James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  Another change is more understandable but one that fundamentally altered the character of Bond. Anxious both that the public would not warm to a vista of unrelenting violence and that censors might cut the film to ribbons, Terence Young decided to sprinkle Bond’s dialogue with quips. When Bond delivers to Government House the dead body of a No henchman who has swallowed cyanide rather than talk, Bond tells a doorman, ‘Sergeant, make sure he doesn’t get away.’ When assassins chase Bond in a hearse and end up going over a cliff, an unperturbed Bond notes to a witness, ‘I think they were on their way to a funeral.’ From here on in, villains dispatched by the movie Bond would be given similar sardonic eulogies. This didn’t have the effect of making 007 a comedy character, but provided stylish leavening.

  Although Bond books would have seemed cinematic to readers before the movie series started, the transference to screen provided a dimension to James Bond that even the quality of Fleming’s writing could not. The lush terrains of Jamaica on display in Dr. No were virtually landscapes from other planets for a low-waged British populace who took their holidays in UK coastal resorts such as Blackpool and Bournemouth. Then there is the physical manifestation of the character of Honey Ryder (as the film’s credits render her). Her fractured English meant that her dialogue had to be re-voiced by Nikki van der Zyl, but, physically, Ursula Andress was perfect. Her parading around naked as she does in the book was, of course, out of the question, but the white bikini in which she emerges from the surf during her entrée was shockingly revealing for 1962, when one-piece swimsuits were the norm. Only Dr No’s metallic dragon – much smaller than in the book, where its wheels were twice the height of a man – fails to bring something more to the party visually.

  Some things, though, were clearly destined for transference unchanged. ‘Medium-dry vodka martini, mixed like you said, sir, and not stirred,’ says a waiter to Bond, thus bringing to the common man a fastidiousness about alcohol then unknown to him. The first specific use of ‘shaken, not stirred’ (Fleming’s ‘and’ would never feature) comes when Dr No offers Bond a drink. Bond himself would first use the phrase in Goldfinger. The phrase would become another famous signature of the films.

  Some fans cleave to the idea of the early Bond films possessing a gritty realism that was gradually sacrificed for gadgetry and gimmicks, but watching Dr. No gives the lie to that. Among its absurdities are the fact that Sylvia Trench is able to sneak her way into an intelligence officer’s home; the fact that Bond lets go a female photographer clearly in league with evil forces; and the fact that Bond and Honey are decontaminated of the radiation permeating Crab Key by a perfunctory scrubbing at their clothes and a shower.

  The biggest offence against plausibility, however, is the film’s most famous scene: Bond’s shooting of Dent when he has him cornered in Miss Taro’s house. Angered by his reaching for his gun, Bond pumps two bullets into a helpless Dent to the accompaniment of the line, ‘That’s a Smith & Wesson and you’ve had your six.’ The scene was sensational for the time: heroes did not kill in movies unless their lives were in direct danger. It was also illogical. Just as he is killed, Dent is literally on the point of yielding up to 007 the identity of the person who ordered Bond’s assassination. It makes sense only as a tilt for headlines or a heady act of defiance of the censors.

  Dr No makes his first appearance (apart from a scene that conceals his face) around twenty minutes before the end. While Joseph Wiseman may not be on screen long, he is magnetically menacing when he is. His calm and cultured manner is a world removed from the ‘Wiseguy, huh?’ baddies that then proliferated in cinema.

  Upon Bond’s sabotaging of the nuclear reactor, Dr No’s minions scramble to evacuate Crab Key, throughout which alarms resound. Bond finds Honey and makes his escape with her before the island blows sky-high. The movie ends with Bond and Honey canoodling in the boat he has forcibly commandeered. It’s Bond’s third conquest of the movie after Trench and Miss Taro, a seduction rate not even Fleming depicted him attaining: in only two of Fleming’s novels did Bond seduce more than one woman.

  Dr. No’s lushness is particularly impressive considering the production’s financial limitations. The budget allowed by United Artists was so inadequate for mounting such an extravagant story that anecdotes abound of pathetic begging-bowl tactics and ingenious improvisation during the shoot. David V. Picker – who claims to have got the budget raised from an initial $1.1 million to $1.35 million – bristles at talk of such stories. ‘It was enough to do what we wanted to do for the first picture,’ he says. ‘That’s chitchat.’ Dr. No’s soundman has different recollections. Says Norman Wanstall, ‘It was quite aggravating when, every time I tried to ask for a theatre or recording session for something, I was always told, “Well, do you really need it? You’re costing us a fortune, Norm.” How Ken Adam ever built those sets for that money I will never, ever understand.’ Wanstall even suspects the limited money available was an unofficial reason for casting an unknown as Bond. Miraculously, the threadbare reality behind the glossy illusion is really visible only in the patently false shelf of book spines disguising the radio equipment in Strangway’s office. The back projection on roads and water may be shoddy but was not unusual for movies of the period, regardless of budget.

  ‘Nobody – and I really, really mean nobody – knew whether or not that film would be a success,’ insists Wanstall. ‘I always remember when we had that sneak preview in a cinema in Ealing, as people were filing out the look on Saltzman’s face was sheer terror. I’d never seen Saltzman look like that before – he was always so laid back.’

  He continues, ‘Everybody knew that we had a fantastic star in Sean. It didn’t take long to realise, “My God, we’ve scored here.” We knew that Ursula was going to cause a sensation because she was terribly glamorous. We knew the locations were going to be very, very effective. And the sets were out of this world. And we had a scene like the tarantula which was going to knock people out. So we knew there was quality and something different in this film. But we knew we had eventually to introduce Dr No … He was a pretty bizarre character, this guy who was living in this extraordinary environment, underground with fish in a massive aquarium. He had metal hands. His whole setup was so extraordinary. It was a question of whether or not people would think he was laughable … We thought, “God, if people don’t accept him, then the film will be a flop.” But somehow everybody just accepted it.’

  An audience reaction Wanstall describes as ‘very, very favourable’ fanned out from humble little Ealing across the world. Following its British premiere on 5 October 1962, the 105-minute film was an instant success in Europe, quickly recouping its costs.

  According to Broccoli, United Artists, despite their original enthusiasm, were unsure of Dr. No’s prospects in the world’s single most important movie market and therefore bypassed US metropolises, showing it at drive-in theatres in backwaters. Monty Norman also remembers a lack of fervour from the Americans. He says, ‘After I’d spent four weeks in Jamaica, Harry Saltzman asked me to go and see the suits, the people involved in Bond on the New York side. I went there and I could see that there wasn’t that much enthusiasm.’ Yet Picker says of Broccoli’s claim, ‘That’s total bullshit. We opened it on Broadway in two theatres. We didn’t open in the sticks anywhere.’ While at the time The Hollywood Reporter stated that the film was to premiere in the Midwest and Southwest, it adjudged its 450-theatre engagement ‘massive’. Either way, both audiences and the likes of Variety and Time were enthusiastic in their reception. In fact, the latter’s review was printed in October 1962, fully seven months before the US premiere.

  Altogether, Dr. No took back more than twenty times its budget. This was not a figure bulked up by television residuals: United Artists refused to sanction any TV broadcasts of Bond films for a decade. (Eon had the option of making a Bond TV series after having completed three feature films but never exercised it.)

  Ian Fleming’s remuneration for his largely passive role in
the making of the Eon Bond films was impressive: an advance for each film of $100,000 – around $800,000 in today’s coinage – all of which went into trust for Caspar. The addition of 5 per cent of the producers’ profits was, of course, a more abstract remuneration, and theoretically meaningless: if the Bond films made no money, neither would Fleming. History shows, however, that Eon’s Bond contrived to become among the most profitable series in motion-picture history. This is not to mention the knock-on effect on sales of Fleming’s Bond novels.

  In public, Fleming’s opinions on the cinema Bond seemed backhanded compliments. Of Dr. No, he said, ‘Those who’ve read the book are likely to be disappointed, but those who haven’t will find it a wonderful movie.’ Of Connery, he offered, ‘Not quite the idea I had of Bond, but he would be if I wrote the books over again.’ Yet there is a suspicion that he did warm to Connery’s portrayal of his creation. He privately wrote to his lover Blanche Blackwell in October 1961 that Connery was ‘a real charmer … a god actor with the right looks and physique.’ In his books he began making Bond incrementally more Scottish.

  Richard Maibaum said to Pat McGilligan, ‘In my opinion, [the Bond films] started this whole larger-than-life approach to action-adventure pictures … and then everybody else climbed on the bandwagon … You know, Hitchcock once told me, “If I have thirteen bumps in a picture, I think I’ve got a picture.” A bump is something like someone says, “I’m looking for a man who has a short index finger,” and a totally unexpected guy says, “You mean like this?” That’s in The 39 Steps. After Dr. No, Cubby, Harry and myself decided that we weren’t going to be satisfied with thirteen bumps in a Bond story, we wanted thirty-nine.’

  Such a contrived, incident-packed approach, of course, was rather at odds with Fleming’s slowly unfolding Bond books. As the poet Philip Larkin noted in The Spectator in 1966, ‘No sooner were we told that the Bond novels represented a vulgarisation and brutalisation of Western values than the Bond films came along to vulgarise and brutalise – and in a way sterilise – the Bond novels.’

  Within two years, the revolutionary approach seen in Dr. No had, with the follow-up Bond films, settled into a loveable formula. Within five years, the plethora of pastiches, spoofs and imitations had made that formula a cliché. Yet it did at the time genuinely define a new paradigm. Dr. No felt topical because of the Cuban Missile Crisis that happened to occur in its month of release, but that was not the only impression of aching modernity it conveyed. Its sensuality and brazenness about non-marital sex was extraordinary in a film world across which lay the shadow of the Hays Code and the British Board of Film Censors (now known as the British Board of Film Classification). Moviegoers were used to big and exotic productions, but such big and exotic productions were usually American and, as such, were laced with all-American, cornball high-mindedness rather than British scepticism and sardonicism. While British leading men before Connery were manly, they were also overly polite, even effete. Connery introduced an unapologeticness and swagger to UK male acting. And, if Bond’s being an establishment rebel was a contradiction in terms, it was not a dichotomy over which the audience were inclined to agonise. Not for nothing did the Vatican condemn Dr. No as ‘a dangerous mixture of violence, vulgarity, sadism and sex’.

  Fame often ripples out in an unexpected fashion. As James Bond films began to change the world, Connery himself had his own smaller effect. The given name Sean – hitherto an arcane, Irish variant of John – suddenly became popular, and specifically in Connery’s spelling rather than the more phonetic ‘Shaun’.

  Although the Daily Express had recognised 007’s potential before the movie industry, the explosion of interest in James Bond created by Dr. No was something on which the newspaper was unable to capitalise.

  The Bond strip had disappeared from its pages in February of the year of the movie’s release. An adaptation of Thunderball abruptly ended after the hijack section. A cursory, even insulting, final entry was mostly composed of text summarising the remainder of the story. ‘Bond finds them and the world is saved,’ it helpfully informed the readers regarding the missing bombs.

  The reason for the strip being thus wrenched from the paper was the fury of the paper’s owner, Lord Beaverbrook, over the appearance of ‘The Living Daylights’ in The Sunday Times Colour Section. Beaverbrook considered it a breach of his newspaper’s exclusive UK right to publish Bond prose in non-volume form, although this arrangement doesn’t seem to have been formalised in contract and, even if it had, would seem to have been called into question by the fact that the Express had declined to serialise The Spy Who Loved Me.

  Press barons of the era were liable to make such peremptory gestures. This one was costly to both Beaverbrook and Fleming. Beaverbrook lost out on the publicity bonanza attached to the newly famous Bond, while Fleming lost out on both revenue from further comic-strip adaptations and further book serialisations, which also ceased. Some grovelling from Fleming – still not financially secure – ensured the two men’s rapprochement and the resumption of both serialisations (March 1963) and comic strip (June 1964).

  Beaverbrook died three weeks before the Bond comic strip returned to the Express. Fleming was dead within two months of that return. The Bond comic strip, though, ran for many years. Its final Daily Express instalment was in 1977, whereupon it moved over to the Sunday edition of the paper, plus a daily strip in the Daily Star, a new part of the stable. It completely ceased appearing only in 1984.

  The success of the Bond comic strip is a stark contrast to the failure of 007 to thrive in a closely related medium, the comic (or comic book in American parlance).

  The release of the Dr. No movie saw the appearance of the first Bond comic. Classics Illustrated from New York’s Gilberton Company, Inc., was a self-conscious cut above the average comic, ostentatiously bringing literature to the kids, as demonstrated by its cover strapline, ‘Featuring stories by the world’s greatest authors’. Ian Fleming may or may not have fitted that description, but the decision to run an adaptation of Dr. No was certainly incongruous for a publication devoted to disseminating adaptations of the works of such people as Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain. Moreover, the comic was not, in fact, an adaptation of one of Fleming’s books but its film incarnation, albeit rendered, unlike both (UK) book and film, as ‘Doctor No’.

  The comic had the usual Classics Illustrated classy and undemonstrative painted cover. However, the artwork by Norman J. Nodel in the thirty-two-page adaptation inside was rudimentary and, in places, almost childlike. The rumour that Nodel had no access to the actual film and was working from a script and publicity stills seems borne out by inconsistencies (the room in which Dent is upbraided by Dr No lacks the film’s famous huge roof grille) and what might be termed over-consistencies (i.e. the familiar and frozen nature of some of the tableaux).

  The sex and violence of the film is understandably toned down for a young readership. Bond beds no one, and his sadism is transformed into traditional comics’ Queensberry-rules stuff (he merely wounds Dent). Other changes had less benign purposes. There are no black characters in this Caribbean adventure, with Bond’s local aide Quarrel made as Caucasian as Bond.

  While Gilberton managed to get the publication distributed in the UK as usual, the lack of the typical ‘classic’ content caused problems in their home country, where the purchasers of Classics Illustrated were as much schools and libraries as retail outlets. Accordingly, it was not issued Stateside under the Classics Illustrated banner but, instead, was sublicensed to DC. A new cover, drawn by Bob Brown and more in keeping with the house style of the publishers of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, was wrapped around the Classics Illustrated work. The newly upholstered publication was released as an edition of DC’s Showcase title.

  DC published at precisely the wrong time. Although, courtesy of their president, a lot of adult Americans knew who James Bond was, few children did. Releasing the comic in January 1963, four months before Dr. No’s St
ateside premiere, was, therefore, pretty close to pointless. Sales were inevitably poor.

  Even had the publication date been synchronised with Dr. No’s US release, such was the low quality of the comic that it’s to be doubted that it would have led to a public demand for a regular Bond title from DC. That option was there, though. Blogger Mark Evanier has written of the DC sublicence:

  The contract … included an option clause that would allow DC to do a regular series for a modest fee … George Kashdan, who was the editor at DC involved in the Doctor No one-shot, told me that DC Management felt it was in the business of promoting Superman and Batman, not properties owned by others … Kashdan did not know why they made an exception for the Doctor No adaptation but theorized that it was cheap (the material was already drawn and the Bond people didn’t want a lot for the rights) and maybe that someone was doing a favour for someone else.