was a double bill of two Bond movies we hadn’t seen before: Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun. Just as well, as in those pre-VHS days, it would be 1980 before ITV saw fit to screen both films.

And so our mother parked us in the almost empty Odeon just after lunch for over four and a half hours of impossible glamour, action and suspense. Of crocodiles and voodoo and speedboats. Of Chinese junks and Solar Agitators and the best-dressed spy in the world. The double-bill was a 70s thing in way that seems curious now. Although US cinemas in the 60s had often paired movies, it was only then just getting going in the UK. It’s a big deal, asking audiences to sit through four or even five hours of entertainment in the dark. Hitchcock famously said a film’s length should be timed to the endurance of the human bladder. But double-bills were everywhere, so they must have been justifiable box-office-wise. Bullitt with Bonnie and Clyde. Rollerball with Juggernaut (no, me neither). There was even a double bill of The Spy Who Loved Me with The Pink Panther Strikes Again later in the year, with Bond and the cartoon feline back-to-back on the poster, holding guns in the classic 007 pose. Maybe the popularity of double-bills was down to parents who just wanted to offload their kids for an afternoon of shopping.

No matter, the experience of Golden Gun and Live and Let Die was monumental: a high point of our young lives. Curiously, the films were shown out of sequence to their release dates. So we were treated to Golden Gun first. This, as it turned out was right on many levels, not least of which being that it allowed Moore’s relaxed second turn as Bond to seduce us before his more egregious debut. In retrospect, Golden Gun is a high-camp, kinky oddity. A scoop of 70s sleaze, with its three-nippled villain and bare flesh everywhere, most notably Britt Ekland’s in her almost non-existent turquoise bikini. Not only is it a cocktail of racy thrills, but also casual racism and toxic innuendo, most of which went over our heads as usual. None of this mattered to two nine-year olds. What did matter was the film’s incredible imagination (courtesy of new screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz in tandem with old hand Maibaum). There was villain Scaramanga’s island hideaway and its lurid Funhouse, built for sadistically toying with his victims before shooting them with his self-assembled Golden pistol (yes, we wanted one as much as a Walther PPK). And then there was Scaramanga’s flying car, and Bond’s stolen Toyota in which he does an incredible loop-the-loop stunt over a broken bridge. Also M16’s off-kilter office in the beached wreck of the Queen Elizabeth in Hong Kong harbour. And so on.

What’s more, the association of sex and death was heavy-handedly present in almost every scene. Lulu’s piercing title song told us ‘Love is required whenever he’s hired/ It comes just before the kill’. Or was that he comes just before the kill? And sure enough, there was Maud Adams obliging the icy Christopher Lee (who we vaguely knew had played Dracula) before she too cops a golden bullet. By the time Bond pilots a seaplane to the pristine Thai island of Khao Phing Kan to face down Scaramanga in the last act we’re lost to Bond’s world. This is all real, gripping, vital. It’s all actually happening. Will Bond survive the Funhouse? Will he even survive Britt Ekland’s Mary Goodnight; a 'ditzy blonde' who almost does for our hero when she nudges the wrong button with her bikini-clad behind (that kinkiness again). Of course, he has to survive or he wouldn’t return in The Spy Who Loved Me, as the end-roller tells us he will, while Bond sails away in a junk over the South Seas.

After The Man With The Golden Gun, not only were we shaken and stirred, but we were also slightly confused. Following the example of the formidable Anya Amasova in Spy, why was Bond’s leading lady such a dolly bird? And why, after seeing the immensely tall Jaws a few months before, was Bond’s adversary now immensely small – the diminutive Nick Nack, played with knowing menace by Hervé Villechaize? It was all highly troubling.

But we didn’t have an opportunity to think about these imponderables. Before we had time to leave our seats for a pee, Live and Let Die was tearing up the screen, with its blend of Blaxploitation, urban cool and unstoppable energy. A mournful gospel score soundtracks a funeral on a New Orleans street. Without warning a shady man in a Panama hat is stabbed before being swallowed up by a coffin. The mood flips and the crowd erupts into a jamboree with a Dixieland band leading the procession. Those reversals again. You never got used to them - or enough of them. Then we’re at the UN, where the British delegate gets a deadly shock through his earpiece. Then we’re on the (fictional) Caribbean island of San Monique, watching another sweating white dude in a suit get bitten by a snake in a crazed voodoo ritual. All before our hero had appeared on the screen, or Paul McCartney has sung his immortal lines about being young and your life being an open book.

In many ways, Live and Let Die is the most problematic film in the Bond series. Forty years later, James and I would sit through it again on the hard seats of a room above a pub, hosted by the Tufnell Park Film Club. It was, to our eyes, a creaky old mess. The only redeeming feature was that the Club had somehow persuaded the wonderful Madeline Smith (who plays Moore’s squeeze in his first ever scene as Bond) to introduce the film. Simon Winder, in his book The Man Who Sold Britain, writes about a similar feeling on revisiting the film when he showed it to his children. It left him ‘mute with grief. The film was a mean-spirited and offensive shambles, too stupid really even to be racist, too chaotic to be camp’. While perhaps overly pejorative, he has a point. It’s certainly ponderously directed in places, with a speedboat chase that seems to just go on forever, and no over-arching driving plot where Bond has to save the world. The film is really just a series of great set-pieces, the most memorable of which were the bus that gets ripped in half during a chase, and Bond’s escape from the alligator sanctuary by using the backs of crocs as steeping stones. Years later, as a thirty-year-old mature student at UCL, while reading the moment in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus escapes from the Cyclops using his ingenuity rather than brute force, I would recall the suited Roger Moore leaping over the water in the mango swamp. Indeed, Bond is the archetypal hero who uses his wits, rather than just his fists, to win.

But the film’s adjacency to 1970s Black culture is still uneasy. Live and Let Die seems to have jumped on the Blaxploitation movie bandwagon, co-opting it for its own purposes, while loosely tying it to the plot of Fleming’s novel, which was about Bond foiling the smugglers of seventeenth-century gold coins in the Caribbean. Director Guy Hamilton and screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz are happy to present Harlem as a clichéd den of thieves, with everyone from cab drivers to shoeshine boys hip to the act. It also depicts the Black villains using a white woman (Solitaire, played with virginal grace by Jane Seymour) as a chattel and a honey trap. Having said that, on watching the film again, Bond the Colonial interloper is fooled at every turn by his Black enemies. They are way smarter, and way better dressed, even by Bond’s Savile Row standards, duded-out in Chesterfield coats, black leather gloves and pimp hats. Though Bond doesn’t get taken outside and ‘wasted’, as Mr Big instructs, he gets taken to the cleaners. He’s the alien abroad, the fish out of water, the honky mug fooled twice by the seating arrangements in the Fillet of Soul restaurant, whose revolving booths take him into the hands of the enemy. He’s even trapped in the back of a taxi by the same cab driver who delivered him to Kananga’s lair in the first place. Not great spy-work there, 007.

Tom Mankiewicz, in an on-screen interview, admitted to being aware of the danger of writing all the villains as Black characters. He reveals the racist, shit-kicking character of Sheriff W.D Pepper was created for the purposes of satire, to give the audience a ridiculous white man they could laugh at. Pepper returns in The Man with the Golden Gun, with even more racism, at one point calling the East Asian population ‘pointy heads’. Confusingly for us, when we saw Golden Gun and Live and Let Die out of sequence, we had no idea who this absurd caricature was supposed to be. Yet, despite the filmmakers’ attempts at even-handedness, Live and Let Die still presents a world struggling, and failing, to come to terms with racial and cultural difference. The voodoo ritual that Bond crashes in the third-act plays straight into the worst white-settler fears of savage natives and rough magic. Naturally, all these disharmonious resonances were lost on two young boys in the Aylesbury Odeon whose hearts were still, just about, open books.

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Four decades later, I would return to Fleming’s novels in preparation for a Backlisted podcast about On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The accusations of racism and misogyny in Bond were bound to come up, and I was hyper-alert to them as I scribbled in the margins, comparing the original novels with the films. If nothing else, it was an excuse to read all the books again for the first time since early adolescence. What I found was surprising, if not revelatory. For a start, there was something wonderfully tangible and vivid about Bond’s world on the page. Fleming knows how to evoke the stink of the Everglades, or a heroine’s perfume, or how to convey the exact tactile grip of Bond’s Beretta or Walther PPK. The prose is luxurious, alive with Fleming’s formidable descriptive powers; his mastery of dialogue, his mise-en-scène, his plotting, pacing and rich characterisation. He makes the action sing. There’s a dexterity to his writing that any fiction writer would admire. The idiom is English, not American. It’s not a Chandleresque register, but that of Buchan or Waugh. A supremely visual writer, he also makes sure to include all the senses, the sounds and smells and textures of lived experience. This, I realised, is what we loved as young readers. We disappeared into an immersive world, full of sensation. It was another way of escaping our rapidly deteriorating domestic situation. All the other stuff was arcane to us: the politics, the espionage, the world history; the adult arenas of sex and travel; alien emotions such as ennui or sexual disgust. All mystifying to two ten-year-olds, but tantalising nonetheless.

Most striking was Fleming’s gift for the creation of character; his Dickensian genius for portraiture; his grotesques and neurotics. Like all great writers, he had an instinct for emphasis; where to slow down and where to speed up. While an action scene might be over in a few lines, there’ll be two pages describing Le Chiffre’s face, or three pages on the monstrous Drax. The effect is to show how physiognomy might reveal the psyche. Like Fitzgerald spending a whole paragraph on Gatsby’s charming but equivocal smile, Fleming will linger over his villains until he (and we) understand them better. Like Dickens, he wrote his books with great energy and little revision. There’s a spontaneous life to his villains that is wholly compelling. In addition, Fleming was the first thriller writer to put real perversity into his evil characters. It’s there from the first book with Le Chiffre’s whips. John Brosnan, in a rare moment of insight, suggests the antecedent of the Bond villains is ‘not Al Capone, but Dracula’. There’s something satanic and sexually deviant about them. There’s also the Freudian notion that their transgression began with their infant sexuality. In a couple of novels, Bond imagines what his villains were like as children: cruel, greedy kids.

Another big surprise was that he wrote women very well, a rarity for male authors of the 1950s (and now). On rereading, nearly all Bond’s women are revealed as complex, independent and tough, with a core of mystery. Fleming liked his women to be coarsely somatic, to be real, living beings with the same appetites and proclivities as men. None of Bond’s women in the books are helpless damsels like Golden Gun’s Mary Goodnight. None are ‘Bond girls’ in the accepted sense, familiar from the films. They are largely formidable femmes libres, from the double agent Vesper Lynd in the first novel Casino Royale, to policewoman Gala Brand in Moonraker, who could ‘break Bond’s arm quicker than he could break hers’. What’s more, they are very definitely women, not girls. They have agency; they sweat and swear. Honeychile Rider in Fleming’s Dr No has ‘authority in the voice’. We learn very quickly that she’s just killed her abusive husband with a poisonous spider, a detail tactfully omitted from the film version. The women in the Bond novels are not the insipid floosies of some of the films. Fleming also paints male relationships with great sensitivity. Witness Bond’s bromance with Felix Leiter across several books, or the respectful, fearful, adoring, father-son relationship he has with M.

In his own way, Fleming gives us the truth about men and women. Even though one would pin them as a genre fiction, the Bond novels frequently transcend the prison of the conventional spy thriller. While Fleming is not Turgenev – there’s little moral complexity or psychological depth in the Bond books; it all very Manichaean, with black hats versus white hats – he plunges us into a uniquely believable world, one that never really existed. It’s a fantasy of super-potency; of Britain as a world power that never faded. A boy’s own world of action-adventure transposed to the realm of adult sexuality and sadism. As Simon Winder splendidly observed, Bond is essentially ‘Biggles with a cock’. Despite working in naval intelligence, Fleming didn’t aim for verisimilitude. His Bond-world rarely reflects the gritty realities of espionage. For that, readers would have to wait until the early 60s for John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. There you find a world of shadows, opaque misinformation, false names, dead drops and microfilms in tobacco tins. The book’s hero, Alec Leamas, is an ‘alcoholic wreck’. At one point he remarks: ‘What do you think spies are: priests, saints, martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards’. By contrast, Bond’s world is of full of light and action and certainty, with outlandish names we’re meant to believe, and exotic locations we’ll never visit. The world opens up with Bond. What I loved as a child reading the novels was that you got to go places and learn things. You learn about golf, horse-racing, chemin de fer, rocket science. Bond’s frame of cultural reference is truly impressive, from international politics, to art, to anthropology, to zoology. You didn’t find any of this in the dank world of Le Carré’s dysfunctional spooks.

Fleming cleverly makes sure the essence of Bond’s character is elusive. He’s undoubtedly a snob, with his Savile Row suits, Morland's Turkish cigarettes and Pinaud Elixir shampoo (‘that prince among shampoos’). In Goldfinger, he looks down on a sweating patsy in his ‘Abercrombie and Fitch’. In the same book he admits: ‘I don’t drink tea. It’s mud. And it’s one of the main reasons for the downfall of the British Empire’. He’s even snobbish about the new fivers: ‘The old ones were the most beautiful money in the world’. Bond is cosmopolitan, urbane, the opposite of a fusty provincial. Yet, despite his Fettes and Oxbridge education, Bond is strangely classless. He’s uncomfortable in the stratification of the British class system, which he sees as a prison. He’s the opposite of clubbable. He disdains the aristocracy and the nouveau riche. His most natural and uncomplicated associates in the books are the working-class characters, such as the caddy in Goldfinger or the Marseille cab driver Marius in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Or the Cayman islander Quarrel in Live and Let Die and Dr No. Or self-made men like Darko Kerim Bey in From Russia with Love, with his extended family of sons and cousins working for his Istanbul intelligence network. Furthermore, Bond is oddly ascetic, given his proclivities for fine food and drink. ‘It was the puritan in him,’ we read after Bond has ‘the best meal of his life’ of stone crabs and pints of ice-cold pink champagne in Goldfinger. He’s revolted because ‘he’d got what he wanted and easily’.

While rereading the books, it became clear that the character of Bond had become distorted, not augmented, by the films. In the novels, Bond has (unavoidably) a real interior. While he’s not Tolstoy’s Levin or Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Bond suffers and yearns and dreams like the rest of humanity. The big revelation is that Bond is surprisingly innocent – he’s not just the cynical agent of the British Government, sated with women and high-living, creased with ennui. He’s intensely vulnerable and alive, and always shocked at the level of evil, megalomania and paranoia of each of his nemeses. Above all, he’s interested in them as human beings.

What surprised me even more was that, far from being a predator or a harasser of the opposite sex (something his film incarnation veers perilously close to), Bond is helpless in the face of his women. He falls in love with just about every one of them. He’s not just interested in notches on bedposts. There’s a fundamental respect there. In Thunderball, Bond states: ‘Whore, tart and prostitute were not words Bond used about women’. Admittedly, Fleming slightly undermines this respect by devoting a whole paragraph to how women are ‘a hazard on the road’, on the following page. But let’s not split hairs. It’s with women where Bond’s vulnerability is most manifest. And – surprisingly – with his job, which is essentially killing people. Not only is Bond a nervous flier in the Bond books, but he hates killing. In the opening of Goldfinger he reflects: ‘he had never liked doing it’. He suggests he was ‘too intense, too introspective’ to be a cold-blooded assassin. Bond castigates himself, not because he thinks of these as bad qualities, but because they are ‘unprofessional’. Bad for the mission. Fleming’s Bond is full of feeling. He suppresses his emotions in order to become a killing machine, but he’s acutely sensitive. This, of course, is why we follow him over the course of twelve novels and two volumes of short stories. I was shocked to find that Bond cries in virtually every book. Even Fleming forgets this, writing more than once that Bond ‘cries his first tears since infancy’.

Lastly, there’s the question of racism. Undeniably, the Bond novels embody the attitudes of the decades in which they were written. They are supremely ‘of their time’, which is not to excuse their infelicities. The most overt racism occurs in Goldfinger, with Fleming’s presentation of Oddjob, who is referred to as ‘that Korean ape’. Yet, there’s less othering going on in the Bond novels than in the Bond films. Fleming’s Bond is a man of the world, used to meeting men and women of every creed and colour. While Dr No’s Chinese heritage is presented as ‘exotic’, it’s the sexual and biological otherness that Fleming focuses on. All of Bond’s villains have physical abnormalities which have little to do with their race (and accusations of ableism are valid here). There are the steel tongs of Dr No’s hands, and the fact he’s ‘one in a million who have their heart on the right side of their body’. But he’s no racist caricature in the tradition of Fu Man Chu. Living in Jamaica, as Fleming did when he wrote all of the Bond novels, he lived side by side harmoniously with the Caribbean islanders. By all accounts, there was a respect and parity there that’s mirrored in the books. The Black characters in the novels are Bond’s equals as men. In the case of Quarrel, there’s no hint of Crusoe and Man Friday, of massa and servant. There’s certainly none of the queasy and offensive othering we find in the film version of Live and Let Die, at which Fleming would undoubtedly have cringed.

While rereading the Bond books, I was struck again and again by how radically Fleming’s Bond differed from the character travestied by his movie counterpart. The Bond of the films is revealed as the most sexist, misogynist, casually racist masculine role model you could present to two nine-year-old twins. It was certainly not what we needed at the time. And yet, in another sense, Bond was precisely what we needed. Because James Bond was always in control. Once our parents separated, and our stepfather arrived on the scene, we felt any sense of agency had been ceded; that we were passive victims in our own lives. Only James Bond 007 could save us.