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What the Russians thought of James Bond in the 1960s
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.is/7qmpQ https://archive.is/7qmpQ
- trhway 5y agowhile a lot of attention is focused on Bond, i think it is notable that basically the same themes/style/etc. can be found in the [pretty good] children movie based on the Fleming's book and directed by Broccoli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitty_Chitty_Bang_Bang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitty_Chitty_Bang_Bang
- craz8 5y agoI suggest that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is set in the Marvel universe, and Caracatus Potts is the grandfather of Pepper Potts.
- CoastalCoder 5y agoHaving seen Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as a little kid, I have to say that the Child Catcher frightened me more than any Bond villain. (And tangentially, no Bond villain ever devised a death-machine as scary as the the pipe in which the kid Augustus got stuck.)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Brakenshire 5y agoThe most interesting quote, from a Russian magazine in 1966: > Philistine pragmatism takes over in Fleming’s novels. They tend to be indiscriminate, to combine elements of all sorts of sensationalism — political action and thriller, science fiction and advertising brochure, a fashion magazine and nudist film… This, briefly, is the secret of the genre, of popularity in its modern shape. Still, had it not been for the screen, Bond would have been lost among all the other spy characters out there. A nobody. It was the film industry that made him a myth.
- mannykannot 5y agoThis is all true, as far as it goes, but it is all because Fleming did a couple of things differently, which, perhaps accidentally, made his stories appealing as movie vehicles. Firstly, unlike most other (and in some cases better) writers of espionage and sabotage fiction of the time, he set his stories in the Cold War rather than WWII. Secondly, he cast Bond as an adroit womanizer. That term alone signals that we are talking about a different era. Fleming also indulged his audience’s fascination with the lifestyles of the wealthy, though the Bond of his novels exhibited a certain prissiness that the movie makers wisely dropped. Finally, that ‘license to kill’ nonsense was pure theater, but effective.
- tiahura 5y ago“womanizer” Isn’t that term sort of sexist in that it suggests women lack agency?
- adamm255 5y agoHave you ever watched a Bond film?
- coolso 5y agoIsn’t it sexist to suggest that women don’t have the agency to allow themselves to be womanized?
- habeebtc 5y agoThere is quite a lot of non-consensual kissing in those films. I recently watched "Live and let Die", and indeed it is in there. You do not have to look far. It is a common Bond method of seduction.
- mc32 5y agoA better example would be Pussy Galore. Moreso in the novel she's hinted as being leasbian --but Bond never the less takes her despite her protest in the flick.
- lstodd 5y ago> Izvestiya in May 1962 Come on. It's what the propaganda branch of CPSU Central Committee thought worth publishing. Which has about zero bearing on what actual Russians thought. (Not to mention there wasn't much to think of, since obviously the movies were never run in the USSR back then). So what the average Russian thought was along the lines 'okay, another front page full of usual bullshit, another front page useful as toilet paper'.
- AQuantized 5y agoSoviet news at the time was actually much more accurate than the USA. In the New York Times about half of the things would be true and the other half false. However, if you simply believed the opposite of what Izvestia said on a given issue you would always have the truth.
- lstodd 5y agoThis is a dangerous oversimplification. What people learned in between 1963-ish to 1985-ish there is that mass media shovels shit wholesale, and so cannot be taken at face value under any circuimstances and that if you style yourself as a connoseiur of shit, you're free to join the field of kremlinology. This approach is sorely lacking nowadays.
- simplestats 5y agoI think it was a joke.
- rpmisms 5y agoYou have encountered Russian humor, congratulations. It's very dry.
- sriram_sun 5y ago"They pretended to pay us and we pretended to work." - From my ~68 yo ex-colleague from USSR who lived through the times. Despite that wry comment, he was brilliant and had a Phd. in optics from Moscow University and for whatever reason had to reboot his career as a level 1 technician when he came over to the US. Also, was promoted 5-6 levels up within a year (at Seagate I believe).
- peter303 5y agoWhat do Americans think of the Wolf Warrior movies from China? Part Bond/Rambo achinese guy geats bumbling evil Americans.
- BobbyJo 5y agoI doubt most Americans even know they exist. I pay a lot of attention to China (through sources like HN, youtube channels, etc.) and even I am only barely familiar with the genre. The movies don't get published here (for obvious reasons), and Americans tend not to pay much attention to movies they themselves aren't going to watch. I've seen a few clips, and they look like if Marvel fired all their writers and cut their budgets by 80%. I tend not to like the writing of any Chinese movies I've seen though, which I guess is to be expected. Different culture, different emphasis, different ideas of realism.
- habeebtc 5y agoI don't know that I have quite the same issue with Chinese movies. Some have quite good production values, actually! Especially for the budgets. The challenge I have with Chinese films (especially high fantasy) is that it feels like I have missed something along the way and can't follow the plot. This is regardless of the translation quality, and regardless of how closely I am paying attention. I suspect it is the case that as a viewer you are assumed to be well versed in Chinese fairy tales, mythology or history. Certainly this is the case in lots of Western films. Pretty good example: Sorcerer and White Snake. Quite watchable (beautiful film, really), but hard to follow 100% of the time as a Westerner.
- snowgrove 5y ago>The movies don't get published here (for obvious reasons) I saw Wolf Warrior 2 at the AMC cinema in Sunnyvale, California. There weren’t a lot of showtimes but the theater was packed for my showing. Chinese audio with English subtitles. Thought it was an entertaining action movie with some ridiculous propaganda set pieces a la Rambo. My mostly Chinese (maybe Taiwanese? didn’t ask) fellow audience members audibly groaned en masse at some of these, like when the hero gets a truck full of refugees past some African rebels by dramatically waving a PRC flag. An American friend of mine saw the film a few months later on a cross-country fight, the airline had it on the inflight entertainment system. It’s also apparently on Prime Video. So such movies can be found here for those who want to see them; that’s just a pretty small group of people.
- starik36 5y agoIt's peculiar that Soviets were treated to a review of a film that no one in the USSR would have the opportunity to see.
- krasin 5y agoUSSR had multiple classes (despite being a classless society on paper). Nomenklatura ([1]) and some other smaller classes had access to western press and were often allowed to travel to the "capitalist countries". Even at home, they had access to special stores for foreigners and elite paying a special currency that regular Soviet citizens didn't have ([2]) to purchase Western goods. They watched Bond movies and wanted to read reviews as well. That said, all of my relatives were regulars. I don't miss USSR. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryozka_(Russian_retail_store) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryozka_(Russian_retail_store...
- lstodd 5y agoYou forgot to mention фарцовка, which was essentially a grass-roots sort of a fix to this quasi-unofficial class divide. There isn't even an en wikipedia article about it, while it had a order or two of magnitude larger turnover than Beryozka shops and "распределители". I so do not miss this all, but it seems to come back right now most anywhere.
- osipov 5y ago
- TMWNN 5y agoI haven't read James Fleming's book but would like to. I'm glad that the review does not explicitly claim that James Bond fights the Communists, something so often asserted by people who don't know what they're talking about. Ian Fleming created SPECTRE because he thought that the Cold War might end soon, and so wanted a nonpolitical opponent for Bond. In the films, the USSR is Bond's opponent only in For Your Eyes Only. Red China is the silent backer in Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice, but Auric Goldfinger and SPECTRE are the real enemies, and Thunderball establishes that SPECTRE is willing to work for anyone (including Western powers). Max Zorin in A View to a Kill, General Orlov in Octopussy, and Gustav Graves in Die Another Day are explicitly rogue agents.
- the_decider 5y agoI read a few of the earlier Bond books; there the antagonistic organization isn’t Spectre but the actual WW2 era Soviet counter-intelligence org SMERSH, whose name is short-hand for “Death to Spies”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMERSH https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMERSH
- FearlessNebula 5y agoGeneral Ourumov in Goldeneye is also a rogue Soviet agent
- Apocryphon 5y agoWell he was, then he was a rogue post-Cold War Russian agent.
- zkirill 5y agoApologies for the side question but this is the first time I’ve heard of the Spectator and was wondering if the subscription is worth it.
- google234123 5y agoIt’s a British conservative magazine. I would say it’s very high quality. Just take a look in private browsing mode to read some more articles and decide
- gumby 5y agoSome of the politics is really out there, but despite the fact I’m far from in alignment politically, nor do I care about British politics for that matter, I have been a subscriber for decades. There are many literary articles, all the writing is top notch (hard to find in the USA), not stuffy despite its Tory orientation, and has had waves of quirky topics, like recipes (referred to as “receipts” for reasons I won’t go into), an agony aunt, and even (pre internet) classified personals for a while. It’s a small, inbred crew (Boris Johnson was editor for a while, and quite a good one) but the magazine has managed to survive for longer than The Economist, which is something. I remember calling once about my subscription and being told there were two subscribers in Palo Alto, of which I was one. I later ran into the other in a bar (he was carrying his copy). We had little in common.
- pjc50 5y agoIt's effectively the house magazine of the British Conservative party, and as such is basically made out of bias. I can't see why you'd read it unless you wanted your prejudices reinforced and an advance feed of what talking points you're going to get on the news.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoRussians didn't think anything about James Bond, they lacked access to the source material. There were critical articles and newspapers, bashing this low quality pulp anti-soviet crap, which pop popularity in the West was signalling the decay of the capitalistic society. Seeing such article, average soviet person just nodded ah-ok, and moved on.
- unobatbayar 5y ago
- gumby 5y agoAny Soviet equivalents anyone would recommend?
- orbital-decay 5y agoThere was obviously no direct TV/movie equivalent to Bond. There's Seventeen Moments of Spring, which was massively popular, but it's a film noir about a WWII spy.
- aasasd 5y agoAs mentioned, the most popular Soviet spy film is the series ‘Seventeen Moments of Spring’ which is more of a procedural in the approach and certainly aims for a more realistic portrayal—though still with plenty of heroics, of course. A close Western analogue, in terms of the mood, is actually ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ from 1965. ‘The Diamond Arm’/‘Бриллиантовая рука’, which was played to death on Soviet and post-Soviet TV, is in fact a clever inversion of the whole adventure genre that was popular in the 60s and 70s.
- 5tefan 5y agoI actually read some Bond novels. IMHO the series detoriates rather quickly. After two books Fleming's writing and yarn spinning is a far cry from Casino Royal. Casino Royal is very different from any of the movies and worth a read.
- helsinkiandrew 5y agoYes! - and a faithful adaptation would make a fantastic film - its a shame that we'll likely never see one.
- helsinkiandrew 5y agoRussia had Stierlitz, Max Otto von Stierlitz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stierlitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stierlitz
- bussiere 5y agoThanks for the discovery of these books :)
- GreenWatermelon 5y agoWhile we're on topic, Egypt had Adham Sabry (I read all of them) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragol_Al_Mostaheel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragol_Al_Mostaheel
- ncmncm 5y agoIan Fleming's wartime spy ideas were notoriously wacky and unworkable. Meanwhile, UK's covert ops groups were, as a rule, fantastically incompetent. So the most unrealistic things about James Bond were that his and his opponents' gimcracks worked, and that he succeeded at anything. Actual spycraft is really mostly about extortion.