It’s only the end of November as I write this but in January, Liz and I will be off to Lanzarote once again to escape the cold and wintry UK. I do love the laid back (and warm) atmosphere in Lanzarote and as usual I’ll be taking a stack of books to keep me occupied while I laze about on my sun lounger in-between dips in the pool.
The other day I popped on the TV to find one of the James Bond films showing. It was Casino Royale, the film version of the very first book in the Bond series and I thought about popping my copy of the book into our suitcase with an idea of re-reading the entire series of James Bond novels. Of course knowing me I’d probably leave the book over there and that would be my tidy collection of Ian Fleming 007 novels ruined.
Fleming did a lot of his writing in a small house he owned in Jamacia which happened to be not far from another house which Noël Coward used to own. Back in WWII, Coward had the idea of making a film about the Royal Navy and so he wrote a screenplay for a film titled ‘In Which we Serve.’ It was the story of a ship. The ship is engaged in battle and is sunk and as the survivors hang on to lifeboats and debris, their thoughts meander over their past lives and the story of the ship is told in flashbacks.
It’s a very good film inspired by the story of an actual ship, HMS Kelly, which was commanded by Lord Mountbatten and Coward was justifiably proud of the finished result. He stars as the captain of the ship and along the way there are various notable British stars, some of them making their film debuts. Coward realised he needed someone to help him with the technical aspects of the film so he asked film editor David Lean to help him direct the film. Lean was happy to do so. Coward asked what sort of a credit would he want and Lean answered that he felt the film should be credited as being directed by Noël Coward and David Lean. Coward wasn’t sure about this but he agreed and the filming began with Coward dealing with the actors and Lean dealing with everything else. Lean mentioned in an interview that Coward soon got bored with directing and pretty much left the whole thing to David.
David Lean went on to have a long career as a film director and made a number of huge epics. One of them was a controversial film called Bridge over the River Kwai. This was about British prisoners of war who were forced in very inhumane conditions to build a railway through the Burmese jungle. Alec Guinness plays the senior British officer who feels that building the bridge will restore British morale and undertakes to build it to the very highest standards.
One of the prisoners decides to escape and with a great deal of luck he makes it to the British lines. He is then approached by another officer played by Jack Hawkins and asked to return to the jungle and help blow the bridge up. Many veterans of the war in Asia were very unhappy about the film as the true horror of the cruelty and deprivations unleashed against the POWs was not properly depicted.
Alec Guinness and William Holden were the stars of the film and third on the billing was Jack Hawkins. Hawkins was one of the leading stars of British cinema in the 1950s. During the war Hawkins served in the army and when he returned to civilian life in 1946, he was soon acting on the stage. With a pregnant wife he became concerned about his future and so accepted an offer to become a contract star for Alexander Korda. He really became a star after a performance in Angels One Five, a film about an RAF station in the war. Another hit was Mandy where he played a sympathetic teacher of deaf children.
In 1953 he starred as a naval captain in The Cruel Sea. The film starts off at the beginning of World War 2 when the Jack Hawkins character is at the builder’s yard helping with the fixing up of his new escort ship, Compass Rose. His officers begin to arrive, many of whom are easily recognisable as stalwarts of the 40’s and 50’s British film industry: Donald Sinden, Denholm Elliot and Stanley Baker and later in the film Virginia McKenna appears as an officer in the WRNS.
The cast and characters are therefore introduced and then the ship goes off to war, protecting the many convoys of merchant ships, bringing the supplies so desperately needed by Britain. It’s one of the great war films of all time.
Two of my personal favourite films starring Hawkins were The Intruder, a great film in which Hawkins plays a former military officer who discovers a past member of his old tank regiment robbing his flat. He determines to find the man again and the story is told in flashback as he interviews a group of his former officers and men.
The other was The Long Arm in which we see how Scotland Yard worked back in 1956. Card files, books of fingerprints and albums containing mugshots, all of which had to be laboriously checked by hand. Some great detective work finally manages to nail the villain.
Hawkins was the epitome of the trustworthy British authority figure. In his obituary one writer wrote that Hawkins ‘exemplified for many cinemagoers the stiff upper lip tradition prevalent in post war British films. His craggy looks and authoritative bearing were used to good effect whatever branch of the services he represented.’
Hawkins himself was a three pack a day smoker and later became ill with throat cancer. In 1966 his entire larynx was removed however he was still able to appear in films with his dialogue dubbed by either Charles Gray or Robert Rietti. In the film Young Winston, he has hardly any dialogue at all.
Jack Hawkins died on the 18th July 1973. He was only 62 years old.
As I mentioned, Charles Gray was one of the actors who dubbed dialogue for Hawkins in later life. It must have been a difficult task because Hawkins has one of the most memorable voices in British cinema. Who was Charles Gray? Well you might not remember the name but Gray played one of cinema’s most notorious villains, Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the 007 film Diamonds Are Forever.
Charles Gray (Picture courtesy James Bond Movie Encyclopedia)
Diamonds Are Forever was the follow up film to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. In that film George Lazenby had taken over the role of 007 from Sean Connery. Personally, I thought he was a great Bond but George himself was not popular with the producers. After the shoot was over he had grown his hair long and was sporting a beard. The producers wanted someone who could promote the 007 image even in their private life. Later Lazenby’s agent began to feel that the Bond franchise was finished and Lazenby decided against making another Bond film. What could the producers do? Well their knee jerk reaction was to offer Connery a large sum of money to return to the role. Connery agreed to play Bond one more time, banked a huge amount of money and pretty much appeared to sleep walk through the film.
Charles Gray played Blofeld who has taken over a huge empire run by the mysterious millionaire Willard Whyte and he plans to create a powerful laser using diamonds.
Who was the author of Diamonds Are Forever? None other than Ian Fleming of course, bringing our connections full circle.
Goldfinger is probably one of the best books in the Bond series and only the second 007 book that I ever read. (I’ll tell you about the first one later). I was at school at the time and for one of our assignments in English, we were asked to bring in a book which contained a really good description of a character. I chose Goldfinger as in it, Ian Fleming describes Goldfinger as a man who appeared to have been made using bits of other peoples’ bodies. This must have been in the mid-1960s and although the character of James Bond was pretty well known, the films had not begun to permeate down to the television screen.
This is an interesting story and the resulting film has perhaps become the quintessential Bond film even more so than Goldfinger. The story is about a criminal underworld organisation (SPECTRE) that steals an aircraft with nuclear weapons and holds the west to ransom threatening to explode the bombs.
In this book the secret service find that Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE, is trying to assume the identity of the Comte Balthazar de Bleuville. Bond poses as Sir Hilary Bray of the College of Arms in order to meet with Blofeld. Interestingly, Sir Hilary gives Bond a quick resumé of Bond’s family history including the Bond family motto ‘the world is not enough’ which was used by the film producers for the title of a later 007 film unrelated to Fleming’s books.
This book follows on from the previous one and we find James Bond depressed and disillusioned with his job after the death of Tracy. M considers sacking Bond but instead sends him on a diplomatic mission to meet the head of the Japanese secret service. The British want access to Russian documents which the Japanese are currently decoding. The Japanese decide to offer this information to Bond if he will assassinate a British resident who has created a garden of death, a garden full of poisonous plants which are attracting many Japanese citizens who want to commit suicide. Bond realises that this man is Blofeld and decides to keep this quiet until after he has killed him.
Casino Royale is the first book in the 007 series and it’s a pretty interesting and original one too. ‘Le Chiffre’, a gambler and also a member of SMERSH, a murderous department of the KGB is engaged in a desperate effort to win a great deal of money at the casinos of Royale Les Eaux in France. Le Chiffre is desperate because he has used SMERSH funds for his personal use and his spymaster bosses will not be pleased if they find out. Britain’s secret service happens to find out about this and sends Bond to France to make sure Le Chiffre doesn’t recoup those funds as of course as we all know, James Bond 007 is a bit of an expert with the cards.
This was the second Bond book to be published and the action takes place in the USA and the Caribbean, which Fleming loved and bought a house there which he named Goldeneye. Live and Let Die and in fact the whole book series were recently reissued with all the politically incorrect stuff removed which makes me wonder whether there was in fact anything left to publish after that process was complete. The book was published in 1953 and comes complete with all the prejudices and sexual and racial intolerances of the era. In one segment when Bond visits Harlem, Fleming tries to reproduces the accents and slang terms of the black people of Harlem and for me it’s not one of Fleming’s best books. In the film version, Roger Moore took over the licence to kill and the result was a very tongue in cheek version of James Bond. Sorry but Roger Moore as Bond just wasn’t for me. The film did feature a great theme song from Paul McCartney which was really a little underused in the film. Another feature of the film was a power boat chase along the Bayous of Florida which was a lot of fun but not entirely serious.
This was the third entry into the 007 series and the action takes place mostly in Dover. Millionaire Hugo Drax wants England to enter the space race and so he spends his own money on a rocket named the Moonraker which he intends to donate to the British government. It turns out that Drax is actually a nazi who wants to avenge defeat in the second world war by arranging for the rocket to destroy London. I read recently that Fleming wrote the book while staying in a cottage situated down by the famous chalk cliffs of Dover which was once owned by Noel Coward and later Fleming himself. It’s not a bad read at all and starts off with M asking Bond a favour as he suspects Drax to be cheating at cards and he wants Bond to see if he can sort things out as at the time, this was the mid-1950s, cheating at cards in London high society could really be a big scandal.
Fleming wrote this book at Goldeye, his house in Jamaica, after doing a great deal of research about diamond smuggling. Bond’s mission is to investigate a diamond smuggling ring and he does this by impersonating a diamond smuggler called Peter Franks. Franks leads Bond to an American woman called Tiffany Case who he begins to fall for. He tracks the smuggling ring to the American Spang brothers, leaders of the Spangled Mob, a criminal gang. The finale takes place in the Spangs’ restored western town, Spectreville.
British Secret Service. To do this they persuade a cypher clerk, Tatiana Romanova, to pretend to defect to the west with a Spektor cypher machine. She claims she will only to defect to Bond, having fallen for him after reading his KGB file.
Prior to the writing of this book, a firearms expert called Major Boothroyd wrote to Fleming explaining that an agent like Bond would never be armed with a Baretta as it was more of a ladies gun. Boothroyd recommended a Walther PPK. Fleming was so impressed he included the new gun in Dr No and also added a new character named Boothroyd as the armourer of the secret service.
James Bond has been in the news this week. The books by Ian Fleming are apparently being rewritten as they might be considered offensive to a modern generation of new readers and the producers are still looking for a new actor to play their famous secret agent. OK, time for another James Bond 007 post.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 