I read somewhere, years ago, that the reason Flemming had Bond ask for his martini “shaken, not stirred” was that this was a subtle indicator that, despite his sophisticated appearance, at heart he was really just a thug.
From the novel Casino Royale]:
Bond laughed. “When I’m…er…concentrating,” he explained, “I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad. This drink’s my own invention. I’m going to patent it when I can think of a good name.”
Bond likes his drinks served very cold (a luxury in much of the post-WWII Europe in which many of the Fleming stories take place), and because they’re “very strong” the fragments of ice chips help to dilute them. The literary Bond was not especially classy–he’s a former SOE commando, an orphan raised in Pett Bottom, who was kicked out of Eton for screwing around with a maid, prefers coffee to tea, and eats simple foods at home–and occasionally shows signs of his “wartime sophistication”, such as sprinkling pepper in a glass of good quality martini at M’s club as habit of treating “bathtub gin”. Fleming also occasionally alludes to emotional problems that we’d now put under the label of post-traumatic stress disorder (dropped with Gardner and the later authors). Referring to Bond as a “thug” is not correct–he has education, comes from gentry, and clearly has deeply suppressed internal doubts about the morality of his actions–but he’s not a delicate sophisticate, either. Like Fleming, he was something of a raconteur and castabout who viewed the educated upper class with some amount of disdain for their lack of knowledge about the dangerous practical world he chose to work in.
Stranger
Link to column being discussed.
having tasted both, I tend to agree with the explanation that that vodka drink needs to be ice-cold to be swallowed with shuddering, whereas a proper martini is fine slightly chilled.
The fact that he insists on Gordon’s shows what a tasteless lout he really is.
You all know the joke about the difference between Burt Reynolds and Sean Connery: same actor, better agent.
Bond’s sharp dressing, the sophistication, the allure – it’s all just a thin veneer applied to our killer to make him palatable.
Well, realize at the time that Fleming was writing (mid-'Fifties through early 'Sixties), Gordon’s Gin was the world’s most popular gin and was well regarded in the UK above Beefeater (despite the fact that the latter is clearly a better product…if you have to drink gin, that is), and there were really no boutique makers of gin or other spirits outside of Scotch whiskys, so it is kind of an obvious call. Today, of course, if you ‘called’ Gordon’s, you’d get an odd look from the bartender as he pulled the bottle from the jockey box, but at the time it would have been one of at most three or four available at a typical cocktail bar, and probably sitting on the shelf.
Yes, but could Bond drive an airboat like Gator McCluskey?
Stranger
Have to drink gin? HAVE TO? Ice cubes at 30 places, sir. Tanqueray was around back then as well, although that’s not much better. I guess everyone knew the name ‘Gordon’s’, and Fleming was appealing to the masses.
“Clear alcohols are for rich women on diets.” – Ron Swanson
Stranger
November 2000: late for still having an untreated ulcer, after the publicity of the late 90s. But “non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), low-dose aspirin, smoking, excessive alcohol use, emotional stress and psychosocial factors are increasingly important causes of ulcers and their complications even in H. pylori-negative patients. Other rare causes of peptic ulcer disease in the absence of H. pylori, NSAIDs, and aspirin also exist.”
Did you really intend this for THIS thread??? 
Aha! I stopped reading Bond when Fleming died, and even as a teenager, I had discerned the PTSD (not that I knew it by that name, which I don’t think had been invented, yet); I’ve wondered for ages how they could have kept the character going when he was obviously nearing a complete breakdown. So that was the solution? They pretended it wasn’t there?
The Fleming Bond was clearly a damaged personality, albeit no moreso than others of his generation with similar experience; Kingsley Amis picked up on that and carried it into Colonel Sun. The Gardner interepation of the character was a more straightforward action hero in the 'Eighties mold. (Gardner, to his credit, was a competent writer and actioneer in the line of Alastair MacLean, although falling into formula and coping with the increasingly untenable timeline of a Bond who would be in his seventies by the end of his run.) The later interpretations were almost as cartoonish as the Moore and Brosnan film portrayals, and there is essentially no continuity with the character of Bond. He may as well be Dr. Who, completely dissociated with former portrayals of the character.
It is interesting to read the Fleming novels in the order they were punished, because they originaly portrayed Bond in a somewhat protagonistic (if anti-heroic) light, but later novels and stories deviated, starting with the collection For Your Eyes Only with greater moral ambiguity and less focus on Bond. In The Spy Who Loved Me–a novel Fleming later redupiated but nonetheless represented a shift in tone and style–Bond is actually only a supporting character. This may well follow Fleming’s own emotional decay and disillusionment with how his novels were adapted to screen.
Stranger
I thought Moore ocassionally displsyed glimpses of the literary Bond. Threatening to shoot the gunmaker in the groin. His “interrogation” of Scaramanga’s concubine, which was basically slap her silly until she talked. Kicking that guy off the cliff in For Your Eyes Only.
Ironically, Moore disagreed with the more brutal actions of the character–in particular, the cold-blooded killing of Locque in For Your Eyes Only despite the fact that he cleanly deserved his death–and preferred to play the character in the same dandy-ish fashion as he did Simon Templar and Brett Sinclair. Connery approved of Connery’s performance (the only cinematic Bond he saw in his lifetime) but of all of the portrayals Timothy Dalton most consistently represented the character on screen. His dour, somewhat bitter portrayal and piercing glare transcended some of the silliness of the dialogue of his two films.
Stranger
Agreed., I don’t know if you watched Ffokes, released as Assualt Force in the US, but that probably was the most literary Bond-like performance Moore ever put out and it was not even a Bond film. :D.
However, Moore was a good enough actor that he could make it work. Sure he preferred the light hearted approach, but except for Moonraker he did undertake some very cold hearted actions and it did not seem out of character as it would for Brosnan.
He also made a smuggler eat the poisoned heroin he was selling in the underrated The Wild Geese, so Moore was definitely capable of greater range, but in the Bond films he was essentially The Saint (a bit ironic considering that Charteris’ work was one of Fleming’s inspiration to write spy stories) and with a couple of exceptions his films became progressively sillier, with plots that were transparently and repetitiously adapted from previous Bond films.
Stranger
" A second scientific conclusion reached that evening is that “martinis upset ulcers,” so it may be a while before your humble correspondent repeats the experiment."
I thought that was curious for a staff report written in 2000.
It’s conventional to have only one thread per subject, and this thread did start out referring to the staff report, before morphing to a discussion of Bond representations.
But speaking of which, I always thought that the most important aspect of Bond’s character, (defining his attitude to women and to killing) is that his fiancee is killed at the end of the first book.
Sorry, Melbourne, but the reference was quite obscure, totally non sequitur, and didn’t reference the part of the staff report you were addressing. So, of course, I totally got confused. 
You will note that someone else picked up on the ulcer bit, and there is now a separate thread on that. You might want to cross post there. 
my question where is manhattan? he was one of my favorite people to read on the boad … you just didn’t get him in a discussion about freeway lanes …
He hasn’t posted in almost three years. 