Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming, was the first book of his spy thrillers, which was published in 1953. It reflects the tension of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the Western Powers, which included England and the USA among their key countries. Fleming is glorifying England’s spy agents, reflected by the courage, cunning, intelligence, masochism, and sexuality of his fictional hero, James Bond. In the early film adaptations during the 1960s Sean Connery portrayed the spy agent. I was a teenager during those years and can attest that James Bond and Sean Connery were tremendously popular and iconic symbols for the heroic Western agent of the Cold War. As the years progressed and world politics changed with it, the spy thrillers adapted accordingly. For instance, the original novel of Casino Royale portrayed Le Chiffre, a Soviet Block agent, as Bond’s antagonist. Decades later, when the move adaptation was created and the Cold War had ended years prior, the antagonist Chiffre was portrayed as representing terrorism, which reflected the contemporary world political map. However, much of the Bond mystique including his patriarchal and superior macho personality stayed unchanged.
For instance, in the original novel, Fleming has Bond portray his female partner in espionage, the beautiful and sexy Vesper, in unflattering, chauvinistic terms:
This was just what he had been afraid of. These blithering women who thought they could do a man’s work. Why the hell couldn’t they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men’s work to the men. And now for this to happen to him, just when the job has come off so beautifully. For Vesper to fall for an old trick like that and get herself snatched and probably held to ransom like some bloody heroine in a strip cartoon. The silly bitch. (Fleming 099)
Prior to this mishap Bond was planning on seducing and making love to her, something that he had put on hold until the mission was accomplished. Thus the Fleming depiction of the lead female spy fits Simone de Beauvoir’s “Other.”
Jerry Black, in his Politics of James Bond: from Flemings Novels to the Big Screen, correlates the Fleming’s novel’s film adaptation to appropriately relate with the contemporary world situations, He states that “Bond is a figure to resist the threat of empire…can be seen, at least initially, as a central figure in the paranoid culture of the Cold War.” He makes a further distinction regarding the novel, Casino Royale, not reflecting the spy tension and clashes between England and the USA: “This is not, however, the issue in Casino Royale. The harmonious relationship of Bond and Leiter [who is an American agent in the novel] concealed a more troublesome realty,” namely defections of American spies to England. In the novel Casino Royale SMERSH is introduced as an agency trained by the Soviets to kill English and American spies; however, in the subsequent film this is not prevalent as it would make the agency anachronistic.
In the Bond novels and films cutting edge technology has a major influence, generally as an enticement of curiosity and excitement for the reader or viewer. However, Steven L. Goldman, in his article “Images of Technology in Popular Films: Discussion and Filmography,” illustrates that the film industry is ambivalent as far as technology, and has been reflected by their negative bents in such films as Iceman, Splash, Baby, The Manhattan Project, Clockwork Orange, China Syndrome, Silkwood, Aliens, Robocop, Dr. Strangelove, or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. However, as Bond fans realize, advanced technological gadgets and weapons have often been his ace in the hole in getting out seemingly impossible jams.
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