Some Kind of Hero - 704 pages of it! - Page 3 - General Bond Film Discussion

I finished the book a couple of weeks ago and can recommend it. Some Kind of a Hero is a great labor of love and fandom--Field and Chowdhury seem to have tracked down every useful Bond film book ever published, absorbed the facts within and combined them with an impressively wide-ranging set of interviews.

I didn't find any revelatory discoveries regarding the classic era of Bond films (1962-1989), perhaps because I own some of the rarer quoted sources, such as the Cinema Retro issue on Dr. No and Helfenstein's book on The Making of OHMSS. I'm less well-read when it comes to the Brosnan/Craig era, and I found those chapters very educational. It helps that the authors were able to interview most of the major players from those years, whereas most of the classic era luminaries are now dead. Purvis and Wade certainly come across as writers who know Fleming inside and out, and whose work has rarely made to the screen as they wrote it. Readers will also have a better appreciation of how the modern Bond films have been at the mercy of corporate interference and demands for rushed product (which blighted the Brosnan era).

The authors have been badly let down by their editor and proofreaders--if they even had any. I gave up counting all the instances of misplaced punctuation and garbled syntax. There are also too many direct quotations of anecdotes that would have been more effective if paraphrased.

Some Kind of Hero also shows the limitations of oral history, which has been called the easiest kind to write. Not that I'm suggesting Some Kind of Hero was easy to write--it was obviously a Herculean undertaking of several years' effort. But it would have been an even greater achievement if it relied on more than interviews and other Bond books and articles and had also made use of archival research. That's easier said than done of course, since the archives of United Artists and EON are probably difficult to access.

But a definitive history of the Bond films will have to make use of archival research, because documents--such as interoffice memos between UA and EON, or the producers' letters to the director--are often more reliable than memories of incidents that happened decades ago. The chapter on OHMSS relies heavily on recent interviews with Lazenby and reproduces his claim that Hunt didn't speak to him during the shoot--a claim that has been challenged elsewhere on basic grounds of logic. That's the other problem with oral histories--they give priority to those who were available to be interviewed. Peter Hunt isn't around to give his side of the story. Another minor example--Guy Hamilton, in an interview decades after Goldfinger was made, dismisses Paul Dehn's contributions by saying he was lucky to get script credit. But Adrian Turner's examination (in his book on GF) of the screenplay's genesis convincingly suggests that Dehn played a major role in adapting the book.

When Some Kind of Hero discusses screenplays, it relies on information taken from interviews or other Bond books, but a definitive history of the Bond films (at least of the classic era Bond films) will have to sort through all the drafts prepared for each production, in the way Helfenstein did for his OHMSS book. I'm rather surprised no one has conducted a study of the hoard of Bond scripts included in Richard Maibaum's papers at the University of Iowa (the list of the contents is here: http://collguides.li...MSC0149#series5). We know that in many cases the final film either deviated from Maibaum's script (DAF) or Maibaum initially had a very different vision of the material (DN, LTK, TLD, OP, TSWLM). It would be fascinating to learn more of the roads untaken and whether the producers were wise to not take them.

Putting talk of definitive histories aside, Some Kind of Hero remains a recommended purchase. No previous Bond book has compiled information from so many sources, and, as far as oral histories go, it will probably remain definitive for the classic Bond era (unless someone succeeds in scoring a detailed interview with Connery--Field and Chowdhury made an honorable attempt), since there's almost no one left to interview. Future Bond films will probably prompt future editions of Some Kind of Hero but you might as well read the current one.

Edited by Revelator, 26 January 2016 - 12:44 AM.

Some Kind of Hero - 704 pages of it!

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