A view to a killer cover

Damn, the covers on some of these first editions of the original James Bond novels are wicked cool. But while I have a bit of the collector in me, the price range on Ian Fleming first editions puts them way out of my league. Do you have $3,500 lying around for a first run of Diamonds Are Forever? Hey, how about 30 thousand sterling for a complete set? That’s only a little more than 58 thousand bushbucks. Not for me, I’m afraid. Not unless I get really good at baccarat.

The centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth is coming up later this month, and as should be expected the Brit publications are outdoing themselves with coverage. The Guardian has this nice rundown of the best villains from Fleming’s James Bond novels (as opposed to those in the films, though there is some overlap). This nifty Charlie Higson piece compares Fleming with his creation:

Fleming enjoyed gambling, but was cautious and none too successful. He loved fast, powerful cars, but, unlike Bond, was stopped for speeding in the United States, and his most serious accident was when he reversed into a milk float. So did he share Bond’s taste in food? The books are filled with mouth-watering descriptions of lavish and exotic meals, but Fleming was a conservative and undiscerning eater who liked nothing more than a plate of scrambled eggs. His tastes in women were closer to Bond’s. Fleming was certainly a womaniser, charming and witty but callous. Ben Macintyre quotes one of his conquests as saying: “For Ian women were like fishcakes. Mind you, he was very fond of fishcakes, but he never pretended there was any mystique about eating them.”

Like Bond he had a fear of commitment and marriage, preferring the safety of affairs with other men’s wives, and, like Bond, he eventually caved in and got spliced. But whereas Bond’s wife, Tracy (for once his genius with names let him down), is conveniently killed on their honeymoon, Fleming stayed married to the end of his life - though it was a troubled, plate-throwing kind of a marriage. In fact, it was probably the shock of getting married that compelled him to finally get around to writing the books he’d had knocking around in his head for some years. Soon after the wedding he decamped to Goldeneye, his villa in Jamaica, and wrote Casino Royale in about five weeks, pausing only to go snorkelling, have a smoke and down a cocktail, though not necessarily all at the same time. Like Bond, Fleming drank and smoked heavily, but he felt the effects most acutely, whereas there are only two recorded hangovers in all of the 14 books, despite Bond’s staggering consumption of booze. The first comes in Casino Royale, when, after a heavy night at the gaming tables, Bond sighs “Champagne and Benzedrine! Never again!” After this Fleming obviously decided that Bond’s appeal was that he could live the life his readers dreamed about without suffering any ill effects.

Goldfinger has the distinction of being not just one of the better Fleming novels, but also the best of the movies. Unfortunately, the Bond novel I started with was . . .

. . . You Only Live Twice, the worst of the Fleming books and the worst of the initial Sean Connery flicks, though each is terrible in its own highly distinctive way. I was barely 10 years old when the movie came out, but that was the perfect age to see one’s first James Bond movie. A rocket base hidden inside a volcano? A steel-jawed spaceship that captured space capsules in orbit? A master villain who dropped incompetent subordinates into a decorative tank full of piranhas? What’s not for a 10-year-old boy to love? It hardly mattered that the plot was ridiculous and Sean Connery was visibly bored in many of his scenes.

So I paid my 75 cents for the paperback of Fleming’s novel and learned the hard way about how little the movies had to do with the novels, and how the chronology was screwed around. After all, Fleming introduced Bond’s arch-nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Thunderball, had him kill off Bond’s new bride in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, then had Blofeld die at Bond’s hands following a bloody swordfight in You Only Live Twice. Instead of the cool stuff from the movie, the novel had Bond grieving for his murdered wife and losing his grip on his job. After a long, wandering introduction and midsection, the novel picked up steam as Bond infiltrated the Japanese hideout of Dr. Shatterhand and discovered his suicide garden of poisonous plants (where the piranha pool also figures) but it was all a bit much for a 10-year-old.

I find that with most people, the first James Bond novel they’ve read is usually their favorite. After my bad experience with You Only Live Twice, I was well into my thirties before I tried Fleming again. I decided to work through the series in sequence, and while I enjoyed the increasingly loopy plotting and characterization in the books and stories, I still prefer the relatively low key Casino Royale.

I dunno about you, but I think the opening credits of the recent film version of Casino Royale very knowingly incorporate elements of the jacket design, which Fleming himself suggested to his publisher.

The big wheeze

The advance word on this new Indiana Jones movie is pretty bleak – considering how tired the whole franchise had become, 10 minutes into the second movie, the prospect of a fourth go-round with two decades of extra cobwebs sounds like pure chloroform.

In fact, hardly any of the big popcorn movies front-loaded this summer sound like they’re worth the trouble. The new Narnia movie is a big deal for Dances With Mermaids, so I guess I’ll be duty-bound to take her to that. I prefer my memories of Speed Racer as a daffy, crummy looking cartoon from Japan, as opposed to a daffy special effects spectacle from the Wachowskis. (Remember their lean, sardonic debut — Bound? More of that less-is-more spirit in the future, guys.) Iron Man is supposed to be good, but I’m not a comics fanboy – maybe I’ll rent it. 

I took another look at Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom last night and I’d forgotten the sheer balls-out nastiness of the thing, with its army of enslaved children being whipped and burned, the gross-out banquet of bugs and brains, and the coarse insult-slinging between Harrison Ford and Kate Capshaw serving as a poor replacement for the fizzy banter with Karen Allen from the original movie. Except for the fleet-footed opening sequence in the Shanghai nightclub, the movie was leaden and coldhearted, with endless action scenes and moments of gore that courted an R rating. I’d forgotten that the uproar over this movie led to creation of the PG-13 rating. If I’d taken my kids to the movie, I’d have been pissed off too. 

The Dark Knight looks really interesting, chiefly because of Heath Ledger’s fresh, weird take on the Joker, which should be a big improvement on Jack Nicholson’s overrated hamming. I’ll want to see that one in the theater.       

Local hero’s journey

David Bordwell, blogging about the recent Ebertfest in Chicago – where else? — talks about festival attendee Bill Forsyth, the Scots filmmaker whose 1981 teen romance flick Gregory’s Girl remains a cult favorite in the U.K., and whose comedy Local Hero has been on my personal Top Ten ever since I saw it on its initial 1983 run. 

On first acquaintance, Local Hero brings to mind the best of the old Ealing Studio comedies like The Man in the White Suit or The Lavender Hill Mob, with its gentle humor and quietly observant way with the eccentric locals of a Scottish seacoast village. However, this wee unassuming film has a roll of quarters hidden in its fist, and while it doesn’t sucker-punch you, it does get pushy and even downright tough in its quiet way.

The first surprise is the way it stands cliches on their heads: the protagonist, a Texas oil exec sent to buy up the village for a planned oil refinery, falls in love with the splendor of the place, but the locals can’t wait to sell out and get rich — “You can’t eat scenery,” one of them says. The second, which comes at the very end, is harsh bordering on brutal and sharply rights a film that was threatening to tip into twee whimsy.

According to Bordwell’s report, the return to Texas — and the piercingly lonely image it sets up — was to be the final shot of the film:

The original cut ended with Mac returning to his Houston apartment and staring out at the dark urban landscape—beautiful in its own way, but very different from the majesty of the Scottish shore. There the original film ended, but the Warners executives, although liking the film, wanted a more upbeat ending. Couldn’t the hero go back to Scotland and find happiness, you know, like in Brigadoon? They even offered money for a reshoot to provide a happy wrapup. Forsyth didn’t want that, of course, but he had less than a day to find an ending.

The movie makes a running gag of the red phone booth through which Mac communicates with Houston. Forsyth remembered that he had a tail-end of a long shot of the town, with the booth standing out sharply. He had just enough footage for a fairly lengthy shot. So he decided to end the film with that image, and he simply added the sound of the phone ringing.

With this ending, the audience gets to be smart and hopeful. We realize that our displaced local hero is phoning the town he loves, and perhaps he will announce his return. This final grace note provides a lilt that the grim ending would not. Sometimes, you want to thank the suits—not for their bloody-mindedness, but for the occasions when their formulaic demands give the filmmaker a chance to rediscover fresh and felicitous possibilities in the material.

Bordwell also has a very thorough and insightful analysis of Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Hamlet, which aside from fleeting annoyances — mainly, the stunt-casting of Robin Williams, Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal — remains one hell of an impressive work.        

Sunday Bookchat

I.F. Stone and a right-wing lie that won’t die, books about Muslims that Muslims aren’t allowed to review, and a Spice Girl abandons music for literature. Read all about it.

A James Bond joke

I never heard of James Bond jokes, and I’m old enough to remember the days when a new Bond movie was something that people actually got excited about. But here’s an example, via Eric Alterman:

007 walks into a bar and takes a seat next to a very attractive woman. He gives her a quick glance, then casually looks at his watch for a moment.

The woman notices this and asks, “Is your date running late?”

“No”, he replies, “I am here alone. Q has just given me this state-of-the-art watch and I was just testing it.”

The intrigued woman says, “A state-of-the-art watch? What’s so special about it?”

“It uses alpha waves to telepathically talk to me,” he explains.

“What’s it telling you now?”

“Well, it says you’re not wearing any panties …”

The woman giggles and replies, “Well, it must be broken because I am wearing panties!”

007 taps, taps his watch …

and says “Damn thing must be an hour fast.”

Cue sassy, John Barry-orchestrated saxophone.

Drug-guarding alligator snapping turtles

I’ll bet the writers on The Wire wish they’d heard about this before the show ended its run. I could see Avon Barksdale opening a pet store with a bunch of these in the back.

The Spirit is willing

I don’t know how Frank Miller’s upcoming film adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit will turn out, but if nothing else it inspired the Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries to unearth and post these great samples of Preventive Maintenance Monthly, an Army publication Eisner illustrated from 1950 to 1972. (The magazine itself rolls on.)

Time and tide

Via Jeff Sypeck, I see that Jen A. Miller has published a guidebook called The Jersey Shore: Atlantic City to Cape May. I’ll have to get a copy of that, though the title indicates that only about a third of our state’s glorious shoreline is covered.

Perhaps an alternate title could be Shoobie Country, since its coverage area is well within that area, roughly defined as south of the Barnegat Inlet, where “shoobie” is the preferred nickname for inlanders who have the temerity to want to come and swim in the ocean and walk on those beaches the local sandwingers believe God created for their use alone. (North of Barnegat, the default slur is “bennie,” the origin of which is as debatable as “shoobie.”) Jen has invited people to post their Shore memories at her book blog,

Dream on

This bit of video for a never-realized film version of Little Nemo in Slumberland, which would have been directed by master animator Hayao Miyazaki, is enough to inspire long stretches of musing over What Might Have Been. The little bit I’ve seen of the film that actually was made looked pretty undistinguished — so undistinguished, in fact, that I’ve avoided watching the rest so that it doesn’t track mud through the section of my brain where Winsor McCay’s astonishing comic strip resides.

This excellent post from Cartoon Brew will fill you in on the background. As to why I consider it a big deal, here’s my take on the fall 2005 publication of So Many Splendid Sundays, the oversized collection that finally allowed McCay’s meticulously detailed panels and layouts to be seen in the correct form. If nothing else, it gives me an excuse to rescue the article from the archives of the original StevenHartSite, a handcrafted affair that preceded the current incarnation.

* * * * *

Imagine you’d grown up admiring films like Lawrence of Arabia or 2001: A Space Odyssey but had only been able to see them on a medium-sized television screen. Or you’d always loved the Ode to Joy but had only been able to hear it on a boombox or a small radio.

Now imagine seeing the films at a top-line movie theater with a big screen and excellent sound, or hearing Ode to Joy in a concert hall with a great chorus and a superb orchestra. Sheer physical impact is a legitimate artistic tool. Any work of art has its value regardless of the way it’s presented, but for some things, proper scale is needed to put across the necessary feeling of grandeur.

Bear this in mind when I say that even though I’ve admired Winsor McCay and his fanciful comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland just about all of my conscious life, the new book Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays makes me feel I’m looking at McCay’s pioneering artwork for the very first time. In its quiet way, this book took me back to the afternoon at the movie palace when the planets all lined up on the screen and the low rumble on the soundtrack surged into the triumphant Also Sprach Zarathustra, or the breathtaking transition when Peter O’Toole blew out a burning match and the immense screen at the Ziegfeld erupted into a blazing desert sunrise. I’m not saying that So Many Splendid Sundays is how Little Nemo ought to be seen. I’m saying this is how it has to be seen.

So Many Splendid Sundays does something that is both very simple and very difficult — it reproduces the strips in the exact same 16-inch by 21-inch size readers of the New York Herald would have seen them in 1905, albeit on heavier paper stock than tissue-thin newsprint. One result is that So Many Splendid Sundays is a coffee table book that’s bigger than many coffee tables. Another is that the reader finally gets to enter and appreciate the meticulously detailed empire of dreams that Winsor McCay created for his audience. There have been other beautiful and lovingly compiled collections of McCay’s work, but all of them reduced the size of his panels — often drastically. Those books gave you a seat way back in the theater. So Many Splendid Sundays puts you in the front row as Yo-Yo Ma runs his fingers up and down the cello. It makes for an expensive book, needless to say.

McCay (1867-1935) wasn’t the first comic strip artist, but he was certainly the first great one. In a section of the newspaper reserved for raucous slapstick acts like The Yellow Kid, McCay offered surrealistic dreamscapes and immense halls of glass, all rendered with a master draughtsman’s eye for composition and layout. Blessed with a quick hand and cursed by a constant need for money, McCay also produced a stream of separate comics (most notably Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, produced under a pseudonym for a rival paper) and editorial cartoons.

Winsor McCay was the first and probably only cartoonist who could be described as a superstar. For several years in the early 1900s he augmented his considerable income as an employee of William Randolph Hearst by touring the vaudeville circuit, where he wowed audiences by dashing off impeccably rendered sketches of selected couples aging through courtship and parenthood and old age, all rendered with phenomenal speed as the pit orchestra played “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.” In 1911 he added a new dimension to the show by incorporating his pioneering work in animation, particularly his short films with Gertie the Dinosaur — a friendly Diplodocus carnegii whose expressiveness made her the first personable cartoon character, years ahead of Mickey Mouse. Ever ambitious, McCay turned the screenings into multimedia affairs in which he stood on the stage and gave carefully timed instructions to Gertie, who would appear to be responding to the man on the stage. The cartoons — collected on the DVD Winsor McCay: The Master Edition — are full of magically smooth animation with tricky perspectives that contemporary cartoonists would leave to the computer animation staff. McCay drew them all by hand, and the results are still pretty impressive.

If McCay’s writing had been as inventive as his artwork, Little Nemo would have been a strong contender for the title of greatest comic strip ever created. But we never learn much of anything about Nemo; after spending years as the centerpiece of extraordinary visuals, he remains a generic Small Boy. McCay could take us into a child’s dreams, but it took somebody like Bill Watterson with Calvin and Hobbes to take us into a child’s soul.

But among his many other achievements, Winsor McCay also paved the way for inspired eccentrics on the nation’s comic pages, and the grand loons who followed — from George Herriman (Krazy Kat) to Charles Schulz and the aforementioned Watterson — owe him a debt of gratitude. Slumberland is still a place I like to visit from time to time, and if you go, too, chances are you’ll come back better for having had the experience.

Amsterdam weekend

I have yet to visit Amsterdam, and when I do I probably won’t seek out a hash bar because I’ve never smoked anything in my life and I’ve always been leery of dope. However, if I do decide to Cheech’n'Chong it, I hope the experience will be as entertaining as Geoff’s:

You select from the menu at the bar, you get a gram. Back home this would be the Bingo Bag Dame Fortuna rarely grants you. As a result, you and your pal are launched quickly to the Kuiper Belt. Your legs are about fifteen feet long, your cranium is pumice. It gets quiet, and everybody is staring at you. “Everyone is staring at us,” you say, and your pal says “I know.” “Do you think they heard us?” you ask. You get really quiet and think about the impossibility of ever standing up again. Then you decide to try and get to the head. Inevitably in a building in Amsterdam the head is up- or downstairs, and the stairs are twisting and steep and about two inches deep. These stairs would be challenging on any given day, but with fifteen-feet legs you best have your wits about you. Of course you have no wits about you at all. Going up or down you pass pasty-faced Yanks from Missouri or Idaho petrified with fear and clinging to a loose rail. Your feet are lower than your head and you imagine the implications of this based on Relativity–your head is older than your feet, and substantially so after all these years walking around upright. You decide to buy an inversion apparatus as soon as you get home so your feet can begin to catch up.

After a six month expedition you make it back to the table and your pal says “That was quick.”

WordPress has cleverly redone its format to make inserting videos a lot more difficult and aggravating, so I can’t include the Amsterdam dialogue from Pulp Fiction.

And if anyone has posted Patton Oswalt’s classic bit about the Amsterdam coffee houses, please oblige me with a link.