I have that book -- forgot I did! The author mentions in a side note that it's a little unclear on some things who came up with what, that each "making of" or book told it differently, etc. I'd be interested in reading Sackler's draft, but that part about Brody being so paranoid he freaked out the shark was in a swimming pool...lol.
Ultimately it seems to me Tristan and Sackler's names should've been swapped out on the final writing credit of the movie -- or just all three of them should've been listed. If anything, more of the finished film seems to bear her contribution than Sackler's, whether it was coming up with the ending, the water skiier sequence (apparently hers), the removal of the adult "Boyd" character, more of a reliance on the teenagers, etc.
It's very odd, almost seems spiteful on Universal's part that they MAY have argued against her credit since they fired her and Hancock. Gottlieb basically rewrote the movie on the fly but the outline and the set-pieces were already in place when he got there, and he had to adjust accordingly to some key elements that were set.
I just know from paying attention to these things plenty of other writers have been credited for far less on movies too. Must've been politics involved in how the WGA figured it out at the time, as Sackler and Gottlieb were both veteran writers with lots of "cred" and she wasn't nearly as experienced.
DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER by Ian Fleming (1956, 229 pages). James Bond returns in this follow-up to MOONRAKER, this time with the assignment to infiltrate a diamond smuggling operation in order to discover who is behind it all. Bond takes on the identity of Peter Franks, a small time crook who is supposed to carry diamonds smuggled out of Africa through London and into the United States. James connects with the beautiful and mysterious Tiffany Case, a contact for the Spangled Mob, who makes sure he gets the diamonds to America. Upon arrival Bond teams up with Felix Leiter (now ex-CIA after what happened to him in LIVE AND LET DIE), infiltrates the Mob and meets up with one of its leaders, Saraffimo Spang. Bond also meets his two sadistic henchmen Kidd and Wint, and as usual, Bond gets more than he bargains for. I found this entry in the series to be lackluster – the main issue I have with the novel is a lack of a good villain. While Kidd and Wint are decently evil they are just henchmen, and the two main villains are just sort of there and not ominous (like, for example, Sir Hugo Drax in MOONRAKER). In addition, if Fleming was going for a “fish out of water” thing with the Englishman (Bond) in America to tackle the Mob or a noir-esque type novel, in my opinion he did not do a very good job of it. The stronger moments in the novel occur when Bond and Case spend time together, and the death of the jockey at the hands of Kidd and Wint is pretty intense. But overall though I would say the novel is weak and anti-climactic.
In 1971 the Bond franchise coaxed Sean Connery to come back and play the role of James Bond one last time for the film adaptation of DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER. Because the book’s main villains are not “larger than life,” the filmmakers and writers went big by making Blofeld the main villain. The film retains several elements from the book – the film mainly takes place in Las Vegas like the novel; Kidd and Wint are retained (as is their homosexual relationship), the diamond smuggling pipeline plot is retained, Felix Leiter is found in both novel and movie, and the ending of the film mirrors the extended (and much more sinister and dark) sequence in the book. Some homages to the novel are also contained in the film, such as the “mud bath” opening sequence (inspired by the mud bath sequence in the book in which the jockey dies) and the scorpion in the desert (inspired in part by the opening sequence of the book). However, the film adds quite a bit that is not in the novel: for example, the fight with Peter Franks in the elevator (one of my favorite bits in the movie), the car chase down the Vegas strip, the Willard Whyte laboratory in the desert where the satellite weapon is being constructed, the character of Plenty O’Toole as well as Bambi, Thumper, and Willard Whyte, and the final climactic showdown on the oil rig among other things. And while there is a Shady Tree character in the novel (a grotesque Mobster figure), in the movie he is an older Vegas comedian.
The character of Tiffany Case also differs from book to movie. In the novel her backstory is pretty horrific; she got gang raped at the age of sixteen by men from her mother’s brothel which, in addition to other things, led her into the life she lives. Her character is tragic; she can be strong but oftentimes goes through extreme mood swings due to her traumatic past, and I think that Bond connects with her in the way he does because of it (at one point in the book he decides that while he intends to get information out of her concerning the smuggling pipeline, he will not use romance as a weapon to get that information). In the film Tiffany Case is a “loveable mercenary”; I do not feel she has as much character depth in the film as she does in the novel which makes her’s and Bond’s relationship have less depth. John Barry’s score has a great love theme for Tiffany Case (one of my favorites), and his theme for Kidd and Wint kind of captures their quirkiness. Whereas Ian Fleming’s novel continues the adventures of a very solitary and distant character, DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER as a film is more entertaining and accessible. Connery is a charismatic actor, and while I enjoyed seeing him playing the role again, I think the film suffers from his being too old. I used to dislike the film because I felt it was dated and kind of corny, but watching it again I feel it is slightly better than the novel even though it is still somewhat corny and flawed.
The failures of DAF as a film I think stem chiefly from the sense of being a less than satisfying follow-up to OHMSS, but that of course was the result of Connery returning and a desire to forget Lazenby (which is why it's only implied at best in the teaser that Bond's obsessive pursuit of Blofeld is tied to seeking revenge for Tracy). Charles Gray was the worst of the three Blofelds and his "death" was very unsatisfying and not definitive enough.
OTOH, I think Jill St. John gave the best performance of her career as Tiffany in that after being in one of the worst knockoff Bond films "The Liquidator" she got her chance to be in the real thing at the very latest point in time when a "60s bombshell" type could fit into the Bond universe even as this film is already transitioning more into the 70s Bond style. I'll admit the character is stronger in the beginning (her entrance is my favorite next to Ursula Andress's) and by the end she seems to have lost a couple IQ points but at least she gets to have the last word in the tag.
-Did this in reverse order since I saw the movie again and only learned from the credit that it was based on a novel, which I'd forgotten. Found it on Kindle and went through it after the movie which is what I recommend because it's easier to breeze through just after seeing the movie, especially when you discover that the film is a 75% faithful adaptation that retains a great deal of dialogue from the book (something screenwriters were more conscientious about back then whereas today I don't think they really bother if a film is based on a book).
-The film of course is the story of uptight middle-aged banker Arthur Hamilton who feeling at a dead-end in his life and his now loveless marriage is drawn by a phone call from an old friend Charley Evans whom he thought dead, to a mysterious address of "The Company" which takes dissatisfied men, gives them new faces through plastic surgery and a new identity so they can be "reborn" and experience a second chance in life. Cadavers are used to stage the deaths of their original personas. In Hamilton's case, he is transformed from fiftyish John Randolph into 40 year old Rock Hudson who is given the new identity of Tony Wilson, artist. It sure sounds implausible, but give credit to both actors for making you still believe they are playing the same character. Initially, John Frankenheimer envisioned the same actor doing both parts and he'd first approached Laurence Olivier, but Paramount nixed the idea, wanting an American box office star and they had pushed Hudson. Hudson wanted to do it, but felt he couldn't credibly play the "before" character of Hamilton so that led to the casting of Randolph as Hamilton (his first film role after years on the blacklist).
-The film then shows Hudson as Wilson in his new life in Malibu as an artist where the Company has furnished him with a valet to attend to his needs and he is financially set. But then the theme of how despite a new face and identity, one can never completely change who one is sets in as "Wilson's" efforts to paint go nowhere, and he hesitates to venture out of the cocoon of the Malibu house. He finally goes for a walk on the beach and meets the free-spirited Nora (Salome Jens) who soon is getting him to loosen up by taking him to a wild Bacchanalian grape stomping orgy (which in this "uncut" version we have to see nudity of a type most out of place for a 1966 film, and frankly it goes on WAY too long. Frankenheimer here presages some of his tasteless sequences of his bad 1980s films "The Holcroft Covenant" and "52 Pick-Up" that go on forever and serve no real plot point in their extended bad taste). Then a party with his neighbors turns into a disaster when "Wilson", drunk starts spouting off about his past life as Hamilton. And it turns out his neighbors are all "reborns" themself who aren't pleased with this breech of protocol that by extension would put them at risk. Nora is exposed as a company underling who had been sent out to get him to adjust to his new life and she then disappears form the film. In the wake of this, "Wilson" then goes back to New York to confront his former wife. He discovers she's moved on has thrown out almost everything of Arthur Hamilton's and talks about all the silences she'd had to endure. After this, feeling a failure as "Wilson" he goes back to the Company demanding to start over again with another operation and a new identity where he can be in control.......but things are about to reach a grim finale.
-I went back to the novel because I was frustrated in my attempts to find a copy of the shooting script. There was another cut scene from the film in which "Wilson" before visiting his former wife in New York, first visits his married daughter who had been established as living in the west. A scene was filmed with Evans Evans (Mrs. Frankenheimer) as Arthur Hamilton's daughter and for the first time I learned that Leonard Nimoy, while waiting for Trek to be picked up, had played her husband. The scene established them having a newborn child. Supposedly that ghostly image that is the final shot of the film was part of this cut scene but we may never know. At any rate, I felt the story could have used that scene once I learned about it, and failing to find the shooting script from the vendors that sell film scripts, I found the novel on Kindle and went back to that.
-It was surprising as I noted to find that so much of the film's dialogue does come from the book. That said the narrative structure is much weaker and you can see where the cinematic improvements to the narrative were made. For one thing, author Ely never gives us the real name of "Tony Wilson". The "Arthur Hamilton" name was a screen invention. This from the outset makes the character much harder to get a handle on in the book's narrative. If the theme is you can never escape who you are, then it would make a lot more sense to establish the "real" person first, but instead we start with him making the decision to go to the company and we learn about the phone calls from "Charley" later on. There are a number of other things unique to the novel like a disturbing scene of a company nurse giving him sex before the operation. The biggest surprise is the total absence of the Nora character. This makes the scenes of his unsatisfying life as Wilson more disjointed though we see more sinister group activity by the other "reborns" living nearby who are keeping a careful eye on him. This results in Wilson giving them the slip twice to first go to Denver to see his daughter and her husband and then to his former wife in New York. Comparing the scenes with the wife, we see in the book a lot more cold indifference regarding the 'death' of his former self and not much willingness to talk about him at all which leaves "Wilson" shattered inside. I suspect the daughter scene was different in the filmed version that was cut since the scene with Mrs. Hamilton in the film is much different. In the novel it takes place while she's throwing a party with others and is anxious to be over and done with Mr. Wilson's visit about her late husband. The film made it a different and more poignant scene and I suspect that it was the same in the cut version with the daughter.
-The ending of the novel doesn't have the film's shock value. The scene with the "all purpose clergyman" is there and the dialogue he spouts comes from the novel but the scenes are reshuffled in the movie so that the final scene in the book is a conversation with the Old Man director of the Company and it ends with "Wilson" facing things with sad resignation to his fate instead of the horrifying one the film gave us.
-End result, I would say the film is better than the novel from a structure standpoint and has some good moments. But is it still a classic that it's been made out to be? I have to say no. Frankly, the story runs too long especially in the Hudson-Wilson establishing himself scenes and one plot hole is left where Wilson is surprised at the airport by a man who seems to recognize him. In the book we learn this was a plant from the Company to get him acclimated to his new identity by having strangers to him know him as "Wilson". This is never established in the film and it almost leaves the implication (never otherwise hinted at) that maybe the reason he's become "Tony Wilson" with all this elaborate fake ID etc. is because perhaps there really was a Tony Wilson who was done away with at one point! (That itself would have made the Company even more sinister. That perhaps their cadavers are the real possessors of the identities they give to their clients). The grape orgy scene as I said goes way too long and becomes exploitative. At times I almost think the story might have worked better as an hour long Twilight Zone episode with appropriate Serling intros and closes (much as another film of this era, "The Swimmer" also seems like an extended cinematic Twilight Zone episode).
FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE by Ian Fleming (1956, 259 pages). Soviet counterintelligence agency SMERSH issues a death warrant against James Bond in an effort to make up for failed operations in the past. In a grand plan designed by Chess Grandmaster Kronsteen and Colonel Rosa Klebb (head of Operations and Executions), the sinister organization enlists homicidal Donavan “Red” Grant (their best executioner), the beautiful and seductive Tatiana Romanova, and the lure of a Spektor decoding machine in order to murder Bond and pin a sex scandal on him which will, in turn, embarrass British Intelligence. The plan is put into action and Bond falls into the trap. This book is easily, for me, the best Bond novel Fleming had written up to this point. It is full of suspense, good characters (including the very likeable Darko Kerim Bey, Bond’s contact in Istanbul), and climaxes in two suspenseful confrontations (Bond versus Grant/Bond versus Klebb). To a contemporary audience the plot may seem rather goofy (especially since sex scandals are not all that scandalous anymore); however, in the context of Cold War relations between Russia and Great Britain and attitudes toward Russia in the West, the plot probably hit emotional nerves with audiences at the time. Interestingly, Fleming had gotten tired of writing Bond novels and rewrote his original ending (where Bond and Romanova brought things to a romantic close) to something more like a cliff-hanger that allowed Fleming the freedom to continue with Bond’s adventures or end the character (fortunately, he continued the series).
The book was, of course, made into a film in 1963 – of all the Bond books Fleming wrote up to that point, the film version of the book is the most faithful to the entire story arc of its novel with some exceptions (the prologue, the chases post-confrontation on the train, the ending). It is an immensely satisfying and entertaining film that improves on some of what the novel does while thoroughly honoring the source material. For me, FRWL started what I consider to be the Golden Age of Bond films (FRWL, GOLDFINGER, THUNDERBALL, OHMSS). There aren’t a whole lot of significant differences between the movie and the book, though there are some things to note:
-Maybe the biggest change between the novel and the film concerns Bond’s enemy: in the film it is SPECTRE (with Blofeld at the helm), not SMERSH.
-The train sequence in the book is well written and suspenseful in its own ways, but the fight between Bond and Grant is over relatively quickly. The film ups the ante and, in my mind, created one of the most memorable fight sequences in the entire franchise. It is aggressive, brutal, and intense – one ‘feels’ the fight and the tension, so I commend the filmmakers and actors for doing such a great job in the execution of that sequence.
-Minor thing here, but I wish Daniela Bianchi’s hair was dark to match the characters hair in the novel. Nonetheless, she is stunningly beautiful as Tatiana in the film.
-I must commend Pedro Armendáriz’s performance as Ali Kerim Bey (name changed for obvious reasons). He matched the cadence and rhythm of Kerim’s lines in the book perfectly, and every time I read the book I hear his voice as Darko Kerim Bey’s voice.
-The prologue in the film is not in the book, but I think it is a decent introduction to Grant’s character. The book characterizes him as a homicidal maniac who does his best killing when the moon is full – all sorts of psychological stuff going on there. In the film Grant is more suave (played really well by Robert Shaw) and more of a ‘normal’ assassin or perhaps symbolically Bond’s opposite/darker side.
-Although it is not my favorite score of the series, I really like Barry's score and his 007 theme. It adds excitement, drama and tension to the visuals really well.
-I have to admit I am not a fan of the boating scene toward the end of the film as Bond and Tatiana make their escape. After the epic fight between Bond and Grant, the boating chase seems tame and anti-climactic. But that is a minor complaint. In the end, I thoroughly enjoy both the book and the movie. Both are gems in the franchise.
-I have been wanting to do this for a long time. Back in middle school I remember reading the novel and enjoying it and then when I found out there had been a movie version I was excited and when I saw it I felt a tremendous sense of letdown when I saw how the film changed things drastically from the book regarding its second half and climax. A lot of years went by and I saw the movie a couple times but didn't until now go back to the novel so I could do this experiment.
-The novel is told in the first person by the somewhat mysterious Englishman Dr. Patrick Carpenter who has arrived in Scotland with orders from the American Chief of Naval Operations to be taken aboard the American nuclear submarine Dolphin up to the British Arctic Weather survey facility, Ice Station Zebra where reports of a disaster have surfaced that have left the men stationed there fighting for survival. The Dolphin's captain, Commander Swanson is somewhat suspicious of Carpenter with his refusal to elaborate on why he's been given this carte blanche but when Carpenter tells him that Ice Station Zebra is in fact being used as a secret early warning station, he agrees to go along (Though Carpenter as narrator of the story tells us the readers that this is in fact not so).
-The journey to Ice Station Zebra allows us to see the inner workings of a nuclear submarine, while Carpenter makes friends with the crew, including Dr. Benson (who keeps pictures of cartoon characters in his sick bay. This is actually not an insignificant point in the book), Executive Officer Hansen and others. En route to Ice Station Zebra, the sub must face the danger of finding a point where the Dolphin can break through the ice and be in nearby position to effect a rescue. This involves traveling dangerously under the ice for a lengthy stretch since if something goes awry that under ordinary circumstances would necessitate surfacing, the Dolphin would be trapped.
-We get a harrowing scene where suddenly, as the Dolphin prepares to fire a torpedo through the ice to break a hole big enough, a stuck open torpedo outer door suddenly causes the sub to flood in the forward compartment (killing one officer) and sink to a point normally below its crush depth before the problem is corrected. Carpenter immediately discovers this is due to sabotage that involved tampering with the wiring to produce a false reading of the outer door in a closed position (the tampering done with glue). Carpenter tells Swanson that this was likely done by a Communist spy back in Scotland who performed the sabotage not to sink the sub but who thought this would delay the sub at a point to keep them from reaching Ice Station Zebra soon. At this point, we also learn that the commander of the station, Major Halliwell is Carpenter's brother so there is another reason fueling Carpenter's desire to get there. (Note-the matter of who did the sabotage never gets established. Presumably we're to assume that Carpenter's positing was correct. It never comes up again as a plot point.)
-When the Dolphin is able to finally break through the ice and get close enough to Ice Station Zebra, Carpenter, Hansen and one other crewman make the five mile trek and MacLean describes the terrifying perpetually dark winter conditions to cover this distance. Upon reaching the station, they discover the facility burned from fire and explosions and most of the survivors suffering from burns and other injuries, while Carpenter discovers his brother Halliwell is dead along with two others, and that both were murdered before being burned to death. He reveals to Swanson that one of the survivors of Ice Station Zebra is clearly a saboteur who destroyed the station to cover up his espionage oriented misdeeds but as to who it is, he can't tell. Carpenter though is still not leveling with Swanson on what the real deal is that has attracted Soviet interest and sabotage and murder.
-After the survivors are returned to the Dolphin for the journey back to Scotland, the novel becomes more like an Agatha Christie whodunit as Carpenter tries to figure out who the murderer/saboteur is among the survivors of the station. But not before the Dolphin is subjected to more acts of saboteur and would-be murder as Carpenter is assaulted, and then a fire breaks out aboard ship while they are still traveling under the ice which means they can't surface to activate the diesel engines. This results in a drawn out terrifying sequence of the crew slowly on the verge of succumbing to carbon monoxide unless the problems is corrected. In the nick of time, Swanson is able to save the Dolphin while Carpenter, knowing the saboteur had not meant to kill the sub but had miscalculated in how far he would damage it, is prepared to have a Poirot style climax identifying the murderer and saboteur and what the real purpose of their activities was. I won't say who it was other than that two people were working together and the real motive was recovery of film from a Russian satellite that had taken pictures of American nuclear missile installations. Carpenter is able to thwart the two spies/saboteurs who think they have been able to get the film smuggled safely to the Russians, but it turns out there is one final surprise punchline at the end that still leaves a smile on my face when I read it.
-With so many Alistair MacLean novels making it to the big screen in the 1960s, it's not surprising "Ice Station Zebra" was among them. John Sturges, who directed the MacLean story "The Satan Bug" was picked to direct for MGM and apparently he had rejected an initial draft script that retained the murder mystery element of the novel and instead went for an action climax on the ice (totally overlooking the drama that could have been generated from the fire aboard the sub while it was unable to surface). The final screenplay is credited to Douglas Heyes (better known as a TV director including a number of Twilight Zone episodes) with "screen story" by Harry Julian Fink suggesting a number of other changes along the way. There are some cosmetic changes in names. The Dolphin becomes the Tigerfish, Commander Swanson becomes Commander Ferrady (Rock Hudson) and Dr. Patrick Carpenter instead becomes the more overtly espionage agent traveling under the pseudonym "David Jones" (Patrick McGoohan). "Jones" has no brother tie to the Halliwell character at Ice Station Zebra either. We also get the addition of a group of US Marines under the command of too eager Lieutenant Walker (Tony Bill), and then abruptly in mid-journey two new characters not in the novel arrive by helicopter to be part of the expedition, the tough, cold Marine Captain Leslie Anders (Jim Brown) and Russian born but working for the West operative Boris Vaslov (Ernest Borgnine) who is an old buddy of "Jones" and vouches for him (first tip-off of what's wrong with this script is why "Jones" would travel under a pseudonym and then be joined by a colleague who already knows him).
-Despite these seemingly extraneous additions, the first half of the film is still faithful to the novel in basic outline in that we get the open torpedo door sabotage bit. The only problem is that Sturges chooses to have McGoohan deliver his "explanation" in such a rapid fire fashion that you can barely keep up with what he's saying and the fact that the sabotage unlike the book is supposedly done by someone on board *before* the arrival (meaning either Anders or Vlasov) means that someone is willing to die for the effort which really makes no sense (another problem with the movie script). When the Tigerfish arrives at Ice Station Zebra for Act 2 (the film had an intermission) that's when the story totally deviates from the novel. The Station has been sabotaged but the architect of the sabotage and murder is dead already with the others so what we have next becomes a race to find the film from the satellite before the Russians arrive to grab it (McGoohan's explanation of the satellite and the film is also delivered in a rapid over the top fashion that is really taxing to audience ears who can be forgiven for not picking up on it). The key difference is that the satellite also photographed Russian sites by mistake as well as American sites so therefore the film is dangerous to both sides (BIG difference from the book for an obvious reason).
-I won't go into spoiler details of the climax except to note that "Ice Station Zebra" the movie is one of the earliest examples of how Hollywood decided to take a Cold War novel that was unabashedly pro-America/West in its approach of who comes out on top in the story and instead decided to give us a "Detente" style finish of "neither side wins/plague on both your houses in this silly game" ending that is totally unsatisfying after this long build-up we've been given. ("Telefon" which I've reviewed earlier in this thread also falls in this category as does "Raise The Titanic") I for one would have loved to have seen a cinematic ending of the novel's ending where the Russians look at what they think will be the film they've recovered only to see a switched reel that contains pictures of the Doctor's cartoon character art from the sick bay. That would have been an ending audiences would have smiled at.
-The added characters of Anders and Vaslov really do not add much in the way of cardboard cutout story mechanics for the revamped version of the film and the transformation of the heroic Dr. Carpenter into the cynical "Mr. Jones" is not welcome either since "Jones" ends up being a royal screw-up of the first order and is played very unsympathetically by McGoohan. On the other hand, I will say this. Unintentionally, McGoohan playing a British spy whose name we don't learn makes it very easy to let one's imagination think he is once again playing John Drake, and the fact that he took time out from "The Prisoner" to do this movie lends another bit of subtext to this in that because "Jones" is this very determined and overly sure of himself spy who in the end totally screws up and becomes responsible for the death of an innocent man, I can't help but think that "Ice Station Zebra" the movie is the adventure that led John Drake to resign (out of guilt and a sense of disenchantment with his profession) and then get sent to the mysterious Village. Face it, the way McGoohan's "Jones" performs is exactly the kind of thing that would trigger him to give it all up. But that element of making "Ice Station Zebra" the unofficial story that links "Danger Man" to "The Prisoner" is really the best thing I can say about the movie version. Take that element out, and I have to give the nod completely to MacLean's book that should have been brought to the screen along the lines of the original story with its murder-mystery device and its upbeat pro-West ending where the good guys prevailed without any ambiguities.
-The film gave us what was arguably Michel Legrand's most memorable film score (certainly for a US movie). However the cheap soundstage look of the film for the Arctic scenes have always been a drawback. How it even got nominated for a special effects award (especially against 2001 seems almost laughable).
DR. NO by Ian Fleming (1958, 233 pages). After nearly losing his life on his previous assignment (FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE), James Bond is sent by M on a fact-finding mission to Jamaica. It seems that Commander John Strangways (London’s contact) and his secretary suddenly disappeared from the island. Strangways had been investigating Dr. Julius No, a mysterious recluse who lives on Crab Key and owns a bird guano mine there. Bond arrives in Jamaica, hooks up with his friend Quarrel, and sets out to secretly visit Crab Key. While on the island he runs into the beautiful Honeychile Rider who is there to collect shells; unfortunately, he also runs into Dr. No’s henchmen. Upon meeting Dr. No, Bond discovers he is a sadistic, dangerous power-mad maniac who is involved with more than just mining bird guano.
As a novel, I found DR. NO to be entertaining and well-paced. I also enjoy the serialized nature of the Bond books; for example, I liked that Quarrell (from LIVE AND LET DIE) and Bond rekindle their friendship from the previous adventure to go on another one (albeit Quarrel’s last). I also like how the events of DR. NO occur in the wake of the events of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE – since Bond’s Beretta jammed while confronting Rosa Klebb and nearly caused his death, M forces Bond to use a Smith & Wesson in its place. I find this type of continuity engaging, and Fleming was wise (in my opinion) to write the novels in this way. Dr. No is a strong villain in the series, and the ending is quite satisfying.
DR. NO, of course, was chosen as the first Bond novel to be made into a movie starring Sean Connery as James Bond. The movie’s framework and story arc adhere closely to the book’s narrative, though several changes were made to make the narrative more spectacular for the film version. Some differences between the two are:
-In the book Dr. No’s bird guano mine, while operational, serves as a front for his sabotaging operation against missile and rocket launches in the US. The movie takes the guano mine out of it altogether (wisely, in my opinion) and changes it into a bauxite mine.
-Dr. No works for SPECTRE in the film. In the book he is a loner.
-The book makes no mention of Felix Leiter that I can remember.
-In the book an attempt on Bond’s life is made by putting a giant centipede in his room – the centipede was changed to a spider in the movie, which actually pays homage to a sequence toward the end of the book where Bond is made to navigate through pipes in order to test his pain and fear tolerance (he has to pass through a section of pipe with several tarantulas in it).
-In the book, at the end of the pipes when he falls into the ocean, Bond has to escape the clutches of a giant squid (wisely left out of the film version).
-Professor Dent does not have a named role in the novel from what I can remember (if he did it was so brief that I do not remember it). However, in the film he is a geologist who doubles as Dr. No’s lackey. His character provides for one of the best sequences in the film in my opinion (the stakeout at Miss Taro’s home).
-Also, in the film Bond is given a Walther PPK; I think it was fun that the filmmakers had Dent using a Smith & Wesson to try to kill Bond.
-Dr. No’s demise comes at the end of the book by being buried in bird guano; this was obviously changed to something more dramatic and exciting at the climax of the film.
While better Bond films would be made later, DR. NO holds up pretty well (though I do not care much for the film’s music soundtrack). Connery defined the role for all-time; he is much more edgy in this film and less smarmy (though he has his moments) as he would become in later films. All the changes the film made in adapting the book make sense for the movie’s narrative, and I appreciated that the film was faithful to the book. Both remain entertaining for me.
-This is the only Ludlum novel I have ever read. And it leaves me not too anxious to tackle another Ludlum novel because it is 500 plus pages of dizzying, complex twists and turns and multi-layered levels of exposition that you have to read very carefully. Noel Holcroft, the American raised son of a Nazi general Heinrich Clausen learns from a Swiss banker Manfredi that at the end of the War, Clausen and two other generals put together a "covenant" of $870 million to be used as atonement for the crimes of the Nazi regime. But to put it into effect, Holcroft needs to find the children of two other Generals who were part of the compact, Von Tiebolt and Kessler.
-Things get sticky for Holcroft right away when he is nearly killed leaving Geneva, and then a passenger on his flight to New York is poisoned and Holcroft realizes later it was meant for him. A British operative attempting to get in touch with him in New York is garroted to death. And soon Holcroft is off to Brazil to try and get leads on the whereabouts of the Von Tiebolt and Kessler heirs. More murder and twists and turns lead him to England and France......it just gets dizzying and hard to keep up with but the end result is that the Clausen scheme was actually part of an effort to have funds ready for a would-be Fourth Reich, to be implemented by a thousand children of Nazis dispersed throughout the world.
-This complex novel would have required a ten hour miniseries to do it justice which is why trying to boil it down to a two hour movie was an impossible task and suffice to say the end result was a giant dud of epic proportions that had the barest of theatrical runs (taking in less than a half million). It had a troubled production history when original leading man James Caan bailed out and Michael Caine was hired on a couple days notice even though Caine isn't remotely at all like the Holcroft of the book (who is supposed to be an All-American type having been raised in the US). It also went through multiple script rewrites and the final author, George Axelrod (reunited with director John Frankenheimer two decades after "Manchurian Candidate") by his own admission didn't read the novel for guidance and it shows. The complexity of Ludlum's novel can be maddening but that's because he takes the time to give us characters who meticulously plot things to put their plots into effect and the end result ends up fooling Holcroft through much of the novel. The chief villain of the story is Johann Von Tiebolt, son of one of the other generals, who passes as an Englishman John Tennyson, a globetrotting reporter. It's Johann who is really at the heart of the true plot, to bring about a Fourth Reich using the Covenant money and the thousand plus now grown children seeded throughout the world. He has also been up to this point been a leading global international terrorist "The Tinamou" and has managed to expertly fool British intelligence and ultimately Holcroft into thinking he's a reporter carefully tracking the Tinamou.
-In the film, as played by Anthony Andrews, Tennyson has NONE of the brilliance of his literary counterpart. The whole Tinamou plotline is discarded completely and Tennyson just comes off as an eccentric madman, who at a critical moment after he kills two important characters FORGETS TO ERASE SURVEILLANCE VIDEO SHOWING HIM AS THE KILLER! Having just gone through the novel again before seeing the film again, this demonstration of stupidity was impossible for me to buy, even though it was necessary to make Holcroft in the film show some brilliance that admittedly he doesn't have in the novel since Holcroft only guesses the truth at the VERY last minute. And even then, it's because he gets bailed out by another character, an Israeli operative who isn't in the film. But that said, if you can't give us this convoluted plot to create a Fourth Reich in the hands of a true mastermind and international terrorist, then the film just looks stupid and insipid. And the film criminally gives us a villain who comes off that way.
-Two other unwelcome parts of the film version. Leading lady Victoria Tennant proves once again that she owed her entire career to being Steve Martin's wife in that period because she is terrible. I couldn't stand her in "Winds Of War"/"War And Remembrance" and she's even worse here. Her part is a compression of the fact that in the novel, Tennyson has two sisters, "bad" sister Gretchen (whom Tennyson has an incestuous relationship with) and who aids his plot before Tennyson coolly has her killed, and "good" sister Helden who becomes Holcroft's love interest. The compression here gives us just one sister Helden who serves the role of Holcroft's ally and love interest to a point but then we find out like the novel's Gretchen, she's really her brother's ally in his scheme and disgustingly, the incest element is also retained. This ties in to how Frankenheimer has a rather perverse obsession with being openly blatant about sexual deviance. He takes a chase scene from the novel that took place in France and decides instead to have it in Berlin during the middle of a bacchanal drag show parade complete with nudity. It's as annoying a distraction as the grape stomping scene in "Seconds" and also presages Frankenheimer's sleazier depiction of porn shops and sex parlors in the unwatchable "52 Pick-Up" the following year (and unfortunately like "52 Pick-Up" Frankenheimer also chose to rely on an awful synth score for the movie by a forgettable Polish composer billed simply as Stanislas). It also makes him come off as a hypocrite when he boasts on the commentary track about his restraint when it comes to violence in his movies.
-Novel and film have vastly different endings. The novel's end is sort of a downer but not completely (Holcroft, because he's failed to come on to Tennyson sooner can't stop him from implementing the first phase of his master plan, but he finds a way to extract revenge on him later, though Ludlum brings this about too hastily IMO). The film decides to give us a very bad scene of Holcroft blowing everything open before the press that again only serves to make Andrews Tennyson look stupid.
-Lili Palmer in her final film role shines as Holcroft's mother. She still looks beautiful even though she died the next year from cancer. Mario Adorf is wasted in the largely extraneous part of Kessler (they would have been better off eliminating that character completely). But by and large there is little to recommend about "Holcroft Covenant" the movie. The novel can be plodding and dizzying but at least it has genuine high stakes of terror and a well-crafted plot that you can believe. The film has none of that.
Timeline by Michael Crichton (1999, 480 pages). A group of archaeology and history graduate students led by Professor Edward Johnston are working at a dig site in France, studying the medieval towns of Castlegard and La Roque. The castles associated with the towns were captured by the French during the Hundred Years’ War (fourteenth century) in a conflict between Lord Oliver de Vannes and Arnaut de Cervole. The academic team is funded by (works for) ITC, a company which specializes in quantum technology. Professor Johnston eventually finds out first-hand that its leader, Robert Doniger, has discovered a unique way for people to experience the past. When the Professor does not check in with his students according to plan, four of them (Andre Marek, Kate Erickson, Chris Hughes, and David Stern) are whisked away to ITC where they find themselves on an adventure of a lifetime: they get the opportunity to travel back in time (or something like that) to the towns of Castlegard and La Roque in fourteenth century medieval France on the eve of war. Their mission is to bring Professor Johnston back into the present before his (and their) window of time to return runs out.
I find Crichton’s books to mostly be very entertaining, lively, imaginative, and quick reads – at least the ones I have read so far. His writing is very well-paced; he does a great job going back and forth between building tension and providing moments of recovery and respite as the narrative builds toward its climactic finale. His plots are full of twists and turns that keep the reader engaged and, like several of his other books, his story is grounded in science, technology, and history – he takes liberties of course, but that is what makes his books fun for me. And even though his books are fiction, they are grounded in enough reality so as to be kind of inspiring. His novels also generally tend to be filled with a deep cynicism toward corporate leaders and corporate culture (something many of us can relate to). Timeline is filled with all of the above along with some interesting characters, humor, a John Hammond-esque heartless, arrogant corporate type looking to exploit technology for huge profit, and a nice epilogue that is moving in its way. Crichton delivered another winner with this book.
Adapting Crichton’s books for the big screen is no easy task – his novels are nuanced, intricate, and dense with character development and plot-twists; his books have a certain rhythm and flow to them that makes adaptation difficult. Although I have never seen The Carey Treatment (based on his early novel A Case of Need), the films associated with his books tend to be, in my opinion, average to outright abominations (the exceptions are The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, and Jurassic Park in my opinion, which are the best). Timeline was adapted into a movie in 2003 and was something of a troubled production with reshoots, a replacement score, and a myriad of other issues. It did poorly at the box office, and according to one review I watched even Crichton himself disliked the film – so much so that I guess he refused to allow any of his remaining novels to be made into films. Timeline is not an outright abomination (that honor belongs to Spielberg’s The Lost World), but to me it is an extremely and laughably bad film.
There are many reasons why I feel that way – on the large scale the film’s pacing and narrative seem poorly conceived and extremely rushed. In trying to fit as much of the book’s narrative as they could into the movie, there is almost no time to linger on anything except getting to the next moment and moving the story to its conclusion (and a huge explosion). The screenwriters obviously had to make changes to characters and events to fit everything in and make an attempt at an entertaining narrative, but the changes they made from the book do not add anything interesting or compellingly dramatic to the story. If anything the changes they made were goofy, confusing, undermining, and just not necessary. Nothing for me had the impact it could have; I wish the authors had just stuck more closely to the characters and story as conceived and executed in Crichton’s book. Some examples follow:
-One of the major changes the film makes in character relationships is the one between Professor Johnston and Chris. In the book Chris is a graduate student in medieval science and technology who works with Johnston; Chris has a complex past and after his parents both died in a car accident Johnston takes him under his wing and acts like a parent toward him. In the film Chris is Professor Johnston’s son who visits his father a couple times a year. Chris’ character is “dumbed-down” as to become something of a lummox whose only purpose in the story is to go back in time and rescue his father (and to hit on Kate, one of his father’s students). That is literally the only reason why he’s there and a part of the story – the father-son relationship is merely one of narrative convenience. By the end I forgot that Chris was even Johnston’s son – there is nothing emotionally moving or redeeming about their relationship at all (it is superficially developed in the script). This change from the book falls flat and was completely unnecessary.
-One of the most glaring things about the movie is that the filmmakers replaced three female characters from the book with male characters: the female physician who treats Traub at the hospital, a female marine who accompanies Andre, Kate, and Chris back to the fourteenth century, and most importantly Diane Kramer (ITC’s head attorney) who becomes Steven Kramer in the film. I don’t know why these changes were made but it makes no sense to me and serves no purpose in the film. It is kind of offensive in a way – and Kate’s character in the film seems to have less moxie and independence than the Kate of the book.
-In addition, the filmmakers completely gutted the role Lady Claire plays in the book and basically changed her from an independent character who takes matters into her own hands to a damsel in distress who needs rescued by a “knight in shining armor” (Andre Marek). In the book Lady Claire is a mysterious, conniving figure – people secretly believe she killed her husband, and she will do anything not to marry Sir Guy, one of Lord Oliver’s best knights. That makes her dangerous, and throughout the book readers are on edge as to whether she can be fully trusted or not. I liked her character in the book; the film basically threw all that out and made her Arnault’s sister and a love interest for Marek (which also bogs down the story because there is already a love interest between Chris and Kate in the film which is barely developed). It all just falls flat on its face.
-Then there is the “time travel” aspect of the story. The ability to travel into the past in the book is described in terms of quantum technology and the ability to access “multiverses”. This means that ITC can dial into a specific place and time anywhere in the past (plus or minus a little) when they want to (if I read things correctly). Of course, company head Robert Doniger wants this to lead to massive profits for himself and the company. In the movie ITC’s experimentation leads to a discovery of a wormhole that connects the present to the specific area and time of France in which the film’s story takes place. As such, the “rush” to rescue the professor comes from not knowing how much longer their machine can stay connected to that point in the past on the other side of the wormhole. Again, this is an unnecessary change to the book’s story that does not add suspense at all – as silly as it sounds, to me this change is more unbelievable than what Crichton wrote in the novel! And the emphasis on the expendability of others in the name of huge profit is pretty much lost in the film. Again, it all just falls flat.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of other eye-rolling, groan-inducing moments that one can speak about (including the ridiculously funny ending that takes away the emotional impact of the end of the book). The bottom line is that there is little in the film to praise; the acting is, on the whole, quite bad (they did not have great material to work with), the relationships in the film are not very believable, and the sets and scenarios the characters find themselves in are sometimes very laughable. I suppose I should mention the score by Brian Tyler as well as Jerry Goldsmith’s rejected score – Tyler’s score is serviceable and has a couple of themes in it, but his score is mostly thunderous, pulsating action music that sounds like most other things from the time (I will give him credit for a memorable love theme that is very pleasant). Goldsmith’s rejected score is more traditional – not prime Goldsmith by any stretch, but definitely more dynamically nuanced and enjoyable to my ears (I can understand though why it was likely rejected). Everything in this film just falls flat – as a movie Timeline stands as an example of poor source material adaptation, decision making, and execution.
There are some spoilers below when talking about the movie - cannot help but discuss them. If anyone else has seen this film and/or read the book I would love to hear your thoughts on the film and/or book.
Spider by Patrick McGrath (1990, 221 pages). In the late 1950s, Dennis Cleg (‘Spider’) has arrived at a halfway house in the East End of London, and it is run by a woman named Mrs. Wilkerson. He suffers from mental illness and has had a traumatic childhood – his father abused him and his mother was murdered. The halfway house is not far from where the tragic events of his childhood took place, and now that he has returned he finds himself wrestling with those past events and his frayed sanity. In order to keep fiction from fact he writes down his thoughts in a journal which he hides in his room, but as he works through those thoughts he finds it gets harder and harder to distinguish what is real and what is imagination rooted in his schizophrenia. McGrath’s story is a chilling, eerie tale written in a gothic horror style – it is filled with creepy houses and sheds, rainy days and nights, assorted insects (spiders, maggots, etc.), dark, cold coal cellars inhabited by rats, an ominous parental figure, and the frightening ruminations of a disturbed mind. The story is very dark, yet I found it hard to put down. McGrath adds little details here and there that point to the story’s conclusion, though I found myself questioning whether I had things right or not. The reader is taken on this vivid psychological journey of discovery with Dennis/Spider, and it sticks with you afterward. I imagine psychological horror stories are so effective because mental illness is something “familiar” in the human experience to some degree for many people – the subject matter makes the story scarier and more real even though it is a work of fiction. Spider is a well written book and, for those who love gothic horror, worth reading.
A film adaptation of the novel was made in 2002 and was directed by David Cronenberg. It is one of his most straight-forward adaptations in that there is very little of the body horror tropes that he is known for. The screenplay was written by Patrick McGrath who, under Cronenberg’s guidance, adapted his own novel into something more cinematic. The film’s style progressed as it was filmed – it is an expressionistic film (not a case study) in which environments and such symbolized and represented Spider himself and his mental illness (the film even moves at Spider’s shuffling pace). Instead of using voice-over narration (something Cronenberg rejected in an early draft of the screenplay), we walk with Spider throughout the film and observe what he observes, seeing events and people through his eyes. On the positive side of things, the performances by Ralph Fiennes (Dennis/Spider) and Miranda Richardson (Mrs. Cleg/Yvonne) are really good (though I found Gabriel Byrne’s performance as Bill Cleg to be uneventful). Howard Shore’s haunting and unsettling score fits the subject matter perfectly. As a director and an artist Cronenberg is very meticulous and purposeful in his technique and presentation of the material, and admittedly he is one of mu guilty favorite directors, though it is sometimes hard to watch his film because they are so cynical and depressing (and gross – I will never watch his recent updating of Crimes of the Furture).
If SPIDER was an original film not based on existing material, I would like it more than I do. However, there are a few things about the film that I really don’t like which end up making it very average. For one thing, the film dispenses of the gothic horror conventions used in the novel. The indoor environments in the film are drab, a bit claustrophobic, and suffocating in a way and are effective in representing Spider’s inner person, but the outdoor environments are too bright and not as eerie or horrifying as the environments in the book. Even the garden allotment and the shed at which the murder takes place look unthreatening. Spider’s home as represented in the film looks next to nothing like what I pictured in my mind while reading the book. There is nothing really “horror” about the film – it is much more of a psychological thriller film. That is a significant change in my opinion; granted, it would be impossible to put on film many of the things that are documented in Spider’s journal concerning his schizophrenic thoughts, and to be fair I feel that even if one could do that, it would look a bit weird and forced. Yet I was hoping for something more than what the film delivered where the overall feel of the film as compared to the book is concerned.
A second criticism I have of the film when compared to the novel is how the film specifically roots Dennis’/Spider’s life-changing decision as a young boy in the Oedipal complex. As I said earlier, the screenplay was written by the author of the novel, so even he made a conscious decision to give a foundational reason for Dennis’/Spider’s schizophrenia – he loves his mom and is jealous of the adult relationship between his parents, associates his mom with Yvonne (a prostitute at a bar called The Dog and Beggar whom his father is attracted to and who “replaces” his mom after she is murdered), and eventually kills Yvonne/mom by purposefully gassing her to death in their home. In the novel it is not so clear – thinking back to the narrative in the book I guess I can see that as a reasonable inference from what happens, but there is an ambiguity in the novel that I enjoyed much more than what the film provides. The novel also sets up Dennis/Spider as an unbalanced kid, something the movie doesn’t do very well: for example, in the book Dennis/Spider is (supposedly) abused by his alcoholic father, getting spanked in a dark coal cellar where rats live in their home. The novel doesn’t really give an answer to the question “why” – Dennis/Spider is a disturbed character who suffers from schizophrenia rooted in any number of things, and what makes the novel horrifying is that there is no single explanation for why he killed his mother. He is irrational and has a very skewed logic – there is no need to answer the “why” part of it. I felt the film over-simplified something more complex where Dennis’/Spider’s character and motivations were concerned, and I did not care for that much.
A third criticism I have concerns the ending of the film – maybe less of a criticism and more of a shock to me. In the novel Dennis/Spider hears voices in the attic of the halfway house he is in which is run by Mrs. Wilkinson (who he happens to delusionally think is Hilda Wilkinson the prostitute/mom from The Dog and Beggar). I believe these voices to be his guilty conscience and part of his schizophrenia – the voices (in the attic of his mind) act as a catalyst to push him to relive the night he murdered his mother in order to arrive at the truth. They accuse him, mock him, and keep him up at night. At the end of the novel Dennis/Spider is a psychological mess, and he decides that he is going to go up to the attic in the halfway house to basically silence those voices (commit suicide). Suicide is a foundational Cronenbergian concept that is in many of his films (I believe he once said something to the effect that suicide is the only way one can give death real meaning…something like that), yet it is missing in the film version of Spider. In the film Dennis/Spider sets out to kill Mrs. Wilkinson in her sleep (who he delusionally thinks is Yvonne/mom) but is discovered and does not do it – Mrs. Wilkinson calls the asylum who comes to pick him up and take him back there. It is an open-ended ending and somewhat depressing in itself (can Dennis/Spider ever be fully rehabilitated, or will he never be able to fully face the truth of what he did to his mother?), but it lacks the powerful finality of the book’s ending. Ultimately I feel the film falls short of the impact the novel had on me when I read it – they both come from the imagination of the same author and so share similarities, but one is a gothic-psychological horror story and the other is psychological thriller story. Of the two, I prefer the former.
Goldfinger by Ian Fleming (1959, 264 pages). James Bond returns to take on SMERSH operative Auric Goldfinger, the richest man in England. Bond discovers through a series of adventures that Goldfinger’s ultimate plan is to steal all the gold bullion located in Fort Knox and, by doing so, disrupt the financial markets of the world. Fleming’s book is, of course, a product of its times and likely would not get published today without serious editing revisions. Bond is not exactly the most likeable or humorous hero, and while I like the harder edge that Fleming’s books give Bond as a character, the books do tend to have a darker, more sinister feel to them when compared to their cinematic adaptations. Speaking of sinister, Goldfinger is a cold, dislikeable character in more ways than one – the novel makes him absolutely detestable - and the description of his death at Bond’s hands is pretty intense and suspenseful (for that matter, Pussy Galore has a more sinister role in the book as a lesbian crime boss than she does in the movie). One thing I really liked about the novel is how Fleming has a character from the first novel, Casino Royale, reconnect with Bond in Miami; he is the one who “hires” Bond to investigate Goldfinger’s alleged cheating scheme. It provides some fun continuity within the Bond corpus as a whole. All in all Fleming’s novel tells an interesting story that adds some fun lore to the Bond canon.
The book was adapted into a film in 1964 as the third installment of the cinematic James Bond franchise. The narrative of the film sticks very closely to the overall narrative of the book, so there is not much difference between the two. Overall I feel the film improves on the book by making Bond more personable. As I stated before, the literary Bond is quite cold and menacing in his way – he is a killing machine who by his job’s very nature has to live on the edge all day every day. His wits have to be sharp, and he has to be emotionally removed from the realities around him. As a literary character I accept that and enjoy who he is in the books. But I understand making Bond more personable for his movie character, and the makers of Goldfinger were successful in doing just that. Bond is still sharp and menacing but he has a playful side and is full of snarky humor and childlike ego, whether it be his dark humor (“Shocking…positively shocking”) or his lighter humor (as when Bond one-ups M when talking about the brandy he is being served at Colonel Smithers house or, of course, his “I must be dreaming” line when he is introduced to the beautiful Pussy Galore).
The filmmakers also improved on the book by making the film presentation more exciting and “bigger” than the book’s narrative. For example, in the book Goldfinger and his gang of crooks infiltrate Fort Knox by train in order to steal the gold; in the film they infiltrate Fort Knox disguised as Army personnel with a bomb in order to make the gold radioactive. Earlier in the story Bond is captured by Goldfinger and strapped to a table where he threatens to saw Bond in half with a large circular saw; in the film the saw is replaced with a laser beam. The filmmakers also significantly lessen Tilly Masterton’s/Masterson’s role in the movie by having her die earlier in the plot, thus paving the way for Pussy Galore to be the Bond girl of the film. I am not a fan of how Bond forces himself on Pussy Galore in the barn though – it makes me uncomfortable (it is nearly as bad as what he does to the therapist in Thunderball). And in my opinion the ending of the film definitely lightens up the mood compared to the ending of the book – while the movie suggests Galore’s lesbianism, the book is very up-front about it (and even makes Tilly Masterton a lesbian who is deeply attracted to Miss Galore) and it simmers in the hyper-masculine attitudes and stereotypes of the time that just do not hold up very well, in my opinion. In both film and book Bond ‘converts’ Galore to heterosexuality, but I find the book’s ending much darker than the film’s ending.
The one change I did not particularly care for between the movie and the book was the change they made to Pussy Galore’s role in making her the leader of an all-female group of stunt pilots. To me this is something of a step down for her character from the book, though Honor Blackman’s screen presence is very charismatic and bold. I should mention in closing that John Barry really came into his own with the score for Goldfinger – it is exciting, captures the action well, is suspenseful and driving, and gave him the opportunity to expand out in a more creative way than the previous two scores did. In other words, he was really able to attach his musical signature to the Bond films with this particular score. It served him well over the many films he would score down the line. Overall I would say the film not only does the book justice but actually improves on the source material to some degree.
The chief change from book to film is the fact that the screenwriters recognized that trying to actually rob Fort Knox was simply impossible, and giving Bond a scene to explain to Goldfinger why it's impossible (when he thinks this is what Goldfinger plans) is for me the most brilliant change from book to film by making the plot more effective and with higher stakes.
I have railed about Bond forcing his way on Pat Fearing in "Thunderball" many times myself but I honestly never saw a similar parallel with Pussy in "Goldfinger" because the difference is that doing that with Pussy serves the mission. In "Thunderball" he's doing it to a civilian woman at a time when he's not on a case which is why that scene repulsed me on all levels and is the biggest strike against "Thunderball" as a movie to me.
Eric Paddon wrote: Wed Apr 08, 2026 6:47 pm
I have railed about Bond forcing his way on Pat Fearing in "Thunderball" many times myself but I honestly never saw a similar parallel with Pussy in "Goldfinger" because the difference is that doing that with Pussy serves the mission. In "Thunderball" he's doing it to a civilian woman at a time when he's not on a case which is why that scene repulsed me on all levels and is the biggest strike against "Thunderball" as a movie to me.
Good points...the Thunderball scene definitely gets a "most repulsive moment" in a Bond film from me for the exact reason you stated - she is a civilian and not an antagonist.
