Fiona Fullerton (Pola ivanova) says she wanted to sleep with Roger Moore after the hot tub scene in AVTAK. At the time Fullerton was 29 and Moore was 57, perhaps proving he had the Bond magnetism to the end.
This from the Times, 14 June 2023, saying the Express cartoon featuring a younger more rugged Bond in 1958 put Connery on the path to Bond - even though the films came four years later.
I like that story: the comic strip influenced the films, and Connery himself! those comic strips dont get discussed enough, they were the first adaptations following Climax Mystery Theatre, I wonder if they influenced any of the camera angles and staging of the films? theyd already had to solve the problem of telling a prose story in visual form, film is closer to comics than it is to prose.
speaking of which I must quibble with the claim "Bond didnt exist visually before...", As well as Barry Nelson in 1954, there were the PAN covers starting in 1955, three years before the comic strip. On the cover of the first PAN, Bond looked like this:
Roosevelt agreed to let the FBI take responsibility for foreign espionage – something Hoover badly wanted – though the bureau was so inept at first that you wonder if any agent had even read The Thirty-Nine Steps. In the lead-up to the war, Gage writes, British intelligence had to teach FBI agents the basics of setting up foreign outposts and running double agents. At Camp X in Toronto, MI6 officers instructed Americans ‘in the arts of sabotage, self-defence and secret codes’. In exchange, the FBI turned a ‘blind eye to British activities on US soil’. Ian Fleming, posted to Washington, didn’t take to Hoover – ‘a chunky enigmatic man with slope eyes and a trap of a mouth’. British intelligence generally considered him out of his depth, if sufficiently discreet to be trusted with secrets.
Not sure where to post this so I put it here. I was in Covent Garden last night and had a couple of predinner drinks in the famous Lamb and Flag public house. Thing is, down the passageway stapled to the wall I saw this sign I had never seen before:
Well, who knew?
PPK 7.65mmSaratoga Springs NY USAPosts: 1,256MI6 Agent
I'm watching a documentary on TV about Joan Collins. It turns out meeting a young Roger Moore was the direct inspiration for her to turn to acting. RM warned her about the Harvey Weinsteins of the age (Roger was a gentleman already), but she became an actress anyway.
I can certainly see a Gyrocopter being a practical and useful low budget reconaissance vehicle in a military context, especially in developing countries...but I thought that missile equipped Gyrocopters was purely Bondian fiction. Perhaps not! 😆
The current issue of The London Review of Bookshas a review of the biography Sidney Reilly: Master Spy, by Benny Morris. An excerpt from the final paragraph:
Ian Fleming once said that ‘James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamed up. He’s not a Sidney Reilly, you know.’ But it’s just as true that Sidney Reilly wasn’t James Bond: in Fleming’s novels (and even more in the films based on them), 007’s individual actions make all the difference. Bond’s secret missions save the world, or at least preserve the status quo. Yet even on Morris’s Reilly-centred account, it isn’t clear that the course of early 20th-century history would have run any differently if Sidney Reilly had never existed, or if Sigmund Rosenblum had never left Odesa. To the extent that Reilly resembles a figure in a spy novel, he’s less like Fleming’s creation – his promiscuity and enjoyment of the high life aside – than one of Eric Ambler’s characters: occupying the murky hinterland between espionage, diplomacy and business; crossing and recrossing Europe’s borders even as they shifted under his feet, adopting a new name and a new nationality as he went; carried remorselessly along on the currents of history however hard he tried covertly to direct them.
Has anyone found the source of that supposed Fleming quote? I suspect it's apocryphal.
Today I suddenly became facinated with the blandest Felix Leiter ever - John Terry in TLD!
His first big chance was in 1980 when he was cast as the lead in the fantasy movie "Hawk the Slayer". This movie was not to be the breakthrough of the fantasy genere nor Terry. Watch the trailer:
In the same year as TLD he was cast as the editor of the army newspaper in Full Metal jacket:
In 1994 Terry was in eight episodes of ER, including the first episode, but for some reason his career trajectory didn't follow George Cloony's.
He was later in Lost:
He was back in the movies in David Fincher's underrated Zodiac in 2007. Can you tell Robert Downey was a bigger star at that point?
Terry has been in a lot of TV series including CSI and Law & Order. He hasn't acted since 2013 when he was 63 years old. He has however passed on some good genes. His daughter Hannah is a professional football player (not to be confused with what Americans call "football" and I call "American Hand-Egg".
Though Clive James published edited selections of his superb and highly influential TV criticism years ago, complete articles are now being transcribed and archived online. The edition from December 31, 1978 has a wee bit of Bond content:
Diamonds are Forever (ITV) is a Bond film even less inspired than the average — a real hair-in-the-nose, rented tuxedo effort scripted by the kind of writers who don’t know they are mixing a metaphor when they ask an actor to say ‘the next link in the pipeline.’ Would they give a chain valves?
Thanks to Ian Fleming, he of the cult, the wildest literary experiment in the world is being carried out here in San Francisco. Our city is writing a book.
I would feel better about this if it did not remind me of the monkeys and the typewriters.
You recall the theory: If you put enough monkeys to work batting enough typewriters for a long enough time, why, eventually you get a masterpiece of literature by random chance for Random House.
Roughly speaking, the monkey business is afoot.
San Francisco is writing a mystery novel. That's on account of Ian Fleming. You can blame him, all right. And the coordinator of this dangerous project is Dave Niles, the staff intellectual at KSFO, who (along with President Kennedy) is an Ian Fleming fan
For the three or four readers who may not yet have heard of Ian Fleming, let me explain that he is the creator of James Bond, the super secret agent, and of Bond's boss M, and of the creepy Soviet murder machine known as SMERSH. Also of miscellaneous pneumatic blondes, master spies, inventive torturers, knowing waiters, ingenious mechanics, beetle-browed thugs, sly assassins, pneumatic brunettes, cryptographers, cryptanalysts, pneumatic redheads.
James Bond contends with some, exchanges airy talk with others, kills a few, gets exquisitely tormented by the torturer in each novel; kills the torturer, foils the plot and (after work is done) indulges himself with the pneumatic beauty, but only briefly, because all surplus characters have to be cleared away for the next book.
All this gave Dave Niles the idea, one night, to ask the KSFO audience to phone in the specifications for a synthetic thriller, starting with a super-secret international agent (Bond is a Limey) and going on from there.
Well! Ever since then the listeners have been putting this book together with dedicated fury. And Dave has been editing the results. It's an excellent chance that a publisher will come along soon and put the whole thing between covers.
For a preview, may I present Drason Morris, secret agent. According to the listeners' specifications, Drason Morris is five foot 11 1/2 inches tall, weighs 187 pounds, has brown hair, flinty gray eyes, craggy features. He has a small triangular scar under his left ear. He is lean, muscular and is always deeply tanned.
At Yale, Morris rowed and fenced. In postgraduate studies at Stanford (electronics, Indo-European literature) Morris neglected athletics. Nevertheless he is expert at judo, karate, use of small arms, parachute jumping, explosives, sports car driving, small boat handling, celestial navigation, and the intricate French art of fighting with the feet.
Drason Morris lives in a Belvedere split-level thoughtfully provided with a secret infra-red and sonar warning system, as well as a concealed elevator leading to a hidden dock under the house.
Drason's car is a Facel Vega HK 500, powered by a 360 h.p. Chrysler V-8 with twin four-choke carburetors. The car has disc brakes. It can accelerate from zero to 100 m.p.h. and brake back to zero again in 25 seconds.
He favors a Browning 9 mm. Parabellum pistol, Chivas Regal Scotch, a $2,500 Swiss watch, a Morane Saulnier airplane, an air propelled 19-foot cruiser that coasts at 140 m.p.h., and a Bell TX-500 helmet for sky diving.
So far the listeners have been unable to agree on Drason's taste in broads. One must assume they will be spectacular and inventive.
Plot is pretty much a tangle, so far. Something about a new atomic submarine being hijacked while the President is aboard; a deadly battle between Drason and a 361-pound Sumo wrestler; and a 150 m.p.h. automobile chase across the Golden Gate Bridge. I told you it was wild.
Comments
Ursula Andress and James Dean dated for short while only weeks before his death in 1955.
This is from yesterday, note the date -
https://twitter.com/antanddec/status/1642059712832086016
Fiona Fullerton (Pola ivanova) says she wanted to sleep with Roger Moore after the hot tub scene in AVTAK. At the time Fullerton was 29 and Moore was 57, perhaps proving he had the Bond magnetism to the end.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2467042/Fiona-Fullerton-reveals-wanted-bed-Roger-Moore-steamy-hot-tub-scene.html
This from the Times, 14 June 2023, saying the Express cartoon featuring a younger more rugged Bond in 1958 put Connery on the path to Bond - even though the films came four years later.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I like that story: the comic strip influenced the films, and Connery himself! those comic strips dont get discussed enough, they were the first adaptations following Climax Mystery Theatre, I wonder if they influenced any of the camera angles and staging of the films? theyd already had to solve the problem of telling a prose story in visual form, film is closer to comics than it is to prose.
speaking of which I must quibble with the claim "Bond didnt exist visually before...", As well as Barry Nelson in 1954, there were the PAN covers starting in 1955, three years before the comic strip. On the cover of the first PAN, Bond looked like this:
007 Magazine website has an article on this topic
I know, and then there's this cover from 1958 - I mean that looks even more like Connery.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
This week's London Review of Books has a review of the new biography of J. Edgar Hoover, which includes the following passage:
Roosevelt agreed to let the FBI take responsibility for foreign espionage – something Hoover badly wanted – though the bureau was so inept at first that you wonder if any agent had even read The Thirty-Nine Steps. In the lead-up to the war, Gage writes, British intelligence had to teach FBI agents the basics of setting up foreign outposts and running double agents. At Camp X in Toronto, MI6 officers instructed Americans ‘in the arts of sabotage, self-defence and secret codes’. In exchange, the FBI turned a ‘blind eye to British activities on US soil’. Ian Fleming, posted to Washington, didn’t take to Hoover – ‘a chunky enigmatic man with slope eyes and a trap of a mouth’. British intelligence generally considered him out of his depth, if sufficiently discreet to be trusted with secrets.
The Fleming quote is from his 1957 review of The F.B.I. Story.
Not sure where to post this so I put it here. I was in Covent Garden last night and had a couple of predinner drinks in the famous Lamb and Flag public house. Thing is, down the passageway stapled to the wall I saw this sign I had never seen before:
Well, who knew?
One of the screen used Aston Martin V8'sfrom The Living Daylights is heading to auction: V8 Vantage Auction - A screen used Aston Martin from The Living Daylights is for sale - James Bond 007 :: MI6 - The Home Of James Bond (mi6-hq.com)
I'm watching a documentary on TV about Joan Collins. It turns out meeting a young Roger Moore was the direct inspiration for her to turn to acting. RM warned her about the Harvey Weinsteins of the age (Roger was a gentleman already), but she became an actress anyway.
We all remember Little Nellie from YOLT. A fun gadget, but no serious military would ever adopt something like that. Or would they ....?
This is Hunting Eagle Strike Gyrocopter from the Chinese Army. 😁
I can certainly see a Gyrocopter being a practical and useful low budget reconaissance vehicle in a military context, especially in developing countries...but I thought that missile equipped Gyrocopters was purely Bondian fiction. Perhaps not! 😆
That is just amazing.
This gyrocopter is a lot of fun for us Bond fans, but what can this vehicle do that drones and/or small helicopters can't?
It's not the only James Bond method of transportation that has become real:
"Sentinel" from LTK:
Drug smuggling submarine from real life:
Jet pack from TB:
Royal Navy jet pack.
While he was a parachute instructor for the Special Operations Excecutive during WWII, Timothy Dalton's father rescued a paratrooper from drowning.
A class photo of RAF Cadets in 1961. Timothy Dalton is number three from the right in the back row.
Sean Connery (standing in the middle) during his national service in the Royal Navy.
The current issue of The London Review of Books has a review of the biography Sidney Reilly: Master Spy, by Benny Morris. An excerpt from the final paragraph:
Ian Fleming once said that ‘James Bond is just a piece of nonsense I dreamed up. He’s not a Sidney Reilly, you know.’ But it’s just as true that Sidney Reilly wasn’t James Bond: in Fleming’s novels (and even more in the films based on them), 007’s individual actions make all the difference. Bond’s secret missions save the world, or at least preserve the status quo. Yet even on Morris’s Reilly-centred account, it isn’t clear that the course of early 20th-century history would have run any differently if Sidney Reilly had never existed, or if Sigmund Rosenblum had never left Odesa. To the extent that Reilly resembles a figure in a spy novel, he’s less like Fleming’s creation – his promiscuity and enjoyment of the high life aside – than one of Eric Ambler’s characters: occupying the murky hinterland between espionage, diplomacy and business; crossing and recrossing Europe’s borders even as they shifted under his feet, adopting a new name and a new nationality as he went; carried remorselessly along on the currents of history however hard he tried covertly to direct them.
Has anyone found the source of that supposed Fleming quote? I suspect it's apocryphal.
I'm not sure it is. It sounded vaguely familiar, but I can't recall where - or if - I read it.
Thursday a man managed to dodge the security guards and jump off the Eiffel Tower, but he was arrested upon landing. A Roger Moore fan perhaps?
Video:
Today I suddenly became facinated with the blandest Felix Leiter ever - John Terry in TLD!
His first big chance was in 1980 when he was cast as the lead in the fantasy movie "Hawk the Slayer". This movie was not to be the breakthrough of the fantasy genere nor Terry. Watch the trailer:
In the same year as TLD he was cast as the editor of the army newspaper in Full Metal jacket:
In 1994 Terry was in eight episodes of ER, including the first episode, but for some reason his career trajectory didn't follow George Cloony's.
He was later in Lost:
He was back in the movies in David Fincher's underrated Zodiac in 2007. Can you tell Robert Downey was a bigger star at that point?
Terry has been in a lot of TV series including CSI and Law & Order. He hasn't acted since 2013 when he was 63 years old. He has however passed on some good genes. His daughter Hannah is a professional football player (not to be confused with what Americans call "football" and I call "American Hand-Egg".
Though Clive James published edited selections of his superb and highly influential TV criticism years ago, complete articles are now being transcribed and archived online. The edition from December 31, 1978 has a wee bit of Bond content:
Diamonds are Forever (ITV) is a Bond film even less inspired than the average — a real hair-in-the-nose, rented tuxedo effort scripted by the kind of writers who don’t know they are mixing a metaphor when they ask an actor to say ‘the next link in the pipeline.’ Would they give a chain valves?
The BBC has an article about a photography exhibition in London featuring photos of Bond villain actors:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-67588467
Oops, I've just seen there's already a thread about this. Sorry Barbel!
Thanks jellyfish, no worries.
From GE's Boris, today.
From The San Francisco Examiner, Feb. 17, 1963:
San Francisco Strikes Back
By Dick Nolan
Thanks to Ian Fleming, he of the cult, the wildest literary experiment in the world is being carried out here in San Francisco. Our city is writing a book.
I would feel better about this if it did not remind me of the monkeys and the typewriters.
You recall the theory: If you put enough monkeys to work batting enough typewriters for a long enough time, why, eventually you get a masterpiece of literature by random chance for Random House.
Roughly speaking, the monkey business is afoot.
San Francisco is writing a mystery novel. That's on account of Ian Fleming. You can blame him, all right. And the coordinator of this dangerous project is Dave Niles, the staff intellectual at KSFO, who (along with President Kennedy) is an Ian Fleming fan
For the three or four readers who may not yet have heard of Ian Fleming, let me explain that he is the creator of James Bond, the super secret agent, and of Bond's boss M, and of the creepy Soviet murder machine known as SMERSH. Also of miscellaneous pneumatic blondes, master spies, inventive torturers, knowing waiters, ingenious mechanics, beetle-browed thugs, sly assassins, pneumatic brunettes, cryptographers, cryptanalysts, pneumatic redheads.
James Bond contends with some, exchanges airy talk with others, kills a few, gets exquisitely tormented by the torturer in each novel; kills the torturer, foils the plot and (after work is done) indulges himself with the pneumatic beauty, but only briefly, because all surplus characters have to be cleared away for the next book.
All this gave Dave Niles the idea, one night, to ask the KSFO audience to phone in the specifications for a synthetic thriller, starting with a super-secret international agent (Bond is a Limey) and going on from there.
Well! Ever since then the listeners have been putting this book together with dedicated fury. And Dave has been editing the results. It's an excellent chance that a publisher will come along soon and put the whole thing between covers.
For a preview, may I present Drason Morris, secret agent. According to the listeners' specifications, Drason Morris is five foot 11 1/2 inches tall, weighs 187 pounds, has brown hair, flinty gray eyes, craggy features. He has a small triangular scar under his left ear. He is lean, muscular and is always deeply tanned.
At Yale, Morris rowed and fenced. In postgraduate studies at Stanford (electronics, Indo-European literature) Morris neglected athletics. Nevertheless he is expert at judo, karate, use of small arms, parachute jumping, explosives, sports car driving, small boat handling, celestial navigation, and the intricate French art of fighting with the feet.
Drason Morris lives in a Belvedere split-level thoughtfully provided with a secret infra-red and sonar warning system, as well as a concealed elevator leading to a hidden dock under the house.
Drason's car is a Facel Vega HK 500, powered by a 360 h.p. Chrysler V-8 with twin four-choke carburetors. The car has disc brakes. It can accelerate from zero to 100 m.p.h. and brake back to zero again in 25 seconds.
He favors a Browning 9 mm. Parabellum pistol, Chivas Regal Scotch, a $2,500 Swiss watch, a Morane Saulnier airplane, an air propelled 19-foot cruiser that coasts at 140 m.p.h., and a Bell TX-500 helmet for sky diving.
So far the listeners have been unable to agree on Drason's taste in broads. One must assume they will be spectacular and inventive.
Plot is pretty much a tangle, so far. Something about a new atomic submarine being hijacked while the President is aboard; a deadly battle between Drason and a 361-pound Sumo wrestler; and a 150 m.p.h. automobile chase across the Golden Gate Bridge. I told you it was wild.
Spy in the sky: Russia says it is being watched by ENEMY satellites hidden as 'space junk'
Does this remind you of anything? Yes, Goldeneye. 😀