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Just what IS the 'Spirit of Fleming'?


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#1 DavidJones

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Posted 10 April 2015 - 10:23 AM

Many people, from Michael G Wilson to Timothy Dalton, have mentioned 'the spirit of Fleming'. Usually, it's within the context of 'getting back' to it. But what is the spirit of Fleming? Is it just rhetoric or does it mean something? For Your Eyes Only, The Living Daylights and the whole Craig era proclaim this.

 

I think it means more plausibility, but there are times in the novels where they're very implausible - and pleasingly so.

 

As Brosnan once said, "The blood and the sweat is there on the page." But are the novels really that hardboiled? They're hardly le Care...

 

Added to which, is this what made the Bond films popular, anyway? Or is that the humour/gadgets/spectacle combo which began in Goldfinger. When they do this, aren't EON doing themselves a disservice by switching Broccoli's recipe back to Fleming's?

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#2 Turn

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Posted 11 April 2015 - 12:29 PM

It's a good question. I am guessing that spirit is thrown out when there are space ships or invisible cars in the production. But I can find evidence of it in every Bond film, some more than others.

 

No, the novels aren't that hard-boiled when you have a villain trying to steal the gold in Fort Knox or having Bond battle a sea beast. This is where the films improve on Fleming.

 

Goldfinger gets all the praise as the first blockbuster Bond film, but it seems to be neglected that DN and FRWL were sizeable hits in their own right before the formula was in place. The novels and films will always have differences and it has more to do with the times than it does with the novels. The film series seems to be doing great at the moment, so if there is a switch is still isn't hurting it considering SF is the series' all-time moneymaker.



#3 Dustin

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Posted 11 April 2015 - 04:14 PM

The spirit of Fleming...that's a most elusive thing not easily defined. Is it the sense of middle-age contemplation one might get from Casino Royale? The fantastical-bordering-on-absurd adventurism of Moonraker and Goldfinger? The violence of Live and Let Die or the suspense of From Russia With Love? Fleming himself made a few changes and the books went through a definite metamorphosis over their run, especially once Fleming pursued film adaptations and introduced a couple of subtle but nonetheless significant changes to this end.

One example: Kingsley Amis in his James-Bond-Dossier located Bond in terms of fashion style between off-the-peg customer Inspector Barlow of Z-Cars (a popular TV series of the time) and dandy John Steed of The Avengers and stated it was clear to him Bond's suits never came anywhere close to Savile Row. Amis, due to his standard work, can justifiably be considered a capacity and somewhat of an expert on Bond.

And yet Ian Fleming himself, in one of his later interviews with Jack Fishman (007 and Me, included in the anthology For Bond Lovers Only) stated Bond's suits were just that, Savile Row - and hastens to add his own were of cheaper Cork Street pedigree. What happened?

All of Bond's enemies are invariably rich and often immensely powerful in their chosen profession or the live-in cover from which they operate. With the possible exception of a cheap Mexican knife artist Bond is nearly always up against big shots who can afford to light their cigarettes on his annual pay cheque. In Moonraker Bond is consequently depicted as well-off, yet he risks his salary for a year in a game of cards with a multi-millionaire and national hero extraordinaire.

Said millionaire is described in great detail, down to the - modest! - Cartier cuff-links and plain gold Patek Philippe watch. Other items depicting the charm of the filthy rich are a white Mercedes sports roadster with garish red upholstery and a shining new ballistic missile inside a shining new rocket base atop the Dover cliffs.

Bond frequently moves in the circles of the very rich and it cannot be said he sticks out like the tarantula on Chandler's cake. Yet he never makes the mistake of thinking he belongs in these circles.

At least not in the books, that is.

For the screen Fleming picked up on a number of things during the time of the Thunderball project and subsequently - or during? - put together a list of points for writers and producers concerning the tone and style of his vision for Bond-on-screen. One of the points was to avoid clichéed Britishness (a la Barbour and Landrover...wait...), another to keep an upmarket luxury air. This left traces in the books, too.

Suddenly it's Bond whose luxury camouflage is depicted, new suits with turnback cuffs like Drax - and Fleming - wore, gold watch with chain and another to break his hand with. Bond is still playing the rich man - as he was in Live and Let Die - but now he's also depicted as being perfectly able to afford these little indulgences. The suits he ordered, the watch he breaks, they seem to be taken care of out of Bond's pocket, and rather affordlessly one might add.

A similar shift of priorities seems to have taken place with regard to other elements and staples of the early books. Torture became less frequent or happened only off-stage after the events of Thunderball. Or shifted towards psychological torment. The Anglo-American 'special relationship' of Casino Royale and Live and Let Die changed into Britain being depicted as the underdog in a growingly alienated marriage. Finally, the Secret Service itself took a marked shift into the direction of Deighton's or le Carré's institutions.

So what is Fleming's spirit? Unless you contact him via a seance you can probably just as we'll take your pick.

As for the hardboiled label, that must probably be judged within the context of Fleming's contemporaries. There have of course been writers who fit the bill better in terms of moral ambiguity, violence, coldblooded killer instinct or self-serving bigotry. But there was also a huge number of writers who didn't dare going where Fleming went, not even close. Fleming himself was often annoyed when he was accused of undue violence. During the war he got knowledge of much more violent acts of bestiality, worse than anything he used in his books. Fleming was honestly convinced he had toned down the amount of violence in his works, and he also believed the violence he described was of a nature that didn't invite overtly sadistic notions, in contrast to some of today's entertainment.

On balance I'd surely consider him an early representative of the hardboiled subgenre, like Hammet and Chandler.

#4 Odd Jobbies

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Posted 11 April 2015 - 05:37 PM

hovering somewhere between hedonism and duty



#5 Bryce (003)

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Posted 11 April 2015 - 06:03 PM

Well stated and summed up Dustin. IMO, you're spot on.



#6 Simon

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Posted 11 April 2015 - 06:58 PM

It's a good question, and admirably answered by those above.

 

But I do think it comes down to interpretation.  And as such, I would love to ask, or have someone else ask the producers what their interpretation of this ingredient is.

 

For the most part, and in absence of anything else more substantial to base this on, I reckon it might be a mantra to decree when swerving away from the invisible cars et al.



#7 Guy Haines

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Posted 11 April 2015 - 07:01 PM

In the books it was mixture of the plausible, the implausible mostly made to appear plausible, and the attention to details from real life meant to reinforce the plausibility.

 

Someone wrote about the book Thunderball that, of course, in real life the theft of atomic bombs from an RAF V-bomber couldn't happen - but if it could, this is how it would happen.

 

The other thing that Fleming threw into the mix - which until recently the films didn't always - was that Bond was made to appear all too human at times. His tastes were fastidious, sometimes slightly ludicrous, and he had a track record with the opposite sex which seemed to stretch credulity. But at the same time he could be hurt, physically and emotionally , he felt real fear, and he would often emerge badly battered and bruised from various ordeals. He wasn't a perfect superhero, and at times he could be downright unlikable. In the films he often rose above all this, but not in the books.

 

That was in "spirit of Ian Fleming's James Bond", in my view.



#8 DavidJones

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Posted 12 April 2015 - 01:18 PM

Thanks for the replies - you guys are far more knowledgable than I am on this,

 

I find Eon's fidelity to Fleming's books curious, especially when it could be said that Broccoli/Saltzman's 'take' on Bond was arguably more commercial than Fleming's.

 

Fleming was influenced by the Fu Manchu and Builldog Drummond novels, with their Dr Evil-type villians, grandiose schemes of world domination and inventive methods of murder. But he also seemed to want to ground it all in a Eric Ambler/Graham Greene type territory, with his military intelligence background providing verisimilitude. Such blending of the silly and the plausible is no easy thing to accomplish, though it should be said he didn't always try to do this. 

 

For the films, I suppose it's a matter of moderation. So long as EON remember to reign themselves in and don't go too OTT, like they did in Die Another Day. When that film came out, I was thirteen, and even at that age, when a boy's taste for spectacle and sensationalism is at its peak, I thought it was too silly.



#9 Simon

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Posted 12 April 2015 - 01:29 PM

Curiously, I was 13 when that other presentation of spectacle was released, that of Moonraker.  And I couldn't get enough of it....

 

(Perhaps I was a late developer)



#10 DavidJones

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Posted 12 April 2015 - 06:59 PM

Curiously, I was 13 when that other presentation of spectacle was released, that of Moonraker.  And I couldn't get enough of it....

 

(Perhaps I was a late developer)

 

Ah, but Moonraker is a better film than Die Another Day.



#11 Guy Haines

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Posted 12 April 2015 - 08:08 PM

As a youngster my first Bond movies were the Connery/Lazenby ones - my very first being Lazenby's - and one of the things I must have liked about them was a certain attention to detail. Thus it wasn't just "a nuclear bomber" that was hijacked in TB but an RAF Avro Vulcan B2. It was a Gemini spacecraft - admittedly renamed "Jupiter" that was attacked in YOLT - though the detail was lacking when it came to the Soviet craft hijacked, as it was in real life about their spacecraft. It was things like that, compared with the backdrop of the rival "super-spy" movies of the 1960s that impressed me a bit. Ii looked like Bond had a backdrop that, fantastic though his adventures seemed, had a basis in the real world.

 

Mention is made of Moonraker the movie. Apart from the humour, which was a bit too over the top for my tastes, I found a "colony in space" secretly created, at the end of the 1970s a stretch too far. Oddly enough I don't think I would now, I suppose because of the International Space Station being up there - and at the time of MR's release I didn't dismiss the volcano rocket base of YOLT as too far fetched, I guess because there were real life hidden rocket bases called nuclear missile silos the world over. Bond almost made it into space but didn't in YOLT, which left him still rooted on Earth. Bond got into space in MR which, for this fan at least, didn't seem quite right.

 

I wonder if, had he lived beyond 1964 and continued writing his Bond stories, Ian Fleming might have, at some point, sent our hero into orbit? I have my doubts, but we'll never know.



#12 DavidJones

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Posted 12 April 2015 - 09:05 PM

I wonder if, had he lived beyond 1964 and continued writing his Bond stories, Ian Fleming might have, at some point, sent our hero into orbit? I have my doubts, but we'll never know.

 

I doubt Fleming would have carried on writing. I think he would have been embarrassed by the spy-mania he helped create and would have retreated to Goldeneye without the typewriter. I also don't think there was the same cross-genre meldings as there is today, and he would have considered any space setting to be the exclusive proserve of writers like Arthur C Clarke.



#13 FlemingBond

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Posted 12 April 2015 - 09:07 PM

Whenever they talk about getting back to Fleming they seem to be talking about more realism, less silliness.

 

The cinematic Bond has had  element's that aren't so much present in the novels. Bond was treated mostly as a superman that didn't get hurt, heartbroken, or have a bad ending.



#14 Guy Haines

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Posted 12 April 2015 - 10:58 PM

I offered that question in my last post, with my ex-lawyer's hat on, possibly knowing the answer in advance. I agree with DavidJones. I think by 1964, even if he hadn't had health problems, Ian Fleming would have been close to calling time on Bond in print. There may or may not have been a few more stories to tell, but in his position, with the films taking up where the books left off, why not move on to other things and let the legend carry on in a different media?