Why did the Bond film plots drift so radically from the novels?
opal
Posts: 78MI6 Agent
I've been reading The Man With the Golden Gun, the plot of which is totally different from the film's. The same is true of the other films apart from From Russia With Love, Goldfinger and On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which remain faithful, more or less, to the novels.
Was it to suit the changing tastes of audiences? Or was it a case of the plots being "boring" for audiences wanting obvious action?
Comments
Thunderball is pretty faithful, of course.
Not all Fleming's novels were quite right for a big box office spy adventure. In fact, most of them weren't. Even Moonraker, which is a big plot, is restricted in its locations to the UK, and the south of England at that. You couldn't put the novel of YOLT on the big screen and expect it to sell, not with other Bond imitators out there competing.
The novels instead became a source upon which the film makers would riff - they'd use the title, the names of the main characters, and the locations and maybe theme, a few settings but often that's about it. Of course, The Man With The Golden Gun is regarded as one of Fleming's weaker novels - even so, aspects of it were used, but for License to Kill. At the time they's have thought it better to start from scratch.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Yes, I forgot to include Thunderball, which was very like the film.
I wonder if had Fleming lived, he would have made the plots more suitable for the films?
... I mean plots for new Bond novels.
Let's look at the order of the films, their increasing box office, and the increasing use of formula. The series starts with Dr. No, a faithful adaptation, and proceeds to FRWL, which despite being a much different type of story than DN was faithfully adapted anyway, since the series was still new. Had the book not been adapted before the 1970s, we might never have seen a faithful adaptation of it, since by then it would have seemed atypical of what audiences expected from Bond, more of a thriller than an action film.
After FRWL comes GF, a mostly faithful adaptation but also an augmented version of one of Fleming's more over-the-top books. The film was the series' biggest success yet, and its future template. GF's smash success convinced the filmmakers that audiences wanted incredible plots and lots of quips and gadgets. Luckily Thunderball, written after GF, was also in the larger-than-life vein of GF, and so it also was augmented for the screen in GF style. The attempt to make an even bigger film than GF resulted in even bigger box office. The formula was set.
After plans to film OHMSS fell through, the filmmakers chose to adapt YOLT, presumably to capitalize on the book's Japanese setting. But this meant that the book's revenge plot had to be thrown out. Furthermore, the filmmakers felt the pressure to top TB. So Roald Dahl was instructed to create a script based on tropes from previous Bond films, but on an even bigger scale. The formula was predominant.
After Connery's departure the producers realized that it would impossible to top YOLT, and since they were taking a risk by replacing Connery they could also take a risk in reverting to Fleming. While OHMSS did well at the box office, Lazenby's departure forced a change in direction. United Artists wanted to play it safe by re-hiring Connery, while the filmmakers played it safe by indulging in formulaic self-parody. The book's diamond-smuggling plot was too small-scale for what audiences now expected from the series, so Blofeld (a holdover from the previous film) was given a scheme that combined elements from the films of YOLT and TB. Since the series was reacting against the tone of OHMSS, Fleming's version of Tiffany Case was replaced by her increasingly ditzy film equivalent. The formula was reinstated and honed for the early 70s: the films would rely less and less on plot and more on a series of action set-pieces interlaced with broad, self-parodic humor.
This can be seen in LALD, which didn't have the budget to replicate Fleming's climax, and which wanted to take advantage of early 70s trends by introducing a drug-smuggling plot and blaxploitation elements. As for TMWTGG, by 1973 the book was unadaptable: its opening would have made no sense to cinema audiences, since it was a direct followup to the unadapted finale of Fleming's YOLT; the Caribbean setting had already been used in the film of LALD; and the plot was again too small in scale for what audiences had come to expect from Bond.
After the under-performance of TMWTGG, the series took a break and decided to return to the maximum scale of YOLT (the film). Even if Fleming hadn't forbidden adapting anything from TSWLM besides the title (there is evidence to suggest he hadn't, but that's another story), the book was too much of a radical deviation from any formula to be filmed. The success of TSWLM meant that the YOLT template was also applied to MR, whose source material was again too small-scale, especially in the age of Star Wars. Threatening to nuke London with a rocket was small potatoes compared to stealing submarines to nuke humankind!
The filmmakers realized there was no way to top MR, and since the formula was again exhausted, they once again went back to Fleming for FYEO. All the available novels had been used, but the 1980s trend toward grittier and more "realistic" action films allowed the filmmakers to scale down the Bond films and incorporate unadapted parts of Fleming in TLD and LTK.
The commercial failure of LTK prompted a return to larger-than-life pastiche, so the Brosnan era enjoyed good box office by overlaying the standard Bond formula with modern action film tropes. But yet again the formula exhausted itself by the time of DAD, so the filmmakers returned to Fleming yet again, this time with the newly available Casino Royale. The post-9/11-Gulf War trend for darker, super-gritty action films had conditioned audiences to accept a Bond film that was more "personal" and smaller-scale yet more visceral. The hunt for more "personal" material for Craig also meant that unadapted bits of YOLT were repurposed in Skyfall and NTTD, with mixed results (NTTD arguably is another exhaustion point).
As for your second post...Fleming was more insistent than usual that TMWTGG would be his last Bond book. He was an ill, depressed man and even tired of Bond. As for the possible influence of the films on his fiction, we know that Fleming wrote OHMSS while DN was being filmed, and he certainly had read and approved the script beforehand. Maybe the film influenced parts of the plot of OHMSS. Bu we should also note that Fleming had seen the film of DN and had presumably read the script of FRWL by the time he wrote YOLT. Furthermore, he had seen FRWL and read the script of Goldfinger by the time he wrote TMWTGG, a book that's rather small in scale and doesn't reflect much influence from the early Bond films. So my guess is that if Fleming had lived beyond 1964 and kept writing Bond novels, he would have continued going his own way, regardless of the films.
Thanks, Revelator. That’s a good breakdown of how the series evolved, and how audience expectations and box office pressures gradually changed the films into something distinct from the books.
I hadn't thought about the YOLT/TMWTGG dilemma in those terms before, but you're right—the continuity from the novels was so tight by that point that it would have been nearly impossible to adapt TMWTGG as-is without first doing a faithful version of YOLT. And of course, by the time they got there, the cinematic Bond had long since left that sort of serialised storytelling behind.
Also interesting was what you said about OHMSS being a kind of anomaly—almost a reset brought on by circumstance rather than intention.
And what you say about the formula periodically exhausting itself is spot on too. Every time they push it to its limits (YOLT, MR, DAD), the reaction seems to be a hard reset—often with a return to Fleming, or at least to more grounded storytelling. Almost like the films are trying to find a balance between the literary roots and the cinematic expectations of their era.
I see you have given this some modicum of thought 😂.
Seriously, brilliant analysis.
Thank you for the kind words. As a Fleming fan I have often thought about why the films began deviating from the books. The short take is that the Bond series oscillates between two modes: thriller and spectacle. The first depends more on narrative and characterization, and its plots tend to have at least some degree of plausibility; the second primarily consists of action set-pieces strung together, and relies on more basic characterization and wildly implausible plots. If Fleming's work primarily fits into the thriller mode, the Bond films after Goldfinger drifted -- thanks to audience expectations and the desire to top its biggest moneymaker -- into spectacle mode, with sporadic course corrections when the series reached the commercial or artistic limits of either mode. The Craig era at first glance seems to be an outlier to this theory, but one could argue that CR and QOS were thrillers while SF and SP leaned more toward spectacle. NTTD tried to be both, which might explain why it's so long!
I forgot to add that if anyone wants to enjoy faithful visual adaptations of YOLT and TMWTGG check out the Daily Express comic strip versions. They do an excellent job of staying true to the books while streamlining the stories. In some respects the comic of TMWTGG is stronger than the original.
Also recommended are the comic strip versions of OP and TSWLM. Both add more action and intrigue to the stories but still retain far more of Fleming than the film versions. These adaptations has rarely received the attention they deserve; someday I'd like to devote a thread to them.
All of the strips have been reprinted by Titan Books, in both standalone and omnibus versions. You can search its website to find the edition that suits you. (YOLT is included with the standalone version of OHMSS). I'm not sure if the books are all in print, but you can always copy down the ISBN and feed it to bookfinder.com to find used editions.