I was doing some last-minute Christmas shopping tonight, and found the whole series of Ian Fleming James Bond novels, published by Penguin books. They’re all paperback, but as you can see they’ve got the coolest covers ever.
I picked up a couple of them and was overwhelmed with an urge to buy all of 'em, just for the covers alone. Then I remembered that I’ve read most of them. And they’re just not good. The movies have their own cheesy charm, but seeing it all written out just makes it clear how shallow and slight the stories are.
But those covers! If they made posters of them, I’d be all over it. (I’m checking the Penguin Books website, but haven’t turned up much yet.)
I hold the opposite opinion…I think that the Bond movies suck moose dick. If you read the written Bond stories, they are decently crafted cold war vintage spy stories [written by someone who worked in espionage in WW2, by the way…and he also wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang]
The horrors that happened when they started adding high tech garbage to perfectly good stories … They took a really good novella about a weekend in a small roadside motel, mixed with a damsel in distress to be undressed, a pair of mobbed up arsonists with a great cat-and-mouse sequence and changed it to a submarine pen in the carribean. They took a good story about a soviet-linked finance guy embezzeling money and gambling in Monte Carlo, Bond honing his card sharp skills and putting a sting on Chifre to get his own side to take him out…mixed in with some torture and a car chase … and though it wasnt the Broccoli Brothers, it ended up a Woody Allen comedy complete with an atomic alka seltzer, clones and a flying saucer…They took an interesting story about an amnesiac Bond living with an ama pearl diver…ARGH, I cant go on.
Read the genre, and understand that the Broccoli’s use the name of Bond, some villians, and a vague hint of other names from the books to make money, they don’t care about what could have been a great series of noirish espionage instead of a rat pack glitz bunch of garbage.
Not to mention, Bond wasnt a babe magnet, he looked rather like a 'saturnine Hoagy Carmichael ’ Probably the closest to the real bond is the George Lazenby Bond.
But I have read the genre. To each his own, of course, but I think the novels are extraordinarily weak. Any charm in them comes from the movie versions, IMO, specifically because they refused to take any of it seriously. I knew that Fleming worked in espionage during the war, but of course that doesn’t make the Bond books any more “true espionage” stories than Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is an accurate portrayal of the candy industry. I don’t think it was ever intended to be, and I think the same of the Bond books. (Not knowing anything about Fleming other than the two facts you mentioned in your post, of course.)
I’ve heard (no cite of course, but I think it was a show on the history channel). That the espionage experience Flemming had was far from James Bond. More of the decrypting secrete messages in a dark room kind of espionage. James Bond is Flemming’s fantasy of what he wished working in espionage was like.
I enjoyed both the movies and the books. Although neither is art with a big A if you know what I mean. Arguing about whether the James Bond books or movies are better is like arguing whether jurrassic park made a better book or movie. They were both crap. I happened to enjoy both, but lets be honest and admit that they’re crap.
according to amazon, The allure of James Bond was best described by Raymond Chandler, who insisted that 007 is “what every man would like to be and what every woman would like to have between her sheets.” Give me a break! I’d like to be a hired killer with the blood of dozens if not hundreds of henchmen on my hands. I’d like women to throw themselves at me without the benefit of a first date, or in some cases even a conversation? Many of whom are only trying to get close to me so they can kill me? Its just craziness.
Bond is a franchise that has nothing whatsoever to do with the books anymore.
It is a fomula that served MGM very well, and the sole reason Sony is spending so much money to buy out MGM.
Look for Sony to milk this franchise to death in the very near future…and although there is a Bond film ready to be filmed, the sale of MGM has put everything on hold.
I don’t know if Broccoli has kept his reign on Bond, or if future films are now Sony.
Say what you will, but Bond films always do well in boxoffice…and unless Sony screws it up, they always will do well.
Perhaps one of the subtlest plays ever, in a recent Brosnan/Bond movie (Goldeneye? Die Another Day?), is where he ends up in Cuba and briefly impersonates an ornithologist as cover. The reason this is interesting is that the 007 character was named after Ian Fleming’s good friend James Bond, who was a famous ornithologist with special expertise on the birds of Cuba and the other Greater Antilles.
So what’s the deal with the DVDs? MGM put out a great DVD series, chock-full of fascinating documentaries and other extras, and then promptly deleted them except as expensive box sets. For a long time, at least Goldfinger remained available individually, but it seems even that one is now out of print. Is it just a ploy, so that if you really want Thunderball, you have to buy Octopussy, Die Another Day and a handful of others at the same time? Do they really move more units that way?
