50 Years of James Bond

Ian Flemming

A long article on James Bond, going into the political and psychological elements of the series, by the late Alexander Cockburn:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/23/50-years-of-james-bond-2/

Talks as much about the novels and Ian Fleming as the movies.

There were Fleming's psychological issues, all the father figures that appear in the books. There was the fact that the women in the books are basically men in disguise:

Of course there was dutiful mention of Vesper’s “fine” breasts but Fleming does not seem to have been too interested in them. Four years later in From Russia With Love, Fleming scurries past Tatiana Romanova’s breasts with a mumbled “faultless” before assuming a hotly didactic tone on the matter of her ass: “A purist would have disapproved of her behind. Its muscles were so hardened with exercise that it had lost the smooth downward feminine sweep, and now, round at the back and flat and hard at the sides, it jutted like a man’s". A year later, after publication of Dr No, Noel Coward wrote to Fleming, saying that he was slightly shocked by the lascivious announcement that Honeychile’s bottom was like a boy’s. “I know that we are all becoming progressively more broadminded nowadays but really, old chap, what could you have been thinking of?”