Ian Fleming

The different lives of James Bond -narratives of globalization, estrangement and empowerment Cities and cinema are both urban phenomena and two hallmark bearers of the effects of modernity on civilizations across the world. As Giuliana Bruno puts it, "The machine of modernity that has fabricated the city is also the "fabric" of the film." Neither cities nor cinema were introduced to all part of the world at the same time or in the same way. Arjun Appaudrai suggests the problems with terming modernity as a moment of break between traditional societies at large and their newly transformed lives universally. He problematizes this as "...that [which] both declares and desires a universal applicability for itself." It is perhaps in their unequal and uneven infusion and emergence in different societies of the world that both forms lend themselves to a range of geographies.

Ce seizième numéro hors série de Marginalia est consacré aux études sur Ian Fleming et James Bond, l'agent 007. Cette bibliographie internationale, partiellement commentée, se divise en deux parties. La première partie recense plus spécifiquement les monographies sur l'auteur Ian Fleming. La deuxième partie regroupe les écrits sur James Bond, le personnage des romans et des films.

After working as a personal assistant during the Second World War to John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence of the Royal Navy, Ian Fleming designed James Bond as a prominent fictional British agent from the novel Casino Royale (1953) onward. Bond completes the assignments while simultaneously enjoying the bachelor lifestyle and this has always intrigued many readers and spectators. His life is also enriched by consumerism and more essentially, effortless seduction to limitless sex. Meanwhile his sexual encounters stress his freedom from commitment as well as his embodied British national power, his interactions with most of the Bond Girls since the first Bond movie Dr No (1962) however lack mutual comfort and connection. My dissertation analyses four generations of James Bond movies: Thunderball (1965), Moonraker (1979), GoldenEye (1995) and Casino Royale (2006). These four sources substantiate that the legendary womaniser Bond is instead very much incapable of seducing most of his Bond Girls. As each of the Girl provides a certain extent of intelligence leading to the antagonists, the deficient Bondian seduction therefore hinders both his capacity in national security maintenance as well as his possibility of relishing splendid sexual life.

This chapter not only examines why the James Bond franchise has so far fallen outside the jurisdiction of Adaptation Studies, it also offers a classification of the Bond films as adaptations. By discussing the franchise as a paradigm of the ‘Adaptation Industry’, the chapter highlights aspects like the status of Bond’s literary source-texts, the ambiguous role of author Ian Fleming (who is frequently invoked by the producers as a point of origin), and the series’ preoccupation with rebirth and resurrection. The latter aspect carries over into an analysis of a Bond film with an exceptionally complicated adaptation history: Never Say Never Again (1983), a meta-reflexive commentary on adaptive reduplication strategies and as a film brimming with the déjà vu symptoms of adaptation.

This chapter analyses the remediation of the James Bond character on television, leading to the first screen Bond in 1954 when CBS broadcast Casino Royale as a live TV drama. In 1956, Ian Fleming wrote a TV pilot, James Gunn – Secret Agent, for a planned episodic television series, then reworked it into the Bond novel Dr No, which would become the first cinema adaptation in 1962. The film led to the cycle of British and American television series in the 1960s that drew on Bondian iconography and narrative tropes, such as The Avengers, Secret Agent, and The Man from UNCLE. The chapter analyses how the early history of Bond adaptations illuminates questions of medium specificity and hybridity, the shifting boundaries of genre, and the significance of specific historical and technological contexts in the 1950s and 1960s.

Este artículo trata de detectar los elementos argumentales que reflejan el contexto de la Guerra Fría a principios de la década de 1960 y la aparición de un nuevo foco de tensión internacional centrado en el área caribeña aparecidos en la primera película de la saga cinematográfica del espía inglés James Bond: Agente 007 contra el Dr. No (1962). El film, que camufla la trascendencia geoestratégica representada por el triunfo de la Revolución cubana con el uso de una isla ficticia de invención literaria, parece preconizar la crisis de los mísiles cubanos que tuvo lugar el mismo mes de su estreno.

Stieg Larsson's successful Millenium novels (2005, 2006, 2007) have become a major phenomenon in contemporary globalized culture by combining criminal inquiry with complex accounts of personal life and realism. In doing so they increas-ingly rely on motifs borrowed from the tradition of the spy nar rative as Lisbeth Salander finally faces her father, Zalachenko. In a similar vein, and despite its topical issue, Doug Liman's Fair Game (2010) tells the true story of CIA agent Valerie Plame by placing as much emphasis on her political role as on her ability to reconcile spy work with the demands of her family. In the last decade, the proliferation of these combined views of espionage, personal life and realism in such popular texts suggests their relevance to contemporary culture, and in a way that transcends the borders of, at least, Western countries. This paper discusses The Good Shepherd (2006), Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006) and L'affaire Farewell (F...

Il volume analizza l"immagine del turco nella traduzione italiana del celebre romanzo di Ian Fleming "From Russia, with Love" (1957) in relazione alla teoria polisistemica e all"immagine del turco nella letteratura italiana. Uno studio meticoloso per verificare nel dettaglio la maniera in cui i diversi aspetti della cultura turca vengono rappresentati e percepiti in Italia, attraverso la puntuale disamina degli espedienti e delle dinamiche linguistiche presenti nella traduzione del romanzo di Fleming. A tal fine si ricorre a una prospettiva turcologica critica, innovativa e controcorrente rispetto a quella dominante nel contesto culturale in cui lo studio è stato prodotto, offrendo al lettore italiano un punto di vista alternativo a quelli tradizionali per comprendere e valutare l"immagine del turco in Italia.

This blog is about the first James Bond on screen, in a one-hour TV drama, shot live in the USA in 1954. The version of "Casino Royale" was in a thriller series, "Climax!" on the CBS network and was an early example of colour TV. James Bond becomes an American agent, Jimmy Bond, and his enemy Le Chiffre is played by veteran star actor Peter Lorre. The blog discusses how the drama came to be made, how it was "lost" until 1981, and the legacy of Bond in the later spy adventure shows of the 1960s.

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was a writer with a university education specialized in biology. He had followed T. H. Huxley's teaching of comparative anatomy which defended Darwin's theory of evolution and therefore much of his writing has the specific context which will that the message of history and the message of nature be the same, adapt or die.  We therefore give particular importance to the 1919 publication “The outline of history : being a plain history of life and mankind”.

Aging is not a phenomenon commonly associated with the James Bond franchise, which relies on the successful template of a relatively youthful hero: 007 seems to be permanently stuck at around 40 years of age and retains the agility of a younger man, and while his adversaries tend to be older than him, their deficient ‘Otherness’ usually overshadows aspects of aging or their potential as symbolic ‘bad’ fathers.
There are exceptions from the rule, however, and the Bond series’ indebtedness to the classic template of Victorian adventure fiction occasionally extends to its preference for the aging male hero. In these examples, the films are permeated by the spirit of elderly colonial adventurers like H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, and Bond’s age and experience then qualify him even more as the most trusted representative of British grandeur and imperialism, and as a reliable agent of (old) boys’ networks and inherited privileges of race, class, and gender.
My talk will take its cue from Bond films featuring aging actors in the role of 007 – 1967’s Casino Royale (starring 57-year old David Niven), 1983’s Never Say Never Again (starring 53-year old Sean Connery), and 1985’s A View to a Kill (starring 57-year old Roger Moore) – to analyse their wildly divergent responses to the spectre of aging. I will focus on aspects like the hero’s unwavering virility in the face of old age (at the intersection of senex and eros) and the meta-textual qualities of the films, which resonate with their subtexts on aging.

Stieg Larsson's successful Millenium novels (2005, 2006, 2007) have become a major phenomenon in contemporary globalized culture by combining criminal inquiry with complex accounts of personal life and realism. In doing so they increas-ingly rely on motifs borrowed from the tradition of the spy nar rative as Lisbeth Salander finally faces her father, Zalachenko. In a similar vein, and despite its topical issue, Doug Liman's Fair Game (2010) tells the true story of CIA agent Valerie Plame by placing as much emphasis on her political role as on her ability to reconcile spy work with the demands of her family. In the last decade, the proliferation of these combined views of espionage, personal life and realism in such popular texts suggests their relevance to contemporary culture, and in a way that transcends the borders of, at least, Western countries. This paper discusses The Good Shepherd (2006), Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006) and L'affaire Farewell (Farewell, 2009), three spy films produced in three different countries, as representative of a recent tendency of the genre characterized by this return to a realism that, already a trademark of the genre, is now inflected by contemporary concerns. Although the paper's main interest will be theatrically-released films, it will also refer to television because the 1980s BBC series based on John le Carre's novels contributed significantly to establishing the conventions of the realist spy narrative, and in the last decade the genre has flourished on the small screen. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The spy film genre moved through the 1970s and 1980s towards an increasing relevance of action and suspense, as proved by the films based on Frederick Forsyth's novels The Day of the Jackal (1973), The Odessa File (1974), The Dogs of War (1980) and The Fourth Protocol (1987), a tendency that would become even stronger in the 1990s and 2000s. 1990 saw the release of the first film adaptation of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan saga, The Hunt for Red October, soon followed by Patriot Games (1992), Clear and Present Danger (1994) and The Sum of All Fears (2002). They initiated a cycle of action spy thrillers that would include the Mission Impossible series (1996, 2000, 2006) and, more recently, the Bourne films based on Robert Ludlum's novels (2002, 2004, 2007). In the 2000s the Bond franchise swayed towards action heroics with Daniel Craig, as did such films as Spy Games (2001) and The Tailor of Panama (2001). More recently, Body of Lies (2008), Traitor (2008), Taken (2008) and Salt (2010) have followed the same line. Against this background stands out a less popular cycle of spy television series produced in the last decade. CBS's The Agency (2001-2003), ABC's Threat Matrix (2003-2004) and TNT's The Grid (2004) offered realism and topicality by placing secret agents in the new context of terrorism, but they achieved none of the success of the more fantasy-based Alias (ABC, 2001-2006), 24 (Fox, 2001-2010), Burn Notice (USA Network, 2007--present) or the miniseries The Company (TNT, 2007). As Wesley Britton comments, these examples prove that today the fantasies popularized by 007 have a stronger place in audiovisual culture than the realistic spy stories more usually found in literature. (1) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It is in this context that I would like to place three topical spy films which resemble those realistic television shows but were more popular than them. The Good Shepherd (2006) obtained close to $100 million worldwide, a modest success replicated in the same year by a film that was to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and earned about $77 million world-wide, the German Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). Later would appear L'affaire Farewell (Farewell, 2009), a French film that lacked the commercial impact of the other two but enjoyed a long career on the film festival circuit. It is my hypothesis that these three films achieved this relative success because they touched on issues that were relevant to audiences, and they did so by departing from contemporary main-stream, action-oriented, representations of spy life. …

ARMANDO ROTONDI IL 2014 che ci siamo lasciati alle spalle ha visto grandi anniversari per Napoli, dal trentennale della scomparsa di Eduardo De Filippo, vero monopolizzatore della cultura partenopea degli ultimi mesi con eventi, dibattiti, articoli e altro, agli ottanta di Salvatore Di Giacomo ai quaranta di Vittorio De Sica, con il suo "L'oro di Napoli" realizzato nel 1954. In questo mare magnum di appuntamenti di nascite e morti, cui si possono aggiungere i vent'anni dalla scomparsa di Troisi, un altro personaggio vale la pena di ricordare, apparentemente poco legato a Napoli: Ian Fleming. Pochi in Italia, hanno celebrato il cinquantenario della scomparsa del padre di James Bond e tra i maggiori scrittori di spionaggio del XX secolo. Tra questi, il festival "Libri di mare. Libri di terra" di Pozzuoli ha ricordato a settembre la visita di Fleming ai Campi Flegrei. E in effetti, Fleming appare legato alla Campania, e in particolar modo a Napoli, da un rapporto contraddittorio, molto critico ad essere sinceri, snob e british come era il personaggio stesso di Fleming. L'autore inglese inserisce Napoli all'interno delle thrilling cities mondiali, nella sua raccolta di articoli di viaggio firmati dal 1959 al 1960 per conto del "Sunday Times". Gli articoli confluirono quindi nel volume "Thrilling Cities", per l'appunto, pubblicato dalla Jonathan Cape nel 1963 e ripresi, nell'edizione italiana, come "Thrilling Cities -Le città dell'avventura" dalla milanese Alacran nel 2006. La raccolta comprende tredici articoli scritti da Fleming, tra quelli che il "Sunday Times" commissionò all'autore, come un'indagine sulle principali "città dell'avventura o spionistiche del mondo". Nel viaggio del 1959 descrive: Hong Kong, Macao, Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles e Las Vegas (in un articolo unico), New York e Chicago. Nel successivo reportage del 1960 si sofferma su Amburgo, Berlino, Vienna, Ginevra, Napoli, Montecarlo. Anche Napoli, quindi. Con il suo inconfondibile tono snob, Fleming ritrae Napoli non risparmiando critiche aspre, non evitando citazioni dickensiane e ricreando un percorso del tutto simile a quello che i coniugi Joyce, ad esempio, realizzano nel film di Rossellini "Viaggio in Italia": l'avvicinamento in automobile attraverso l'Appia verso Napoli; gli alberghi del lungomare; la gita a Capri; gli scavi di Pompei e il Vesuvio; l'antro della Sibilla. Fleming parla espressamente di "Fagin" che popolano la città e l'inserimento di Napoli tra le "città dell'avventura" sembra essere dovuta, all'interno dell'articolo, per lo più all'incontro con il gangster americano Lucky Luciano che a Napoli trascorse gli ultimi anni di vita. L'incontro, avvenuto in un albergo del lungomare, è al centro del resoconto dell'autore inglese. Ma non vi è solo questo incontro. Anzi. Fleming descrive e connota la città, senza comprenderla pienamente, ma guardandola come uomo venuto dall'esterno, insofferente, senza occhio antropologico, così come anche le zone limitrofe. Fleming scrive in particolare su Capri: «Capri: quest'isola di sogno, miti e vanità è ancora, ma forse non d'estate, un luogo incantevole ed eccentrico. Anche se fare il bagno nelle piccole spiagge ghiaiose con l'acqua maculata di petrolio è come sempre un'esperienza infernale, Capri è l'ideale per non fare assolutamente nulla» (Ian Fleming, Thrilling Cities, ed. italiana, p. 256). E ancora su Pompei: «Pompei, nonostante le orde di turisti, lenoni e ciceroni, rimane una grande meraviglia. Rischiammo la vita per aver rifiutato di assumere un accompagnatore o di comprare una guida turistica: ci eravamo scordati quanto è grande la città e quanto letali siano per i piedi i grandi lastroni di pietra consumati dalle ruote dei carri» (p. 258). Infine sull'Antro della Sibilla a Cuma: «L'antro, poco visitato dai turisti, è un'inquietante grotta scolpita di origine minoica.