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Ian Fleming's Bond, part 2
Mar. 23rd, 2008 03:19 amLast night we watched the 1963 movie of From Russia with Love on ITV-4, I read the 1957 novel only a couple of weeks ago, and the conjunction produced a bit of wishful thinking. It would be great to see the novel's plot faithfully used for a period movie.
It would need a desaturated palette and a stark mid-Cold War look, including much use of grey, brutally massive Stalinist architecture during the initial Moscow scene-setting. There would be no gadgets except for those mentioned in the book: Bond's briefcase with its concealed daggers, ammo and gold coins, and a couple of bad-guy guns disguised respectively as a book and a telephone. Most of all, there'd be no mention of the fictional organisation SPECTRE. Bond's enemy would be SMERSH.
Which, according to Fleming, was a branch of MGB, the Ministry of State Security, though if you want to be unkind, this is another of those mistakes, since the real SMERSH went out of business in 1946, and MGB had become MVD then KGB in 1953-54 (having been Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD and a swarm of lettered sub-groups with varying responsibilities.) I can't blame him, though; keeping track of alphabet soup must get really dull for someone not writing history, and as for SMERSH...
How could any thriller-writer not fall in love with a department whose name (SMiERt SHpionam) means "Death to Spies"? – even though it's a remit close enough to that of the Double-O section that the Good and the Bad Guys would fit uneasily but appropriately in the same pigeon-hole.
Such a movie won't happen, of course. The Bond movie franchise just got a reboot into this century, and I can't imagine them wanting to go back 50 years into the last one. But it's an entertaining daydream. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks Vladimir Putin looks like a Bond villain. He certainly has the background for it.
You can take the man out of the KGB, but can you take the KGB out of the man? And would this man let you?
It would need a desaturated palette and a stark mid-Cold War look, including much use of grey, brutally massive Stalinist architecture during the initial Moscow scene-setting. There would be no gadgets except for those mentioned in the book: Bond's briefcase with its concealed daggers, ammo and gold coins, and a couple of bad-guy guns disguised respectively as a book and a telephone. Most of all, there'd be no mention of the fictional organisation SPECTRE. Bond's enemy would be SMERSH.
Which, according to Fleming, was a branch of MGB, the Ministry of State Security, though if you want to be unkind, this is another of those mistakes, since the real SMERSH went out of business in 1946, and MGB had become MVD then KGB in 1953-54 (having been Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD and a swarm of lettered sub-groups with varying responsibilities.) I can't blame him, though; keeping track of alphabet soup must get really dull for someone not writing history, and as for SMERSH...
How could any thriller-writer not fall in love with a department whose name (SMiERt SHpionam) means "Death to Spies"? – even though it's a remit close enough to that of the Double-O section that the Good and the Bad Guys would fit uneasily but appropriately in the same pigeon-hole.
Such a movie won't happen, of course. The Bond movie franchise just got a reboot into this century, and I can't imagine them wanting to go back 50 years into the last one. But it's an entertaining daydream. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks Vladimir Putin looks like a Bond villain. He certainly has the background for it.
You can take the man out of the KGB, but can you take the KGB out of the man? And would this man let you?
