CS Weekly Archive > The Big Picture > 11/14/08

Adaptation Versus Inspiration:
The Varied Cinematic Career of 007

By jason davis

As Daniel Craig unholsters his Walther PPK for a second outing as James Bond, CS Weekly looks back at the diverse film legacy of Agent 007.

While pop culture icons like Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and Superman have enjoyed a varied life on the big screen, few have been almost totally controlled by one company throughout their cinematic lives. Despite EON Productions' near monopoly on his adventures, the provenance of James Bond's soon-to-be 22 screen adventures offers up everything from straight adaptations of creator Ian Fleming's novels to wholly original screenplays with little to tie them to the author's canon. Indeed, the portrayal of Bond himself—like that of his American cousin, Indiana Jones—has changed wildly from film to film, with only the iconic image of a suave MI6 agent willing to kill for Queen and country remaining consistent.

In 1953, wartime intelligence officer-turned-journalist Ian Fleming published his first novel. The book, titled Casino Royale, detailed a British Secret Service agent's attempts to undermine the Soviet Union's faith in a banker named Le Chiffre, all while romancing fellow operative Vesper Lynd. The character proved popular, and Fleming began churning out an adventure a year when he took his summer holiday in Jamaica. By 1961, eight 007 novels and several short stories had been published. It was then that producers Alfred R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman approached the author about adapting his character for the big screen. As "Jimmy Bond" (Barry Nelson), the character had already appeared in a CBS-TV adaptation of the first book, but the Broccoli-Saltzman-produced feature films would come to be recognized as the definitive dramatization of the character.

Their first outing, Dr. No, was an adaptation of Fleming's sixth novel and found Bond (Sean Connery) dispatched to Jamaica to investigate the disappearance of a fellow agent who was keeping tabs on the eccentric title character (Joseph Wiseman). Scripted by Johanna Harwood, Richard Maibaum, and Berkley Mather, the screenplay was a faithful adaptation of Fleming's text, which introduced 007, MI6 superior M (Bernard Lee), and the latter's secretary, Miss Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell). Since the characters of CIA agent Felix Leiter (Jack Lord) and the Caribbean fisherman Quarrel (John Kitzmiller) had originally debuted on the page in Casino Royale and Live and Let Die, respectively, it was necessary to move Bond's first meetings with both men to Dr. No (a plot point that would prove troublesome since Quarrel dies, and was later needed again for the 1973 film of Live and Let Die).

Aside from chronological inconsistencies, Sean Connery's tenure as 007 would see little deviation from Fleming's text, save for the early introduction of the terrorist fraternity SPECTRE in Dr. No, ahead of its introduction to the prose world in the book Thunderball. From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and Thunderball—which began its narrative life as a film project before Fleming cannibalized it for a book—all proceeded as straight adaptations until screenwriter Roald Dahl tackled Fleming's penultimate tale, You Only Live Twice. Here began the precedent of inspiration over adaptation, as Dahl used the Asian trappings of the book, but completely re-plotted the tale of Bond's final hunt for arch-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Donald Pleasence). To be fair, the book version was the third part of a trilogy begun in Thunderball and continued in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Because the events of the middle chapter had yet to be dramatized, Bond's vengeful motivation from the book was weakened, and the story required quite a bit of nipping and tucking to remain consistent with the movie continuity.

With Maibaum returning as writer for the next two films—the overdue dramatizations of On Her Majesty's and Fleming's fourth book, Diamonds Are Forever—the scripts cling closer to the novels, though the latter, co-written by future Superman scribe Tom Mankiewicz, slightly elaborates a simple diamond smuggling plot to encompass a high-tech satellite subplot. These borderline science fiction shenanigans would continue throughout the 1970s, reaching their pinnacle with the Star Wars-inspired take on Fleming's third novel, Moonraker. Though Roger Moore's early outings as 007 are still clearly based on the novels, the trend toward inspiration over adaptation became gospel with The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977. Maibaum's script, co-written with Christopher Wood (who would go on to pen the novelization), bears no resemblance to Fleming's tenth novel, a first-person tale narrated by a character named Vivienne Michel whose life collides briefly with that of Bond's. Fleming was dissatisfied with the book and its poor reception, so although EON Productions was allowed to use the title, the author decreed the story itself off limits.

Such was not the case with Moonraker, the next installment of the franchise, which saw 007 blasting into space to defeat the machinations of industrialist Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale). The Britain-based book centered on a plot to detonate a nuclear bomb in London, but the success of Star Wars and the notion of a missile named Moonraker proved too enticing a combination to pass up. It was an increasingly campy take on a character who had once pumped an extra bullet into the back of a traitor just for good measure, and by the time Bond attempted re-entry with physicist Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles), one might have assumed the superfluous presence of the comic-bookish villain Jaws (Richard Kiel) was a tacit admission that the series had jumped the shark.

With 1981's For Your Eyes Only, Maibaum and future producer Michael G. Wilson returned to Fleming's canon, adapting two short stories from the anthology of the same name. The next two films borrowed their titles from other Fleming short stories, but like The Spy Who Loved Me, Octopussy and A View to a Kill were almost entirely original screenplays, developed expressly for the movies with a few tips of the hat to Fleming's nearly exhausted texts. In 1987, Timothy Dalton's first film as the superspy would, for over two decades, be the last film with any literary ties to Fleming's work. The Living Daylights took its namesake's narrative as a jumping-off point and then developed along its own lines. 1989's License to Kill adapted unused elements from Live and Let Die and the short story "The Hidebrand Rarity" but was the first film in the franchise to eschew a Fleming title.

Red tape blocked production on the seventeenth Bond movie for six years, but when Pierce Brosnan assumed the role in 1995's GoldenEye, the title was borrowed from Fleming's Jamaican estate and the plot came courtesy of writers Michael France, Jeffrey Caine, and Bruce Feirstein. This is the practice that remained in effect throughout Brosnan's tenure as Bond. Tomorrow Never Dies (which would have been more effectively titled Tomorrow Never Lies, as originally intended), The World Is Not Enough, and Die Another Day each sprang from original stories, but Brosnan's much-publicized dissatisfaction with the last of these, as well as the popularity of the more grounded Jason Bourne movies, would see a change in strategy by Bond's cinematic masters.

In Die Another Day's teaser, Bond is captured in North Korea and subjected to 14 months of torture before his release is secured in a prisoner exchange. Brosnan's objections stemmed from Bond's rapid recovery from the psychological effects of his incarceration. Within minutes of his release, Bond is back in action, without much of a backward glance to his soul-destroying experience. In a post-9/11 world, such fantasies were no longer appropriate, so the powers that be literally took the character back to his roots for his 21st film outing.

Casino Royale was the first movie since Dalton's 1989 swansong to use elements from Fleming's books. More importantly, it was the first time since The Man With the Golden Gun that Fleming's plot actually made it to the screen. Unlike the chronological tinkering that plagued the early Connery films made out of sequence from their literary antecedents, Casino was presented as Bond's first mission as a double-oh agent. Indeed, the teaser presented the two murders that earned him his license to kill. In stark contrast to Die Another Day, the torture Daniel Craig's Bond endured in his first outing would leave marks on both body and soul. Quantum of Solace, the Casino Royale sequel hitting screens today, is yet another Fleming-inspired story that follows up on Bond's tragic affair with Vesper Lynd in an original screenplay that bears little resemblance to its short story namesake. Thus, the franchise has returned to its roots, only to depart once again for new adventures, hopefully grounded by the return to Fleming's original premise.

As I write this article, it's the 11th of November 2008 in the United Kingdom. According to John Pearson's biography of the character, Commander Bond would be 88 years old today. If the trailers for his latest mission are anything to judge his fitness by, the character seems to be getting his second wind, with adventures aplenty in his future.

Jason Davis has been the DVD Manager for CS Weekly, a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.




Die Another Day, From Russia With Love courtesy 20th Century Fox/MGM Home Entertainment
Quantum of Solace courtesy Sony Pictures

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