How did you feel about the Bond movies after reading some of the books? My husband loves the books, but I haven't read them, just seen the movies.
I have so many thoughts about this question! The short answer is that my experience of Bond as a franchise is enriched significantly by the experience, back and forth, between the movies and the books. The long answer I hope isn’t too much!
The most basic shock of the books is the sense of Bond as a police man or detective, just operating on an international scope. It only comes up in the movie Dr. No, with a couple lines describing Bond as a kind of police man. Book Bond’s adventures are cases, like a detective or private eye’s cases, whereas the movie Bond goes on missions (with something of a para-militaristic, special/black-ops flavor, more and more as the movies go on). I’m speaking in broad terms, keep in mind. The books, especially the early books, kind of have a hard-boiled crime/noir quality to them, with an eye on what is legal or illegal, corruption/infiltration, vice, and betrayal.
I appreciate all the actors who have played Bond in the films, for those moments where they capture an aspect of the original literary Bond. I’m not going to play favorites, all the actors have had their moments where their image/voice fit a moment that I read in one of the Bond books.
As someone interested in the process of storytelling, and constructing stories, the books are an endless source of fascination to compare with the movies. I was amazed to see how thoroughly the movie Live and Let Die was re-worked and adapted from the book. And it was amazing to read the book, LaLD, and see how cannibalized parts of it became movie LaLD, or a really exciting action set piece in the movie For Your Eyes Only, and yet another component became the inciting incident of Licence to Kill. And then consider movie For Your Eyes Only, which is kind of “cobbled together” from the previously mention bit from LaLD, the short story FYEO and another short story call Risico.
I never understood something about the nature of the movie From Russia With Love, and much to my surprise I successfully predicted that reading the novel would help me to finally understand the movie. I was right, but that’s the tip of the iceberg. Watching movie FRWL after reading the novel was one of the highlight moments for me as a James Bond fan. Now I finally do understand the movie, but I was in awe with how the innovations of the movie-making process result in taking the story line to new levels of greatness. And yet there are still aspects of the book I prefer. I like the book version being about Smersh, which Bond had something of a grudge against (because of the books’ version of the Vesper tragedy). I was never a fan of Spectre, so that’s not a win for the movie, but the movie makes the plot about capturing the coding machine more cunning and intricate. And the cinematic desire to include the involvement of the actor playing Red Grant, so he wasn’t neglected as an actor/character, resulted in having him added into scenes later on in production. That improvisation with the character gives the film/story a whole new layer of sneaking subterfuge throughout the film that was sublimely satisfying to experience.
The first five books I read with an eye towards the possible outcome that there might originally have only been five novels, ending with FRWL. James Bond was suppose to die at the end. It would be interesting if the Daniel Craig movies played it out that way as a parallel to the first five novels: James Bond has five major stories of note, and then the character dies. Given that Ian Flemming originally intended it that way (much like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tried to do with Sherlock Holmes), I played a little bit of make-believe in my mind, to honor that intention. I didn’t treat it as a cliffhanger, because that wasn’t the original intention. I would read the next one, Doctor No, with the question in my mind “Does James Bond actually come back to life, in a spiritual sense? Will he be the same character, or will he be different, changed in some way?”
I was surprised by how thrilling Doctor No was. I can’t remember the last book that I read where I literally had the thought, “This book is so thrilling, it is literally a Thriller novel.” I really was on the edge of my seat. I can’t believe how over-the-top it gets, and yet was still a great, coherent, exciting read. A thing happens near the end that I can never imagine in a JB movie, and so many JB movies have been over-the-top in ways that the books never were...yet I can’t imagine the movies ever adapting this thing that happens in the novel version of Doctor No. I have no idea why this is, how come I can’t explain why I feel this way. It makes every kind of sense that they picked that one for the first JB movie...yet, I think it could have been adapted into a better movie at a later time.
Underwater adventures in the books are awesome! Some of the best stuff. And it's easy to not be confused, as a reader it's simple because we stay in Bond's head. Many underwater sequences in the movies are confusing, both before and after reading the books, especially if all the characters are wearing scuba gear and it's hard to tell who is who. The movie's underwater sequences in that vein improve mainly through re-watching enough times.
One aspect that I do not enjoy about the books is the torture aspect. There’s a scene in book Casino Royale, which made the movie adaptation fit in with the films of the time, when cinema seemed to go through a torture-porn phase. None of the books after CR goes to that extreme, but Bond is always roughed up pretty badly in just about all the books. I actually have been enjoying the For Your Eyes Only anthology (eighth book in the series, I think), because there isn’t time for it, so Bond gets a break from serious pain. The books actually clarify that one of Bond’s personnel files specifically mentions he has a high tolerance for pain (I think that might be Smersh’s file on him). I am hugely glad that this aspect isn’t emphasized in the movies.
I love the feeling of having the books as a distinctive version of JB continuity, along with roughly two cinematic continuities (Dr. No through Die Another Day as one, and the Daniel Craig films as the other). To some extent I’m a film fan first and the books are a look into the source material. The books seem like a good baseline for the movies that do the whole “back to basics” approach, or make Bond more grounded. The movies periodically goes crazy and then dial things back. They go crazy with the movie You Only Live Twice...and back to basics with On Her Majesty’s. Moonraker is too crazy, so here’s FYEO to ground things in gritty reality. DAD went nuts, so then we get Casino Royale to re-calibrate. My favorite Bond movies are those ones that go back to basics, and that’s seems to be when they go back to the source to anchor or re-anchor the movies.
It’s neat to go to the source material, read the books and let them be more than just source material for the movies, but having their own identity. And then compare and see the movies and reflect on how they have developed their own identity beyond the inspiration of the source material.
There are small details from the books that I sometimes wonder about if they inform the movies’ character. The Moonraker novel is a very, very grounded book that shows what James Bond’s everyday life might look like, between missions/cases. He works in an office most of the time, and 2 or 3 times a year might get tapped for a mission. He reads or skims boring paperwork for in-the-field information (methods for uses and types of poison in a particular country, for example) and sometimes signs off on them without reading. He spends money, even big money winnings rapidly, because he figures there is no point in saving money, because he won’t live long enough to spend it later: he honestly doesn’t believe he will retire in good health. Think about that. His office is shared between three people, himself and two other double-O’s, and they have their own secretary (not Moneypenny). And that’s all the double-O section is, in the books. FRWL novel shows him go a year without assignment and going stir-crazy. The Goldfinger book shows him stuck on night duty in the office. And Moonraker ends by evoking for me, in spirit, the image that opens so many of the movies: Bond is aware that even though (in the books) he’s an international law enforcement officer, outsiders find the profession mysterious, and consequently regard him as mysterious. In an unselfish moment, he doesn’t try and charm a nice girl away from her fiance, chooses to scare her away from himself, and embraces that cold quality of being an unknowable, dangerous man of mystery, nothing more than a silhouette...framed in the circle of a gun barrel.
