The pre-credits bit in YOLT involves Bond getting introduced as Our Man In Hong Kong before kissing a woman — “Why do Chinese girls taste different from all other girls?” — followed by her flipping the bed back into the wall and ushering in a guy or two to play triggerman, followed by the authorities arriving to eyeball the body and then say things like “we’re too late” and “he died”.
After the opening credits, we soon learn that Bond’s death was faked. My question is: who, there, was in on the act and just pretending? Some of them? All? Do we know?
“We didn’t kill bond. Did you?”
“No, we didn’t.”
“Well, who did?”
“MI6 probably faked it.”
“Get outta town! We’ll just assume he is dead, and carry on. What could go wrong?”
The beginning (faked death) and ending (ninja attack) were already written by the time Roald Dahl wrote everything in between from scratch. It’s a shame since faked deaths are kinda his thing.
I imagined that the woman and the Assassin’s were legitimately trying to kill Bond, they just didn’t know the bed had been made bulletproof. The cops were in on it though as obviously he would have still had a pulse after being fake shot. Which makes sense to me, since the Assassin’s would have just ran in, shot at Bond a whole bunch and escaped before the cops got there. All they really needed was a fake obituary to “confirm” it.
Could be, I guess; but you’re saying the plan is to figure those would-be killers will fire bullets in the general direction of Bond’s unarmed and naked body — in a legitimate try at murdering him — only to then not flip the bed down to fire bullets into his unarmed and naked body?
I think sirens were wailing seconds after they let loose with those machineguns.
Best guess, they were to empty their magazines into the bed/wall and then head to their respective escape routes (dropping the guns into some sack or basket planted previously as they ran). As killing styles go, it’s a little dated for 1967. This kind of ‘hit’ style was more commonly filmed as happening in WW2 movies about the actions of the underground in Europe, where the occupying army wasn’t too concerned (or equipped) to deal with fingerprints or matching shell casings to guns.
I’ll admit that what you’re saying can make sense — and in a way that works for Bond movies in general, as well as this scene in particular. But I can’t shake the feeling that it only works backwards.
Lemme ‘splain. Say you and I are watching some Bond movie for the first time, and we see 007 get captured when he doesn’t want to — and then the bad guys don’t promptly shoot him, but instead just sort of leave him alone without relieving him of his fancy wristwatch. And maybe they explain key pieces of information to him first — not, you understand, by inadvertently revealing stuff by asking him ill-advised questions while interrogating him, but just, y’know, to gloat.
Enjoying that movie by taking it at face value means one of us can turn to the other and say well, yeah; it could’ve played out that way. We nod as we suspend disbelief, playing along by saying what I saw happen could’ve happened; it’s possible. And this scene, on its own, meshes with that: upon having watched the would-be killers do this, we can say granted, what I saw them do in that situation could’ve been what they’d do in that situation.
But it’s an extra step to say this was the ahead-of-time plan to fake his death: it’s not merely that the would-be killers took an approach they might have taken; it’s that Bond went into that situation so they’d take that approach. It looks pretty much the same, but — it isn’t, is it?
Or 006 found out that the woman was an assassin, and they thought “here’s a chance to fake 007’s death so we can advance the plot”. Heck, 006 could even have been one of the shooters, explaining why they knew when/where. (yes, my hand’s are waving really fast)
Exactly. So many improbable things have to happen for the “our cunning plan is to fake my death” not to turn into “our cunning plan got 007 killed for realz.”
I mean what if the assassins burst in while Bond was in flagrante delicto. Would have been difficult to escape when so distracted. What if they used a bomb? What if they got a lucky shot? what if what if what if…
And of course, since it becomes obvious to those who would care that MI6 faked Bond’s death, that trick will never work again. Was it worth it, M?
Mike Myers lampooned this sort of Bond movie logic in Austin Powers with the following dialogue between Austin and his controller, Basil Exposition
Austin:
So, Basil, if I travel back to 1969 and I was frozen in 1967, presumably, I could go back and look at my frozen self. But, if I’m still frozen in 1967, how could I have been unthawed in the '90s and traveled back to the '60s?
Austin:
Oh, no, I’ve gone cross-eyed.
Basil:
I suggest you don’t worry about those things and just enjoy yourself.
Basil:
[breaks fourth wall]That goes for you all, too.
For some reason, several of the early Bond films begin with Bond apparently dead or being killed. Why they do this isn’t clear, because you know it can’t be real – Bond is the hero of the film. And you couldn’t imagine him being killed in any case – he’s a successful franchise, so this can’t be the start of a long flashback. Neverheless
From Russia with Love – pre-credits scene shows Bond being stalked by Red Grant and apparently strangled by him. But it’s all a training exercise for Grant, and “Bond” is revealed o be a sacrificial lamb wearing a mask. Why a mask? It can only be to fake out the audience
Thunderball -pre-credits scene opens on a coffin with “JB” on it. We quickly learn that it’s Jacques Bouvoir, a French enemy agent who killed a couple of Bond’s colleagues. Only Bouvoir isn’t dead either, we learn. Although he is by the end of the title sequence.
You Only Live Twice – the aforementioned scene. It was “explained” that it was a faked death to make Bond’s enemies think he was dead, although there are all sorts of logistical problems. And why go to the trouble of dumping the real Bond overboard and “rescuing” him? It all only makes sense as something visually intriguing and temporarily mystifying. They could just as easily given Bond a fake passport and sent him on a commercial airliner to Tokyo, throwing a fake body overboard.
In fact, of the first five movies they only missed fake deaths in two. well, it didn’t make any sense for Dr. No – we hadn’t even met Bond yet. so that leaves Goldfinger as the sole holdout.
There was some justification. Bond’s obituary shows up in the next-to-last chapter of the book, and you can see it in the newspaper that the unnamed presumably enemy agent has at his elbow as he watches the faux funeral through binoculars. Fleming purportedly really did want to kill Bond off (again – he almost died at the end of From Russia with Love from that tetrodotoxin-enhanced boot knife), but they dissuaded him, the same way sir Arthur Conan Doyle had to resurrect Holmes twice (in Hound of the Baskervilles – presented as an earlier, pre-Reichenbach Falls case – and then in The Adventure of the Empty House, where his “death” was explained as a ruse to convince his enemies that he was dead – just like bond in the movie.)
Sort of like that TNG episode where Enterprise get blown up in the first 30 seconds of the teaser. “Welp, shortest episode ever,” I said as I reached for the remote. “Wonder if the next Trek series will be any good.”