Earlier this year there was a rumour going around that Bond 25 would be a remake of
OHMSS. Apparently, Bond would marry Madeline Swann, she gets murdered, then Bond spends the rest of the film getting his revenge.
I hate to debunk this rumour any more than it deserves (it was in the
Sun) but that's not
OHMSS. The dead wife part is, but the whole "Bond getting revenge against the murderer" part? That's
You Only Live Twice. The book. And that wouldn't be a remake, because that whole plotline from
YOLT has never been adapted for the screen.
Which made me think: what bits of Fleming are there still out there, waiting to be picked up? Below is a run-down of the stuff I can think of that could still make the screen. It's not an exhaustive list, because obviously there's many small moments in the novels that could still be adapted, but it's the characters, plotlines and scenes that I think could still turn up in the films - and some stuff that almost definitely won't.
Note on methodology: in some cases the principle remains, while the details changed - so Pussy being a gangster in the book but a pilot in the film is not worth mentioning, because the spirit of the character remains.
CASINO ROYALE
The 2006 version of
Casino Royale has "Based on the novel by IAN FLEMING" right there in the titles (a moment that caused me to grin like Tee-Hee on helium) and it's deserved: pretty much the whole novel is there onscreen. There's only one significant omission for me. In the novel, two killers try to kill Bond; they have a box with a grenade in it and a box with a smoke bomb in it. Their instructions are to throw the grenade then use the smoke bomb to escape. They think it'd be better to use the smoke first, and push that button, but they've been betrayed, and both boxes contain bombs.
It's an amusing little bit of action, but it's relayed second hand by Mathis, so we miss the real impact. Onscreen, it'd be reliant on you getting a load of backstory first about the "smoke bomb" which wouldn't be interesting considering they were going to die anyway. The other part of
Casino Royale which is mentioned in passing but I'd like to see filmed is the assassination at the Rockefeller Center that gets Bond his Double 0. An accomplice shoots a hole in the thick glass, then Bond shoots
through that bullet hole and into the mouth of the target. Spectacular.
LIVE AND LET DIE
The second Bond book has been picked over three times - first for its 1973 adaptation, then to add to
For Your Eyes Only (the keel hauling sequence) and
Licence to Kill (Felix being fed to sharks). Bloody Morgan's treasure could perhaps form part of a future Bond plot - the valuable coins are being sold to fund SMERSH operations - and the Isle of Surprise is an evocative location, with its barracuda being kept active through meat being chucked in the water and the fake drums to scare the locals. There's also a fun moment where a clock in Bond's hotel room explodes, leaving behind a creepy message, and Mr Big and Solitaire's real names - Buonopart Ignace Gallia and Simone Latrelle, respectively - deserve more attention.
My favourite potential movie moment, however, comes at the end. Bond scuba dives across the bay to reach Big's ship, the
Secatur. He attaches a limpet mine with a countdown to the boat but is subsequently captured...
and taken on board the same boat! It's a thrilling, tense situation, that 007 only escapes from because Big decides to keel-haul Bond and Solitaire across the reef, leaving them off the ship when it blows. But imagine seeing that on screen - Bond having to escape a ticking countdown clock that he himself put there.
MOONRAKER
While the bones of
Moonraker turned up in the film (Drax, the space device donated to the government then used by the villain, Bond and the girl left in the rocket's blast chamber) more of it actually appeared in
Die Another Day; Toby Stephens' character has the personality and backstory of a 21st century Drax, the fight in Blades is a more cinematic bridge game, Icarus is a device for good turned bad like the Moonraker, and Rosamund Pike was even initially announced as Gala Brand, the heroine from the book. A subsequent name change (possibly because Pike's character turns out to be a baddie) means Gala remains unseen on screen, which is a shame, because she's one of Fleming's more interesting heroines. She also walks away from 007 at the end of the book, because it turns out she has a fiance; an interesting twist that the films haven't used.
Other character names not used in the film are Krebs, the nasty German henchman, and Doctor Walter. Oh, and I know it'd look ridiculous, but Drax's notion that every man who works for him should have a shaved head and a giant moustache would be hilarious to see.
Moonraker has a few action sequences that would be great onscreen, too. Drax blows up a cliff face while Bond and Gala are underneath, leaving them to dig their way out; it could be a tense, grimy sequence. That moment also leads to a great black comedy scene when the two shock Drax and his henchmen by turning up at dinner. There's also a scene where Bond and Gala are hiding from Drax and Krebs in the air ducts of the rocket site, and they use a boiling hot steam hose to try and flush them out. It doesn't work of course, but it's tense and violent for Bond and the girl. The villains also disable Bond during a car chase by cutting the ropes holding rolls of newsprint and having it crash into him, though I mostly like that because Krebs refers to them as "toilet paper of the Gods".
DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER
DAF is not a great Bond book; it's very bitty and doesn't really make much sense. The film took all it needed. What's missing are the villains, Jack and Serraffimo Spang; tedious gangsters on the page, but Seraffimo is a great name (as is the moniker Jack adopts, 'Rufus B Saye' - or ABC in French!). Another good name is the jockey, "Tingaling" Bell (potential Bond Girl?). The Wild West town used in the climax, sadly, carries too many B-movie associations for it to make a decent transfer to the screen, and we had a load of interminable horse race fixing in
A View To A Kill. The Brooklyn Stomping Bond receives - kicked into unconsciousness by Wint and Kidd in football boots - is perhaps a bit too violent for the PG-13 world of 007.
One extremely successful element of the book is Tiffany Case. She's a hardboiled, no-nonsense girl, with a neat line in sarcasm and a compelling desire to be "woo'd" by Bond because of her awful past. She'd make a great new film Bond Girl (with a different name, of course).
FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE
Another one where pretty much everything made it to the screen, the only part I miss is the flamboyant name of the head of SMERSH - General Grubozaboyschikov. Now the Russians are villains again, perhaps it's time to introduce General G.?
DR NO
There are three big sequences in
Dr No that are hugely important to the novel and yet will, most likely, never be filmed. The first is Honey being staked out on a mountain to be fed to crabs - way too B-movie. The second is Dr No dying by having a load of guano dropped on him. I can possibly see 007 emptying a craneload of
something on the villain and burying him alive, but I very much doubt it will be bird shit. The third, and the biggest one, is the giant squid.
James Bond works his way through Dr No's torture tunnels and ends up in a sectioned off piece of sea. A giant squid then rises up from the depths and battles with 007, but is defeated when Bond rams a piece of wire in its eyeball. It was a fantastical sequence in 1958, never mind now, and absolutely impossible to film on
Dr No's low budget. In 2017 - when we have actual live footage of giant squids, and when CGI can put anything on screen - it remains unfilmed. Mainly because it's pretty silly. It could
possibly be done, but as
Die Another Day proved, Bond and CGI action sequences don't work. It'd most likely be too camp to ever make it onscreen.
GOLDFINGER
The longest Bond novel became one of the shortest Bond films because they cut out the many chapters of 007 thinking. This isn't a criticism; it's just they pared the novel down to its essentials and put them on the screen. The only thing missing is the sequence where Bond goes snooping round Goldfinger's house; he finds a cine camera filming him, and drops a cat in the box to expose the film. Goldfinger comes back, realises Bond has got one over him and so gets Oddjob to smash up a marble mantlepiece with his bare hands. He then rewards Oddjob with the pet cat for his dinner. Gross racism aside (Oddjob is Korean, remember) the idea of a henchman feasting on a family pet is gloriously sick. It's not likely to make it into the films though, precisely because it's so twisted. And am I the only one who'd like to see a lesbian Bond Girl who actually stays gay, as Tilly does in the novel? (I'd also prefer her to not die, thanks).
FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
The 1981 film put the title short story directly on the screen. It also used the plot and characters from
Risico, in the same collection;
Risico remains one of the few titles never used, which is weird to me, because it sounds incredibly Bondian. More so than
Quantum of Solace, which, of course, they have used, though none of its story made it to the screen (it's a very slight tale of domestic strife told to Bond by the Governor of Bermuda) and probably never will, unless they're getting really desperate for names and decide Rhoda Masters is the new Bond Girl.
From A View To A Kill sort of donated its title and the French location, but Stacey Sutton was no Mary-Ann Russell, and there was no sign of the secret Russian headquarters hidden inside a rosebush. That is a tragedy.
The final story in the collection,
The Hildebrand Rarity, is one of the other unused Fleming titles, though
Spectre's safe house was in a book dealer's called Hildebrand (
Hildebrand Rarities, geddit?!?!). The story's villain Milton Krest and his ship the
Wavekrest appeared in
Licence to Kill, though he was greatly toned down - the Krest of the story is an appalling human being, and everyone's happy when he gets a poisonous fish rammed in his throat; another horribly imaginative death that would be great on film. The Seychelles location plus brilliantly named Quarrel-lite Fidele Barbey would also be nice to see.
THUNDERBALL
Perhaps because there was a phalanx of lawyers monitoring every page of the script,
Thunderball the film is very similar to
Thunderball the novel. The only great omissions are Domino's lengthy story about falling for the sailor on the Player's cigarette packet (obliquely referenced by a poster on the wall of Vauxhall Cross station in
Die Another Day) and the climax, where Bond and a load of sailors swim from a US submarine and fight the SPECTRE frogmen with home made weaponry made out of broom handles and table knives. Not very Bond movie, admittedly.
THE SPY WHO LOVED ME
Famously, Fleming barred the filmmakers from using any of this novel apart from the title (though they did still have a character with metal capped teeth hide in a wardrobe to surprise the girl). Vivienne Michel therefore remains an unfilmed Bond Girl, and it'd great to see a character with that name appear - if only for completion's sake. The rest of the book is a very simple tale of a girl growing up (I can't see Barbara Broccoli ever putting Viv losing her virginity in a Windsor wood into a Bond film) combined with a hardboiled crime thriller. (Although if I won the lottery I'd pay for an adaptation of it, completely straight, in period, with Daniel Craig only turning up in the last third).
ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE
Another one that made it to the screen intact, with the only notable omission being the SPECTRE employee pushed down the bobsleigh track to his death as punishment for molesting one of the allergy girls. I should also put it on record that the first girl sent back to England by Blofeld has the name Polly Tasker which is another Fleming moniker I am weirdly obsessed with.
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
This is the big one, 007. Roald Dahl stripped out the characters (Tiger, Henderson, Kissy, ninjas, ama girls), Bond's obituary, and the Japanese setting - and then made up the rest. That means there's two hundred pages of Bond waiting to be adapted... but it probably won't be. Though the initial part is compelling - Bond has lost hope after Tracy's death, so M gives him an 'impossible mission' to snap him out of it - much of
YOLT is a meandering travelogue, with Bond simply observing stuff that happens in Japan and moving on. If Bond 25 does kill off Madeline (*crosses fingers*) that first part could be a great setup.
The novel only really comes to life in its back third, and this is another part that could be adapted. Blofeld, having murdered Tracy at the end of
OHMSS, has moved to Japan and occupies a castle on an isolated island. His castle is surrounded by a Garden of Death - a mix of fumaroles belching sulphur, piranha filled lakes, and poisonous trees and plants. He's built it simply to attract people who want to kill themselves; Blofeld has surrounded himself with death. It's a hellish location, and would make for a wonderfully dark twisted climax. It should also be noted that Blofeld's cover name is Dr Guntram Shatterhand which is absolute genius and should be saved for a proper film villain.
At the end, 007 destroys the castle but loses his memory; he is last seen wandering off to Russia. If they
do use this for Bond 25, and Craig is sticking around for Bond 26, I hope that's the ending they use, because it leads directly into the unfilmed opener of...
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN
In the first couple of chapters of this book, Bond returns from Russia, brainwashed, and tries to kill M with a cyanide gun. How about that for a pre-title sequence? It'd be dramatic and punchy, but it absolutely depends on the previous film ending on a cliffhanger, and I'm not sure the Bond people would ever be willing to go that far. Dropping it anywhere else would lessen the impact. (It'd also mean we could finally see Sir James Molony as Bond's deprogrammer).
The rest of the book is sadly subpar, though it does have a character called Tiffy, whose real name is "Artificial"; all her sisters were named after flowers, but her mother couldn't think of another one for her. It's a gloriously daft reason to give a Bond girl a gloriously daft name, and I wish it was in a film so everyone else could appreciate it. (Other good/awful names in the book are the CIA agent Nick Nicholson and Bond's very subtle cover name, Mark Hazard). The book climaxes with a shootout on a small-gauge railway; it is not worth filming.
OCTOPUSSY AND THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS
Both of the title stories were put onscreen almost whole, though admittedly one was only done as a story relayed between characters. Hannes Oberhauser was also referenced in
Spectre, of course.
The Property of a Lady was mentioned in the film of
Octopussy, but could still be used as a title at a pinch; it contributed the auction and the Faberge egg, but the traitor Maria Freudenstein didn't make it. The only thing
007 in New York has that should be put on screen is Bond's love of scrambled eggs. He's always eating them in the books and yet off the top of my head, I can't remember him ever eating them in a film. Stick
that in Bond 25, Babs!
