7 replies to this topic

[AMC Hornet]

There may already be a thread similar to this one - or at least some with similar entries - but here goes my attempt to collect everyone's similar thoughts under one banner.

 

It took me a while to notice these things, and I admit it was EON's decision to change CR's game from Baccarat to Poker that helped me realize the flaw in MI6's (read Fleming's) original plan:

 

Bond did not have to go head-to-head with Le Chiffre, challenging him with one 'Banco' after another. That just made him Le Chiffre's sole target after the game (as it had to be for the sake of the story). All he had to do was go 'Avec' every time, which invited the other players at the tableau to make up the difference. Every time Le Chiffre lost, half the stake would go to Bond, and the other half would be divvied up among the other players. Kidnapping Vesper and Bond would only recover half the money Le Chiffre needed to replace before SMERSH caught up to him. The rest would be scattered to the four winds.

 

As I already said, though, that would put paid to the excruciating climax of the novel (besides, given the losing streak Bond hit, the other players may have been discouraged from making up the difference).

 

The other plot device that bothers me (at the moment) was Wint and Kidd outbidding everyone in the Queen Mary's salon for the right to reserve the High or Low field for the next day's anticipated run. Everyone was taken by surprise by their choosing the Low field, as the sea was smooth and the weather quite agreeable. Wouldn't they have saved themselves some money by letting some other sucker win the High Field, then picking up the Low field for a song? (Again, though, that would have deprived Bond of the opportunity to observe the two men, and wonder about Wint's thumb-sucking - as much good as it did him.)

 

So, those are my two introductory WTF? moments, which of course can be written off as 'had-to'be's' for the sake of their respective stories. Regardless, what other convoluted moments have caught your attention - either right away, or after several dedicated readings?

[Dustin]

Truth be told, to me the Flemings are full to the brim with example where the operational capacities of the Secret Service are used with less than the necessary minimum of reason and sanity - though of course necessarily so for the requirements of the adventure tale.

Why sending an agent to Royale at all in the first place? Bond is merely taking away the place for a really big whale who could have cleaned out Le Chiffre with much better chances than the medium grade civil servant with his account of direly scarce foreign cash. Bond's real mission in any halfway decent intelligence outfit would have been to quietly watch from the sideline and contact Le Chiffre when his ship starts sinking to help him defect. Or, in the unlikely case Le Chiffre manages to win back the diverted funds, kill him and his gunmen the way his colleague from SMERSH later did.

No fuss with exposing an active agent to an army of spectators, one of which can even point him out years later at a chance meeting at an airport as he learned about Bond's profession, top security there...

Many of the stories are based on the utter ineptitude of the customs officials seemingly all over the world: a gangster figure is suspected of smuggling gold coins into the US, how in hell's name does he do it? He's only importing live fish on his trips with his private yacht, we haven't a clue, please, pretty please do help us out, lend us one of your gunslingers with their famous balls of steel, we are utterly clueless how this happens and need your expertise...

A rich jeweller is suspected of smuggling gold out of the country, but we haven't the foggiest how he's doing it, every time we ask him at the border he just shouts 'nothing to declare' and drives on in his armour-plated Rolls on a trip to Swizzerland. Please lend us one of your geniuses from the Ministry of Defence because we simply don't get it...

Other times events are simply described more intriguing and adventurous because there would be little story otherwise. Bond spotting the Russian agent in Property of a Lady would of course not lead to the guy being kicked. To the contrary, Bond's service would become best friends with him, learn of all his activities and friends, his preferences and dreams and maybe also of the odd secret he keeps from his own people. But that of course would have been not nearly as dramatic.

Another example is OHMSS. The guy they would send to Blofeld would be either the real Bray or Basilisk, much less chance of being caught red-handed or having their cover blown for these two live in their cover. They would have had just the one mission, to get Blofeld to come to Augsburg where the 00s would wait to pull the Eichmann on him. Of course, Blofeld doesn't act that much more reasonable, he already uses the title and is perfectly fine set up in Swizzerland, what the hell does he need a document from an obscure British office for? Anything he needed he could get either by forgery or simply buy it. Today he'd do it over the Internet...

[JCRendle]

Need Bond have played the card game, Baccarat or Poker, at all? Couldn't he have slipped something into each players food or drink before the game which causes a short period of sickness. If he does this to his own and LeChiffre' s as well it would avoid suspicion. The game would have to be cancelled and LeChiffre would still be out of pocket.

[Guy Haines]

Moonraker is one of my favourite Bond novels, but consider;

 

A soldier from Liverpool with memory problems goes from nothing to everything in no time at all? OK, five years, but from post war austerity Britain? Making all that money in a short space of time would surely attract attention of the investigative press? A bit more digging and surely some highly questionable things would come out? But no - the British establishment, fools that they were, took Drax at face value. (An unfortunate expression that, given what happened to Drax's face!)

 

Put it this way. I read the satirical magazine "Private Eye" every fortnight. They employ some highly regarded investigative journalists, often writing using aliases. If that magazine or something like it had been around in the 1950s, Drax would have been a prime target.

 

The Nazi rocket team. "Fifty loyal Germans" as Drax describes them. I know that in post war western Germany the Allies made use of former Nazis to run things in Germany. But this is a case of bringing fifty rocket specialists to the UK to work. Even Wernher Von Braun's team was kept under restraint and scrutiny in the US for a while. Did no one in the UK bother to check these people out? It's a bit much to expect one policewoman, Gala Brand, to snoop around looking for something - which by the time Bond arrives on the scene, she still hasn't, save for the rocket gyro settings which Drax insists on double checking, and makes Gala doubt herself.

 

And, of course, the whole card game scenario, setting Drax up as a bad type. If you think about it, it's superfluous because the following day a more substantial reason for Bond or someone to investigate emerges - the murder of the security agent Major Tallon. I read that Ian Fleming wanted to write a Bond novel revisiting the card games of Casino Royale but warning of the dangers of German rearmament, and ended up bolting the two ideas together in Moonraker.

 

None of which spoils my enjoyment of the book. Drax is a great villain - my favourite of all the villains in the books - and the plot becomes a real race against time. But I'm not blind to its flaws.

[Dustin]

MR is my favourite! The thing is, even if you accept the Russians would work with a German Nazi - a species that killed millions of Russians during the war - to help him get his revenge against the Brits - a people that actively helped the Russians to turn the tables and so far wasn't any kind of threat to the Soviets - by providing him with a nuclear warhead; even if you accept this incredible proposition, why ever going to all those lengths of developing a kind of mega-V2 and a rocket base atop the Dover cliffs when you could just as well put the thing in a lorry and drive it up to Buckingham Palace where you could end the British Empire in style with a bang?

Though of course that would hardly help the interests of the USSR as it would deprive them of an intelligence service whose sections were thoroughly infiltrated by valuable and loyal spies. But what the hell, let's do it anyway, that old Nazi is so charming and the Brits are so vile and despicable. And placing that warhead somewhere in Washington wouldn't help the Soviet cause at all, all Americans carry tons of arms and would be even more dangerous without a government to restrain them...

[Guy Haines]

The more you think about it - I'm trying not to! - Moonraker the book is as far fetched in its day as the film was nearly a quarter of a century later. But the book still remains a firm favourite of mine - along with another utterly implausible adventure featuring a British villain of dubious background who cheats at cards, Goldfinger.

[JCRendle]

I do love Moonraker, my Great Pan edition is well read. Not bad for something that only cost 2'6.

[glidrose]

How the hell does the submarine travel as fast as the rocket at MR's climax? I don't have the novel open in front of me, but doesn't the rocket land smack dab on top of the submarine?