Indeed, and he is in You Only Live Twice !
Egad, Barry Nelson is awful in this. I remember seeing him in stuff back when but nothing as bad as he is here. At least he got paid, right?
Even in Diamonds are Forever, I think there are examples of what the OP is describing - in this clip (where Bond escapes from being buried in a pipe), the voice of one of the workers opening the hatch - at around the 2:20 mark in the clip - sounds like an English person attempting a US accent and falling short of it.
(I think the voice is dubbed over - I can’t see either of the actors lips moving)
Yeah, I’d strongly guess that the faux-American voice was added during post-production, back in England, by, as you note, an English person trying to sound like a working-class American.
That actually sounds a lot like the afore-mentioned Shane Rimmer (who was Canadian) attempting a different accent. He had an on-screen role as well, so perhaps he was directed to disguise his voice.
I don’t know of any reason that he wouldn’t have been paid. The James Bond books were little known in the U.S. until 1961, when President Kennedy praised one of the books. At the time that this episode was shot (in fact, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s), a lot of American television was like theatrical productions. There were many television shows that consisted of just unrelated individual episodes. Frequently these episodes were based on books or short stories or theatrical productions. Nelson was starting to make a career in Broadway productions. The producers of the show apparently said, “Hey, this little-known British book might make a good episode. We would have to change it to make the character an American working for an American intelligence agency, of course. Let’s cast this Barry Nelson in the lead role. He’s doing a good job on Broadway.”
One of the rarest James Bond books is Too Hot to Handle, the American edition of Moonraker. It’s a paperback, published by Permabooks (a part of Doubleday). Bond is called “Jimmy Bond” on the cover notes.
I collect first-edition James Bonds. While I have some under the Jonathan Cape imprint, as they should be, I’m always looking for others. Too Hot to Handle is one such.
This was the American paperback edition of Moonraker, published in December 1956. Some of the text was rewritten to change some British idioms to American ones. Fleming even added some footnotes that explained some British things to Americans, like British currency:
Anybody else remember the novel, James Bond and Moonraker? Dana Gould claims it had the blurb, “The novel based on the blockbuster film based on the best selling novel.”
Here’s the Wikipedia entry on it:
I’ll wait for the movie adaptation of it.
Superiority complex in this case. It was an American television series that recast Bond as an American agent.
On a related note, there’s a book which uses the character of James Bond as the main example of how Britain tried to define its special relationship with America. The main idea was that while America was bigger, stronger, and had more resources, we needed British brains to tell us how to best use our power. This conceit allowed the British to feel like they were an equal partner in the relationship.
Yeah I’ve got it and read it. This and For Your Eyes Only are the only movie novelizations written by the screenwriter himself. They’re also the first James Bond movie tie-in novels since Diamonds are Forever (where they released Ian Fleming’s original novel with a cover bearing the movie poster, even though the novel and the film have almost nothing to do with each other). Since there was less and less connection between the movie plots and those of the novels, they didn’t (to my knowledge) rrelease tie-in versions of Live and Let Die or The Man with the Golden Gun. And there was absolutely no connection between The Spy Who Loved Me and the film. Someone came up with the idea for a novelization based on the movie. They did that for Moonraker, too, as you point out. Wood’s scripts were Bond at his most puerile, but I have to admit that Wood’s novelizations are better than I;d have expected.
But the next Bond film – For Your Eyes Only wasn’t scripted by Wood (thank god) and there was no tie-in novel. Which is too bad, in a way – they could have simply released Fleming’s story collection For Your Eyes Only, because the film is mainly based on two stories from that collection – the title story and “Risico”. But they didn’t. They could’ve done the same for Octopussy, because that movie is sorta kinda based on two stories from that collection (the title story, again, sand “Property of a Lady”). But they didn’t.
“Budweiser; shaken, not stirred.”
Steve Martin Did It!
Interesting, but not the first time this has happened. I have a novelization of “Five Weeks in a Balloon” by Gardner Fox based on a movie version of “Five Weeks in a Balloon” by Jules Verne. The novel’s title is “Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon.” I’m sure there are many other examples.
Plenty of others.
There’s the Alan Dean Foster novelization of The Thing, which is based on John Cmpbell’s Who Goes There?
There’s the Joseph Silva novelization of the 1977 film Island of Dr, Moreau based on the novel by H.G. Wells
There’s the Piers Anthony novelization of Total Recall which is nominally based on “We Can Remember it for you Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick (although I’ve long argued that a lot of the film derives from Robert Sheckley’s nove; The Status Civilization)
There’s Barry N. Malzberg’s novelization of Phase IV which is based on H.G. Wells (again!) “Empire of the Ants”
And so on and so on ad nauseum.
I’d put a vote in for more than a little bit from Varley’s “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” as well.
As a buyer, I must say I HATE this. As a consumer, if I want a novelization of the movie, that’s what I want! I don’t want to read unrelated stories, even if they are good. I’m still mad at the James Blish ST TOS books.
Blish’s books are based on early draft scripts of different episodes. They’re of historical interest because you can see what the stories were like before they were completely rewritten and put into the can. (Did you know that Carolyn Palomas was impregnated by Apollo?)
John Gavin was also signed to the role a couple of times. He was contracted to do Diamonds are Forever after Lazenby bailed, but then the studio demanded Eon pay Connery whatever he wanted to come back to the role, and Gavin got paid anyway. He was slated to ascend to the role in Live and Let Die, but Harry Saltzman insisted that Bond had to be played by a Brit, and they went with Roger Moore instead.