As you (should) know, Bond 22, Quantum of Solace, is coming out this November 14th. In honor of this momentous occasion, I have decided to spend a little time each week digging into my Bond DVD collection and talking about the best and worst of the series up until now. I also like to compare the movies to the source material, when it exists. I find all of this very entertaining, but if you don’t, the scroll button is still right over there. >>>>>
Thunderball is one of the stranger James Bond books. Author Ian Fleming liked trying out new formulas, and in this one, he decided to throw Bond out of his element a little. In the beginning, he has Bond’s boss M taking a personal interest in the agent’s health. He then sends Bond off to Shrublands, a health clinic from the era when “free radicals” were considered to be the ultimate threat to one’s well-being.
Reading Bond’s thoughts as he remains confined in the spa is like tapping into the brain of a caged tiger. He goes slightly mad, living on “yogurt and lemon juice,” as Moneypenny laughingly suggests in the film version. And as soon as he gets out, he returns to his old wicked ways.
The movie glosses over Shrublands a bit, realizing (correctly) that most action movie fans would find the whole thing boring. Of course, quite a bit goes on there – where Bond goes, trouble follows, and the sinister Count Lippe (played by Guy Doleman) is lurking in the shadows, a threat to Bond’s life. All of this is a direct transcription from the book.
But by losing Bond’s inner monologue – and, most importantly, the scene where M sends him off in the first place – the entire point of Shrublands is lost. They could have cut it out entirely for all the purpose it served.
The rest of the story remains pretty faithful. In short, villainous organization SPECTRE hijacks two atomic bombs and demands a ransom, and it’s up to Bond to recover them, get the girl, and dodge the bullets of baddie Emilio Largo.
The strange thing about the story of Thunderball is that it was supposed to be a movie first. Ian Fleming and Kevin McClory, who met through mutual friend Ivar Bryce, planned to make a film based on some short story concepts that Fleming had already written. He eventually spun it into a screenplay, which was written specifically for McClory to direct. But when McClory’s latest film flopped, Fleming backed out of their deal and worked his screenplays into novelizations instead, without crediting McClory for any of his help on the project. What followed was an epic legal struggle in which McClory, not content with his settlement, kept trying to wrangle the rights to remake “his” Bond film. The eventual result was 1983′s “Never Say Never Again,” which is not considered to be a part of the Bond canon, but which stars Sean Connery in his first and last Bond film since Roger Moore took the reins.
Apart from its interesting history, Thunderball is still an enjoyable film (with a great theme song), but it’s one of the weaker entries in the series.
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