Why do people say movie adaptations are never as good as the books? Bond movies are nearly always better than the books, even when the books are pretty good. Take this one, Thunderball.
Ian Fleming sets James Bond up against a quicksilver plot and a new villain to take the place of the tired Soviet Union. Just in time for the new decade, 007 is also challenged by an independent Bond woman. The undersea descriptions are immersive, the core mystery developed in an ingenious manner that creeps up on a reader who may think they know what is going to happen.
Thunderball is for the most part great fun, keeping the outlandish vibe of Bond novels since Fleming failed to kill 007 in From Russia, With Love but grounding it somewhat more firmly in reality. Add to it the debut of Bond’s arch-nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and you have a second life for a series that lasted the rest of Fleming’s lifetime – and beyond.
A NATO bomber carrying two atomic bombs goes missing somewhere over the Atlantic. Shortly after, a message is received in London and Washington, demanding 100 million pounds sterling. If the money isn’t paid, the culprits, an organization calling itself SPECTRE, promise to detonate the bombs at two unnamed locations, the second more populated than the first.
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| A French atomic bomb test in 1960, one year prior to Thunderball, suggests the stakes involved. "There’s nothing the detective can do but follow the man and wait until
he actually pulls the gun out of his pocket and points it," Bond explains. Image from https://www.sott.net/article/273988-Turns-out-Frances-1960-Sahara-nuclear-bomb-tests-poisoned-the-whole-of-Northern-Africa-and-Southern-Europe |
Just who is SPECTRE, and where are they hiding?
Bond, stuck in the 1950s, thinks only the Russians could be this diabolical. He tries to get assigned Eastern Europe. His boss, M, sends him to the Bahamas to chase down a slim lead. Bond is disappointed:
This looked like the biggest job the Service had ever been given and, in Bond’s opinion, for he didn’t give much for M’s guess, he had been regulated to the back row of the chorus. So be it. He would get himself a good sunburn and watch the show from the wings.
Thunderball makes fine use of one of the best plots in the series, developed from a script Fleming had worked on with Jack Whittingham and Kevin McClory. Who actually did what is not easy to sort out; it seems Fleming and McClory collaborated on an outline; McClory brought in Whittingham to co-author a script, Longitude 78 West, with Fleming’s input; and Fleming took the script and used it for the basis of his solely-authored Thunderball.
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| Kevin McClory at the 1965 film premiere of Thunderball. Among the Irishman's ideas that made it into the finished novel was setting it in the Bahamas. Image from https://www.universalexports.net/battle-of-the-bonds/ |
Sound complicated? The courts agreed, as McClory would claim co-ownership of both Thunderball and its most famous villain, Blofeld. As a result of these legal issues, moviegoers would go years without seeing Blofeld except when he was being spoofed in the Austin Powers movies. Fleming, meanwhile, was to die of a heart attack in 1964, a year after being successfully sued by McClory for using his ideas and one year prior to Thunderball hitting big screens starring Sean Connery, with story credits for McClory and Whittingham.
All that said, one might be tempted to dub Thunderball a fumble for Fleming, but for the joy of reading it.
The novel itself bears the unmistakable stamp of Fleming, weaving his usual descriptive magic with sunny tourist-trap landscapes and wondrous, deadly undersea scuba expeditions at night: It was like traveling across a moon landscape, on and under which many mysterious creatures lived minute lives.
Bond once again enjoys the comradeship of his ex-CIA buddy Felix Leiter. He also connects with a new love interest, Domino Vitali, who showcases an impish, confident sexiness manifested by her willingness to flirt and desert. Their early fencing is a pleasant and amusing tutorial on how Fleming viewed male-female relations, not 21st-century friendly but sensible enough when taken for what it is.
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| Domino is introduced in a motorcar cutting off a horse-drawn cab like this one. "Both of you ought to be put out to grass instead of cluttering up the streets getting in everyone's way," she tells the flustered driver. Image from https://www.bygonely.com/nassau-1960s/ |
The best thing about Thunderball for me is the way it develops, with a terrific bit of misdirection. The book opens with a long detour that spotlights Bond’s downtime; between missions, he sits around the office feeling very hangdog from his late-night routine of booze, smokes, and women. M has taken notice, and sends him to a detox clinic, one Shrublands, where he will be put on a healthy regimen, lose some weight, and clean out his polluted body.
And Bond takes to the cure. Like many ex-addicts, he then becomes obnoxious in his newfound sobriety, lecturing his housekeeper May about avoiding “dead” foods and cigarettes. Eventually May has enough:
“Ye can tell me to mind my ain business and pack me off back to Glen Orchy, but before I go I’m telling ye, Mister James, that if ye get yerself into anuither fight and ye’ve got nothing but yon muck in yer stomach, they’ll be bringing ye home in a hearse.”
It probably helps Bond’s new attitude that he still indulges his more ruthless instincts at Shrublands, taking vengeance on a fellow patient who tries to kill Bond for being too nosy and getting some post-rubdown action with an attractive masseuse. This is still a low-key Bond story so far, and one waits to see how the main event unfolds.
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| Bond catches Count Lippe in a sweatbox much like this one, turning up the heat on the helpless baddie. "And if you catch fire you can sue," Bond says in parting. It won't end the business between them. Image from https://www.pinterest.de/pin/332914597446787786/ |
Cleverly, it involves that patient Bond tangled with, a man named Count Lippe whom it turns out is mixed up in an organization called SPECTRE. I wonder if this part of the story came from McClory and Whittingham; clearly McClory was successful in claiming SPECTRE as his invention. But Fleming did misdirection ploys in the openings of other novels and short stories; this just may be one of his better ones.
The description of SPECTRE’s Paris-based operations is one of Fleming’s best. We are introduced to the inner workings of what seems to be a non-profit agency to help French Resistance veterans, shown around the offices just enough to develop a hint of something amiss (all the desk workers are male), and then allowed in a secluded conference room where a group of hard-looking executives gather.
At the head of this group is Blofeld, a man with a stare so piercing, it seems “almost to suck the eyes out of your head.”
Fleming continues: Proud and thin, like a badly healed wound, the compressed, dark lips, capable only of false, ugly smiles, suggested contempt, tyranny, and cruelty. But to an almost Shakespearean degree, nothing about Blofeld was small.
However magnificent his introduction, Blofeld slips into the background for the rest of the novel, leaving the stage to his deputy, Emilio Largo, also referred to as “No. 1.”
Largo’s job is to recover the hijacked bomber submerged a few miles off the Bahamas, secrete the bombs in a hidden location from which they can be moved as needed, and await instructions. All this he does while pretending to be a wealthy treasure hunter conducting an expedition from his luxury hydrofoil yacht, the Disco Volante.
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| The first-edition dust jacket of Thunderball references a card game between Bond and Largo where Bond is still uncertain whether Largo is part of the A-bomb theft. In a scene also in the film, Bond goads him by dropping the word "Spectre," getting a reaction. Image from https://www.abebooks.com |
A bluff man of hearty good humor and hidden ruthlessness, Largo presents a strong contrast from his antisocial boss. Fleming makes a point of emphasizing his manly bearing and distinctive Roman features:
In the heat and excitement of any operation, Largo always created calm. However much was at stake, however great the dangers and however urgent the need for speed and quick decisions, he made a fetish of calm, of the pause, of an almost judolike inertia.
Bond suspects Largo from his first meeting, noting how none of his boat crew are smokers (something his stay at Shrublands has sensitized him to). London is skeptical, though. Can Bond get M to take him seriously before the first bomb is detonated?
The novel offers some surprises, and skirts past some minor construction flaws, holding together well most of the way while working more in the direction of a mystery than a thriller. For me, the pleasure is in the scenery, the back-and-forth narrative of Largo and Bond, and the engaging friendship between Bond and Leiter.
One thing I realized re-reading Thunderball is that it happily eschews the trope of Bond being captured and having the villain’s plot spelled out to him. That said, Bond’s actual response to Largo once the action is set in motion is unconvincingly underplayed, leading a small team of frogmen to overtake Largo underwater while the bombs are in transit.
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| A scene from the scuba battle that concludes Thunderball the movie. It isn't a strong sequence on film, but at least you do see what happens, and there is a nifty boat chase going on at the same time involving the Disco Volante which isn't in the book. Image from https://www.poffysmoviemania.com/thunderball/ |
This denouement was clearly designed for a movie screen and does not play as well in print, at least not the way Fleming wrote it. People criticize the movie Thunderball for its slow-moving underwater sequences, but at least there you see what happens. Fleming sticks us with Bond’s point-of-view, focuses on a big one-on-one confrontation with Largo, then tells us after how the rest of the battle played out.
It is a minor disappointment. To this point in the series, only Casino Royale and From Russia, With Love had endings that managed something stronger than a shrug. Thunderball plays matters straighter than those two, yet winds up rushed and convoluted anyway.
Still, Thunderball delivers a riveting story, one that gave 007 new life and a fresh start after his post-From Russia, With Love hangover. The health farm cure may not have taken for long, but Fleming seems rejuvenated in what was the first Bond novel of the 1960s (his prior Bond book, For Your Eyes Only, being a collection of short stories).
I
think it helped him to collaborate with a couple of good writers, as much as
Fleming hated to admit it. The Cold War was still a thing, but 007 needed a new
direction as the global arms race and emerging détente made facing off against Russian
adversaries less palatable. Thanks to the unfriendly intervention of SPECTRE,
he got it.
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