Tue 22 Mar 2016

22 Responses to “Dan Stumpf Reviews GOLDFINGER (Book & Film).”

1. Bill Crider Says:
   March 22nd, 2016 at 10:35 pm

   Whadaya mean “used to see in Walter Albert”?

2. Al Says:
   March 22nd, 2016 at 11:18 pm

   “One has to wonder if Fleming was writing this with a straight face.”

   I don’t think Fleming wrote any of his stuff with a straight face. It’s not as obviously tongue-in-cheek as the movies but the tongue-in-cheek element is still very much there.

   I agree with your point that Fleming was very much in the tradition of the British thrillers of the interwar years. And I think consciously so. Spy fiction started to change in the 30s with writers like Eric Ambler and Graham Greene pointing the way to much greater realism and Fleming simply ignores this change.

   Even the “Esquire-style snobbery” is just a variation on the Dornford Yates/Leslie Charteris/Dennis Wheatley approach.

   Paradoxically it’s the fact that Fleming is so old-fashioned that keeps him fresh compared to writers like le Carre. Does anyone still read le Carre?

3. David Vineyard Says:
   March 22nd, 2016 at 11:34 pm

   Walter should sue for that used to, or be terribly flattered by it.

   Fleming did have tongue in cheek, firmly, especially naming a character Pussy Galore. He was a bored ex spy master whose imagination didn’t fit the Cold War as well as it had the hot one writing dull material for the British papers and working as an editor, married for the first time in his forties (he wrote the first one while more or less hiding out in Jamaica during a nasty divorce he was correspondent in), and pounding out these Boys Own Paper adventures over three months between snorkeling, golfing, and imbibing murderous amounts of Vodka.

   The Fleming Effect was to sail as close to the wind as possible while keeping afloat with a barrage of brand names and people and places that kept the reader wondering what was game and what was real. As often as not the most preposterous things in his books were actually based on reality while the absurdities were in the mundane everyday details.

   The plot to steal the gold reserves from Fort Knox, the code machine in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, the secret lair of Dr. No near Jamaica, the attempt to bankrupt Le Chiffre in CASINO ROYALE, the attempt to use Henry Morgan’s treasure to fund SMERSH operations, even bio terrorism in ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE were all exaggerations of actual intelligence operations from the war one from the first war when the Germans attempted to smuggle anthrax into France thru Spain. The fantasy was that Bond could drink half a fifth a day and still function, and that you could bounce back from the kind of punishment he took and do it again. Even the villains were based on actual people like Aliester Crowley, Otto Skorzeny, and Aristotle Onassis.

   Oh, and there was a Swiss businessman who dealt in gold named Auric Goldfinger, who was so flattered by the book he persuaded one of the flight attendants on his personal plane to change her name legally to Pussy Galore. The world is still weirder even than Ian Fleming’s fiction.

   Fleming did have greater than pulp ambitions though. He wanted to write popular escapist books in a voice that echoed far better literature much as Raymond Chandler had. To that end he learned from Chandler, Ambler, Simenon, Maugham (a big influence, “Quantum of Solace” and “Octopussy” are almost pure Maugham style stories), and others.

   I was lucky enough to meet a few of the models for James Bond, and no few Fleming types in England in the seventies. That whiskey soaked Fleet Street drawl unique to his fiction could still be heard then from old timers who had known him in the better clubs. They tended to smile amiably about his excesses, then drop broad hints that maybe there was less fiction in some aspects of James Bond than you might think. After meeting a few of the models for the character I would have to agree. If anything Bond was a dull boy compared to them.

   His influences were the pulps — Sax Rohmer for one, Leslie Charteris and the Saint, Peter Cheyney, Oppenheim, LeQueux, Sapper and Bulldog Drummond, and of course Buchan, war time derring do, real agents like Sidney Reilly, and in this one, his own plan he drew up to rob the British gold reserves as opposition research when he was asked what he would do if he were the Germans trying to steal them when they were transferred out of England during the war. His plan to rob the train transferring them to Fort Knox is one reason they went to Canada and not Fort Knox aside from a fear we might not give them back.

   It is hard today to understand how big or how different Bond was. Up to then British heroes were trying to imitate Americans like Mike Hammer and Philip Marlowe, not American’s trying to be as suave as the Brits. I was 10 when I first encountered Bond in a book (MOONRAKER) and 14 when GOLDFINGER came out. It had everything semi adolescent boys from 14 to 90 wanted, girls, guns, gadgets, glamor, and game, and just incidentally women responded to it in a way they hadn’t quite to Mike Hammer for the most part though I know plenty of female Spillane fans. My mother read Fleming and enjoyed him. She would not have been caught dead reading Spillane.

   My favorite bit of absolute blind stupidity in critical prediction involves TIME magazine in its review of GOLDFINGER announcing the Bond craze has probably run its course.

   It still hasn’t.

   How much influence did it have on me? Well, I’m not much of a vodka drinker, but when the opportunity came I served in intelligence (an ironic name for it I grant), and I might never have been positioned for that opportunity if the Bond books and films hadn’t led me to an interest in international politics in the first place. I guess I was lucky at that, I really don’t think cowboy, my other choice, had a lot of future in it for me.

   The book handles how Bond happens to be present when Goldfinger explains his plan to his allies much better than the film. The scene in the film reminded me of the bit when Bulldog Drummond always seemed conveniently positioned outside just the right window when Carl Peterson was kind enough to explain his entire plan in detail.

   Though I can never watch GOLDFINGER without thinking of my father’s absolute horror when they kill Napoleon Solo, the gangster, and compact that brand new Lincoln town car he is killed in. I think it ruined James Bond for him.

4. Matthew Clark Says:
   March 23rd, 2016 at 11:15 am

   If you have just reread “Goldfinger”, a nice follow up read is Anthony Horowitz’s recent James Bond novel “Trigger Mortis”. Which is set right after the events of the Fleming novel. Another interesting addition to the franchise is “Solo” by William Boyd, set in the sixties, is pretty good.
   Also, Greg McDonald’s recent Hector Lassiter novel “Death in the Face”. Where suspense writer Lassiter accompanies his old friend Ian Fleming as he travels to Japan to do research for his next Band novel.

5. Stephen Mertz Says:
   March 23rd, 2016 at 12:53 pm

   An amusing and spot-on review. More resent characters named Pussy? If a car counts, Uma is driving the Pussy Wagon (or some such) in Kill Bill Pt. 2.

   A few thoughts on the Sax Rohmer influence on Fleming. After the death of Edgar Wallace, Rohmer was England’s preeminent thriller writer and has often by cited as a strong influence on Fleming, along with the others mentioned here. I very much like the later short stories David mentions that are heavily Maugham-influenced. As for Rohmer, his influence on Fleming is usually noted as being exemplified by Dr. No but in fact Goldfinger is the single most Rohmer-influenced of all the Bonds. The hero turning the female minion against the evil mastermind is a staple of Rohmer’s Fu Macnhu tales, a template for the Bond-Galore romance, while the very plot itself is adapted from “The Wrath of Fu Mancu (1952) in which Rohmer has the good doctor setting his sights on Fort Knox.

6. Richard R Says:
   March 23rd, 2016 at 1:28 pm

   I’m not sure which I enjoyed more, your excellent review or the following comments. Makes me want to reread one of the books, or even try one of the newer ones.

7. David Vineyard Says:
   March 23rd, 2016 at 2:40 pm

   Fleming knew his escapist literature not just from his youthful reading. As a critic he championed a number of thriller writers like Geoffrey Jenkins, Donald Henderson, and Geoffrey Waggner and in the Bond books mentions Ambler, Simenon, and Rex Stout all favorably, in fact he half seriously suggested Bond team with Wolfe and Archie, but Stout nixed it saying Bond would get all the girls and depress Archie.

   He personally interviewed Simenon and Raymond Chandler and was himself interviewed by Len Deighton, and I believe Michael Gilbert was his literary solicitor at one point around the same time he represented Chandler.

   In the books M and Bill Tanner (Fleming’s old boss Sir John Godfrey head of Admiralty Intelligence and Fleming himself) are pretty clearly right out of John Buchan and Richard Hannay with a touch of Peter Cheyney’s ruthless Peter Quayle, while Bond is a mix of traditional British thriller hero elements with strong doses of Philip Marlowe, a bit of Sam Spade, and the tough unsentimental heroes of Cheyney’s spy novels added for spice. Several of Bond’s companions like Darko Kerim and Quarrel have elements of Cheyney’s lethal Belgian assassin Ernie Guelvada in them.

   One of the things many American writers and critics miss about Bond is that Fleming never for one moment equates Bond as an English gentleman. He mentions several times that type sees Bond as too tan, too fit, and not quite right for the club. Bond has to be invited to Blades to play cards in MOONRAKER because he doesn’t qualify for membership himself. He is an outsider in a society he bleeds and risks death for as much as Fleming was born an insider. Bond is in many ways an elegant thug more like some of the outsiders Fleming knew in the war like Eddie Chapman and Dusko Popov. At one point in a bit of reverse snobbery Bond even turns down a knighthood. Fleming is very careful to point out that for all his outward appearance Bond is ‘not one of us,’ not quite a gentleman. Even his clothes and fussy habits about cigarettes, cars, lighters, and drinks are all portrayed by Fleming as separating Bond from what he sees as the typical English gentlemen. It always amuses me when Americans and some on the left in England hold up Bond as the outdated English gentleman hero epitomized when Fleming intended him to be anything but.

   One of the most telling bits in the series is when Red Grant is posing as a British agent and Bond quickly takes a dislike of him as the old school tie type dropping ‘old boy,’ every third word.

   Oh, and Dan, earlier in GOLDFINGER before the part about Pussy Galore, Bond muses on the treatment of homosexual’s in the service after realizing Tilly Masterson is a lesbian (admittedly because she didn’t fall for him) and actually comes to the fairly liberal stance it is no ones business and that homosexuals are no greater security threat than anyone else rather neatly dealing with the whole Burgess and MacLean affair in a well done analysis of the whole business. Of course Fleming was himself a Tory, but on that he seems more liberal than you might expect for a man of his class, background, and leanings.

   Rohmer has the most influence likely on the big villains, and as Stephen says the women who fall for Bond are straight out of Rohmer in the Fu Manchu books with a bit of Irma Peterson, Carl Peterson’s, femme fatale, slipping in (there is a reason Blofield’s aide is named Irma Bunt)from the Drummond novels. There is also some influence on the science fictional element in many of the Bond books that Kingsley Amis notes, though as Amis points out, that goes back to William Le Queux and deadly exploding cigars and Oppenheim, and remains a staple in thriller fiction. Both Rohmer and Edgar Wallace toyed with science fiction, the latter actually writing a couple of SF novels.

   Rohmer’s ISLAND OF FU MANCHU could almost be a template for LIVE AND LET DIE and DOCTOR NO with the evil doctor’s private fortress and the mix of voodoo and an exotic Haitian dancer. On the other hand Fleming did like to mix in actual wartime activity in disguised form. The only reason they didn’t prosecute him for violating the Official Secrets Act with FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE was that in order to they would have had to reveal Ultra and the Enigma machine.

   As I said many Fleming villains have real life counterparts: Sir Hugo Drax is based on SS commando Otto Skorzeny; Le Chiffre is based on Aliester Crowley and the German spy paymaster in Lisbon during the war; Emile Largo is Aristotle Onassis and a few other piratical Greek shipping magnates of the post war era; Jack Spang is Al Capone; Blofield is Crowley, the beast, again, right down to the syphilitic nose, mixed with Carl Peterson; Goldfinger is largely Herman Goering. I’ve read somewhere he had Mussolini in mind with Mr. Big and Rosa Klebb was modeled on some of the types he met while in the Soviet Union in the thirties while Red Grant was based on several IRA types who worked for the Nazi’s during the war.

   Much like Conan Doyle, who he resembles in some strange ways, there is quite a bit going on beneath the surface of the Bond novels that you can miss completely while still enjoying them. One day someone will do a good annotated edition.

8. Steve Says:
   March 23rd, 2016 at 4:13 pm

   If I had any say, I’d nominate you, David.

9. Al Says:
   March 23rd, 2016 at 8:43 pm

   “He was a bored ex spy master whose imagination didn’t fit the Cold War as well as it had the hot one”

   That’s the secret to understanding Bond. He is not at home in the postwar world. He doesn’t approve of it at all. He is a product of the 1930s. He does not like living in a world in which Britain has become a third-rate power, subservient to the US. Bond will work with the CIA but he’s always aware that the British Secret Service’s real rival is not the KGB but the CIA.

   While Fleming avoids overt politics it’s a fair guess that Bond would not have voted for the Attlee Labor Government and would have regarded the welfare state with scepticism. He would not have approved at all of the social changes of the 50s (and many of the social changes we associate with the 60s actually started in the 50s).

   Even the Bond of the 1960s Bond movies is not a man of the 60s. The world of discotheques and Carnaby Street and Swinging London and The Beatles and drugs and rock’n’roll is not his world. There’s an odd touch of the Puritan in Bond, and even a hint of Colonel Blimp.

   Personally this is one of the things I enjoy about both the Bond books and the 60s movies – the sense of a man out of his time.

10. David Vineyard Says:
    March 23rd, 2016 at 9:58 pm

    Al,
    Exactly. Bond is very much a protest against ‘Little England,’ against rationing and poverty the end of the Empire, the end of the world Fleming grew up in, yet Fleming also doesn’t romanticize that world in quite the same way as Dennis Wheatley did in his Post War novels.

    Fleming sees the tide turning, sees the changes, and Bond is less a protest than a reminder that something of the old times is still needed. It is often cited that Bond is a fantasy figure, an avatar for Fleming, but not exactly in the same way Marlowe is for Chandler or Hammer for Spillane. Fleming knows Bond is out of date, he just enjoys creating a world in his books where he, and Fleming are not.

11. Al Says:
    March 24th, 2016 at 1:49 am

    “yet Fleming also doesn’t romanticize that world in quite the same way as Dennis Wheatley did in his Post War novels.”

    Agreed. Fleming is interestingly ambivalent about the change in the world. He might not have approved of the postwar world but he did very well out of it, achieving both wealth and fame (both of which he thoroughly enjoyed). There’s a nostalgia for the prewar world but without too much actual bitterness. And Bond himself, while he might have felt out of place in the 50s, also enjoys the trappings of success.

    Fleming was not hypocritical enough to complain too much.

    Fleming is also not exactly anti-American. The US is a rival that has overshadowed Britain but he seemed to regard the US with a mixture of admiration and envy mixed with a dash of condescension – pretty much how most educated Englishmen probably regarded America at the time. And Bond considers the CIA to be decent enough fellows but not quite up to the standards of the British Secret Intelligence Service.

12. John Hegenberger Says:
    March 24th, 2016 at 10:48 am

    The name Pussy Galore is a misprint. You can clearly hear Sean call her Poooosy.

    Everything else I have to say on this, you’ve already read elsewhere and when.

13. David Vineyard Says:
    March 24th, 2016 at 2:40 pm

    Honor Blackman famously set British television on its ears when interviewed live on television about the film by a very British interviewer trying to be discreet about her characters name causing Blackman to blurt out; “You mean Pussy Galore?”

    Granted Connery’s “Poooo-say” made it a lot more palatable for American audiences.

    That shocking (then) name is another thing about Bond that set off a seismic shock in our culture. There were plenty of nude women in hard boiled private eye fiction, but, like Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, the tendency was to gut shoot them once they were naked because the hero had the mentality of a backward twelve year old and didn’t know what to do with them once their clothes were off. There was never any question Fleming and Bond knew what to do.

    Sex had always been at the periphery in escapist fiction, but usually either sublimated to violence or so discreet even an adult could miss what actually happened. It was usually either coitus interuptus, or of the “next morning” variety. There was a lot of heavy breathing, bared bosoms, sweaty palms, and hubba hubba, but you could have easily drawn the conclusion many of the writers had never actually progressed beyond heavy petting.

    While tame by later standards, Bond and Fleming not only went through the bedroom door, they kicked it down and threw back the covers. It was no longer enough for the heroine to flash her pale body, button up her trenchcoat, exit, and leave the hero sitting there with a Bogart like whistle on his lips. If most fictional heroes of the time were groping college boys, Fleming and Bond upped the ante to a post graduate course.

14. Bradstreet Says:
    March 24th, 2016 at 3:02 pm

    John: Actually, I think that the correct Connery pronunciation is Poooshy. Poooshy Galaaaaaw.

    Interestingly, it’s in the penultimate novel YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, where Bond/Fleming really cuts loose and makes his feelings plain. Goaded by Tiger Tanaka, he says that despite losing an Empire, Britain is still punching above its weight. The creator and his creation remained old-fashioned patriots, but they were also acceptors of change. Bond is out-of-his time, and yet strangely of the moment. At various points during the movie franchise there were attempts to update the character, to get him out of his tailored suits, but none of them gained any headway. The result is that you can watch the movie of GOLDFINGER without it feeling really dated. It’s a lovely irony that Fleming’s creation was in the vanguard of the ‘British Invasion’ of US popular culture in the early ’60s. His old-fashioned hero standing head to mop-topped head with The Beatles!

15. Al Says:
    March 24th, 2016 at 9:14 pm

    “It’s a lovely irony that Fleming’s creation was in the vanguard of the ‘British Invasion’ of US popular culture in the early ’60s. His old-fashioned hero standing head to mop-topped head with The Beatles!”

    And the 60s Bond movies haven’t dated anywhere near as badly as The Beatles.

    While Bond is in some ways the antithesis of John Steed time has been kind to both of them simply because they aren’t 60s icons. They’re pop culture icons, but not specifically 60s icons.

    The harder you try to be up-to-date and contemporary the more badly your work will date.

16. David Vineyard Says:
    March 25th, 2016 at 4:32 pm

    For all the brand names and specificity in the Bond books they are mindful of what Conan Doyle did with Sherlock Holmes in that they anchor him but don’t date him. The basic character remains remarkably consistent across the series of films, and strangely throughout the various pastiche by Amis, Gardner, Benson, Faulks, Boyd, and Horowitz.

    For a character Fleming once called a ‘cardboard booby’ Bond is remarkably well drawn although in some ways we know his surface better than his interior. Like Holmes, and despite the fact the Bond adventures are told from Bond’s point of view, we know more about what he drinks and eats than thinks or feels, which is also true of Sherlock Holmes.

    I think of Bond, as I do Holmes, Philip Marlowe, even Nero Wolfe, as primarily a voice. When you hear echoes of that voice you know it and know it is the real thing and when anyone strays too far from it you know it is not.

    Fleming isn’t a great writer, and yet you know the authentic Fleming voice very quickly when you read it.

    And, as Bradstreet points out, the sixties movies haven’t dated badly, some of that because they were so influential that moves today are more like them in the way they are cut and staged. The Bond films don’t get enough credit for the way they changed the techniques of movie storytelling. The distinctive look of the sixties Bonds is fairly common in films today. Even todays CGI heavy films borrow many tropes from the Bond films in design and structure.

    DR. NO is the most dated of the films naturally, and yet compared to other films that came out that year the only things that really date it or small details like cars and phones and the airport in Jamaica. Like the Western, the Bond films from that period have a timeless quality.

17. Deb Says:
    March 25th, 2016 at 4:57 pm

    I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading both your post and the follow-up comments–great stuff! But I’m sure you didn’t mean to refer to your “childhood and young adultery”–or perhaps you had a more interesting young adulthood than many of us did!

18. Steve Says:
    March 25th, 2016 at 5:37 pm

    Maybe I should let David be the first to respond, but I confess I missed that totally, Deb, till you pointed it out!

19. Dan Says:
    March 25th, 2016 at 6:09 pm

    Deb,

    I think it was Ambrose Bierce who defined Adolescence as “That time between childhood and young adultery.”

20. Bradstreet Says:
    March 25th, 2016 at 6:18 pm

    I’m sure I remember Terence Young saying in an interview that shortly after the release of DR.NO he had met Orson Welles, who had told him that he had completely re-written the rules of cinema direction and editing. However, Welles also told him that he would never receive the credit for this, as he was making a popular film rather than an art film. There’s a lot of truth in that.

    The Fleming voice is a raspy, sixty-cigarettes a day and another glass of whisky, journalistic sound. Bond is not a natural clubman in the sense of old-leather armchairs, but you can imagine him in some disreputable Soho nightclub at three in the morning, amongst the Journos and Bohos. I’ve heard the famous interview between old friends Fleming and Raymond Chandler, and it does sometimes sound like Bond and Marlowe chatting with one another.

21. David Vineyard Says:
    March 26th, 2016 at 2:07 am

    Bradstreet,

    A lot of the old Fleet Street crowd had that whiskey soaked voice you mention Fleming having. Of course no few of them were whiskey soaked and smoked 60 cigarettes a day as you point out.

    And a great deal of Fleming’s voice is pure journalism, as is a good deal of the Fleming effect, that ease with words, the comfort with explaining things you just learned about five minutes earlier as if you had known them all your life, the quiet authority, the conversational tone are all learned writing copy. It also teaches you brevity (well, not me, but most journalists), and how to write in a punchy immediate manner.

    You look at good thriller writers, and no few of them like Ambler, Greene, Wallace, Dick Francis, Lionel Davidson, Ross Thomas, Bill Grainger had experience as journalists aside from other fields. Much of it is as simple as the ability to tell a story economically.

    I think you and Welles do hit something on the head there about Young and those early Bond films. Even the trailers look different than the films that were coming out then, and those Ken Adam sets are remarkable in how they open up the screen from the claustrophobic look of so many films of the era.

    Steve,

    The young adultery line is Dan and not me, though I would be happy to steal — I mean, ‘borrow’ it.

22. Steve Says:
    March 26th, 2016 at 7:53 am

    Yes, all credit to whom credit is due. Thanks for the correction!

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