Continuing our discussion of the book For Your Eyes Only, an anthology with five short stories. This is the third.
THE BOOK: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
"QUANTUM OF SOLACE"
THE PLOT
After completing a mission in the Bahamas, Bond is at a dinner party at Government House in Nassau where he remarks that if he were to ever marry, it would be to an air hostess (which we Americans used to call stewardesses). In response, the Governor tells Bond a story about the marriage between a local civil servant and an air hostess, which comes to a bad end. Bond, by his own admission, learns a lesson.
THE COMMENTARY
Bond's professional involvement is dispensed with in a long paragraph at the beginning, where we learn his mission was to interrupt gun-running from Jamaica and the Bahamas (British colonies at the time) to Castro's revolution. He does so by blowing up two ships, achieving "quickly and neatly what M had told him to do." Much to his chagrin, that left him sufficient time to be invited to a dull dinner party at Government House before fleeing back to London.
The rest of the story is The Governor in Nassau telling Bond the story of a low-level civil servant, Philip Masters, who is awkward with women and proposes to the first one who is kind to him, air hostess Rhoda Llewellyn. She agrees, thinking she's going to lead a life of high society in Nassau, hobnobbing with the rich and powerful at parties, luncheons and official balls.
Of course, that doesn't happen. Disillusioned and bored, Rhoda takes up with a rich, handsome local. She hides her actions not a whit, basically rubbing Philip's nose in it. Everyone regards her open infidelities and casual cruelties as terrible, but nobody does anything about it.
I was fascinated by the descriptions here, because I have no idea what it's like to be married in the upper crust in an English colony in 1960. I didn't know what a woman could or could not do, or how society would react. This sort of thing adds context to all the Bond stories, since it is basically the same social set Fleming would hang with in Jamaica.
And it's a pretty effective and affecting story. "I don't know if you've ever seen a heart being broken, Mr. Bond, broken slowly and deliberately. Well, that's what I saw happening to Philip Masters, and it was a dreadful thing to watch."
Usually it's Bond being tortured!
In the story, Masters has a nervous breakdown and is sent on assignment to Washington, D.C., to recover, while back in Nassau Rhoda continues to be invited to various shindigs. Well, until the local Lothario dumps her. Suddenly, without him on her arm, she's persona non grata. (It's still a man's man's man's world after all.) She decides to return to her marriage; she spruces up the house and waits for Philip to return.
But when he does, something in him has died. He is done with her. He has filed for divorce. But worse, in the month it will take for the divorce to go through, he gives her orders as what she's to do in private (punctual cooking, constant cleaning, no contact with Philip) and how she's to behave in public (happy couple). And when he's gone, so is the house. He leaves her with no money, and a couple of items which she discovers, to her horror, leave her in debt.
This is when we get the title drop.
"I think it's the same in every relationship between a man and a woman," The Governor says. "They can survive anything so long as some kind of basic humanity exists between the two people. When all kindness is gone, when one person obviously and sincerely doesn't care if the other is alive or dead, then it's just no good. ... Incurable disease, blindness, disaster — all these can be overcome. But never the death of common humanity in one of the partners."
He coins the term "quantum of solace" for what is implied to now be absent in Philip's heart.
But The Governor blames Rhoda, too. "Whatever her sins, if she had given him that Quantum of Solace he could never have behaved to her as he did." So, to my surprise, it's not just a story of an Evil Woman Doing a Man Wrong. They are both at fault.
It is here that some of what I expected earlier comes into play, as Rhoda becomes something of a fallen woman.
"She went through a pretty bad time," The Governor says. She couldn't get her old job back, and after charity ran out and her main support, the Burfords, were transferred, she became "pretty nearly destitute. She still had her looks, and various men had kept her for a while, but you can't make the rounds for very long in a small place like Bermuda, and she was very near to becoming a harlot and getting in trouble with the police." Fortunately, the Burfords came through with a ticket to Jamaica, where they had been transferred.
I expected a whole lot more "scarlet letter" stuff and a lot more sympathy for Philip than what was in the story we got. Thumbs up for Fleming telling a story where he realizes it takes two to tangle.
But then it gets even better. The Governor reveals the ultimate fates of both Philip and Rhoda Masters, which makes Bond laugh.
"Suddenly the violent dramatics of his own life seemed very hollow," Bond thought. "The affair of the Castro rebels and the burned-out yachts was the stuff of an adventure-strip in a cheap newspaper. ... A chance remark had opened for him the book of real violence — of the comedie humaine where human passions are raw and real, where Fate plays a more authentic game than any Secret Service conspiracy devised by governments."
My God, is this ... self-awareness? From James Bond?
I didn't see that coming. And Bond didn't either. He thanks the Governor for the story, saying "You've taught me a lesson."
The story ends with Bond reflecting "on the conference he would be having in the morning with the [U.S.] Coast Guard and the FBI in Miami. The prospect, which had previously interested, even excited him, was now edged with boredom and futility."
SUMMARY
Great twist, and a rueful ending. By golly, that's a cracking good story.
My wife didn't like this story, because it didn't have any Bondian adventures. But I found it a refreshing change of pace, and was surprised at the level of human compassion for its subjects, and the self-reflection by Bond.
STRAY BULLETS
- "Quantum of Solace" was published in Cosmopolitan in the U.S. in 1959, and in Modern Woman Magazine in the UK the same year as "A Choice of Love and Hate.”
- The World War II connection: There isn't one. Fleming's getting lazy!
- There are no Russians, either, unless they were back of the gun-running to Cuba.
- Nassau has a "Government House" in this story, where the colonial governor lives and apparently does business. So did Jamaica in other Bond stories. Did all British colonies have a "Government House" in that era? Did India or Hong Kong, or was it just Caribbean colonies? Or just the Bahamas and Jamaica?
- At the beginning, Bond makes reference to sitting on a chintzy couch. "Chintzy" has always been a synonym for cheap or gaudy to me, but I realized immediately — as did my wife — that its other meaning was in use here. "Chintz" is a kind of floral fabric, at one time very popular, and that's what Bond was referring to.
- At the dinner party, when Bond is asked about what shows he had seen recently, he answers as best he can. Which is not well. "He had not seen a play for two years, and then only because the man he was following in Vienna had gone to it." That made me laugh.
- Bond and The Governor, it is explained, are forced to talk to each other until 10:30, when both will be free to go to bed. Is this some formal rule for 1950s dinner parties, that they have to last until 10:30? But then, why did the other guests leave before 10:30? Why could Bond not leave as well? It's probably nothing more than a plot device, but I was looking for a concrete reason and couldn't find one.
- "It would be fine to have a pretty girl always tucking you up and bringing you drinks and hot meals and asking you if you had everything you wanted. And they're always smiling and wanting to please. If I don't find an air hostess, there'll be nothing for it but marry a Japanese. They seem to have the right ideas too." Bond is just yanking The Governor's chain here, and thinks to himself that he'd never marry "an insipid slave." Glad to hear it! But that Japanese crack seemed a bit too sincere.
- As opposed to the studied neutrality of For Your Eyes Only, Bond's opinion of the Castro revolution is very clear here. "He hadn't wanted to do the job," Bond thinks of interrupting gun-running to Castro's revolution. "In fact, his sympathies were with the rebels."
- The story is based on one told to Fleming by his Jamaican neighbor (and lover) Blanche Blackwell. (Blanche was the inspiration for Pussy Galore.)
- Philip Masters was the name of the protagonist in Blanche's real-life story, a police inspector whose marriage blew up. Let's hope he never read "Quantum of Solace."
- The man Rhoda initially takes up with is from the Tattersall family, "the ruling clique in Bermudan society." Tattersall is a pretty good name for a cad.
- I can't read "Rhoda" without thinking of Rhoda Morgenstern, the only other Rhoda I've ever heard of.
- When Philip's rules for Rhoda were described, "Under My Thumb" by the Rolling Stones began playing spontaneously in my head. That song was only six years away!
- According to Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett, Fleming's marriage was in trouble in 1960, and one wonders if The Governor's description of a marriage losing even a "Quantum of Solace" was the author ruminating over his own marital difficulties.
- "Quantum of Solace" is written in a style reminiscent of William Somerset Maugham, a writer whose work Fleming admired. The format is lifted straight from Maugham's short story "His Excellency."
THE MOVIE: QUANTUM OF SOLACE
Year: 2008
Director: Marc Forster
Writers: Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade
Starring: Daniel Craig (James Bond), Olga Kurylenko (Camille), Mathieu Amalric (Dominic Greene), Judi Dench (M), Giancarlo Giannini (Rene Mathis), Gemma Atherton (Strawberry Fields), Jeffrey Wright (Felix Leiter), David Harbour (Gregg Beam), Jesper Christensen (Mr. White), Anatole Taubman (Elvis), Rory Kinnear (Bill Tanner), Tim Pigott-Smith (Foreign Secretary), Joaquín Cosio (General Medrano), Fernando Guillén Cuervo (Colonel of Police), Jesús Ochoa (Lt. Orso), Lucrezia Lante della Rovere (Gemma), Glenn Foster (Mitchell), Paul Ritter (Guy Haines)
THE PLOT
James Bond is in pursuit of the people who caused Vesper Lynd's death, which leads to a philanthropist and renewable-energy industrialist named Dominic Greene and an organization named Quantum that is planning a coup in Bolivia. Meanwhile, a former Bolivian agent named Camille Mendes is seeking revenge on the Bolivian general that Quantum plans to put in charge of Bolivia. With their missions overlapping, Bond and Camille join forces, much to M's dismay, who fears Bond has lost his professional objectivity.
THE COMMENTARY
The movie opens with a fast-paced car chase that is absolutely thrilling. We quickly learn that this takes place about 10 minutes after the end of Casino Royale, and that the nefarious Mr. White — assumed dead at the end of the previous movie — is in the trunk of Bond's Aston-Martin.
White is taken to a safehouse in Siena, Italy, for interrogation. Present are M, Bond, M's bodyguard Craig Mitchell and another guard. White starts laughing during the interrogation, as he reveals that Quantum was always worried about how much intelligence organizations knew about them, when in fact they knew nothing.
"The first thing you should know about us is that we have people everywhere," he says. Then he looks at Mitchell. "Am I right?"
Mitchell springs into action, shooting the other guard and going for M. She escapes, and Mitchell bolts, with Bond in pursuit. What follows is another thrilling chase, this one across the tops of Italian villas. Bond is very nearly killed but manages to kill Mitchell first.
White has escaped and M is livid.
"When someone says 'We've got people everywhere,' you expect it to be hyperbole," she rants. "Lots of people say that. Florists use that expression. It doesn't mean that they've got somebody working for them inside the bloody room!"
Back at MI6, M tells Bond that someone with the ID of Vesper's boyfriend Yusef Kabira — the one being held hostage, which is why she betrayed Bond — had washed up on a shore where MI6 found it. M shows Bond a picture of his completely smashed face, saying "we're expected to believe the fish did that." The corpse is unidentifiable, but has Yusef's IDs. "Convenient," says Bond.
M goes on to say that it isn't Yusef. They used a lock of Yusef's hair that Vesper kept in a locket to run a DNA test. Bond remarks that the hair surprises him, as he didn't think Vesper the sentimental type.
"You apparently didn't know her very well," says M. OUCH!
MI6 searches Mitchell's apartment. M laments that Mitchell had been her bodyguard for seven years, and she can see Christmas presents she'd sent to him in his apartment. She smashes an ashtray she'd given him on the floor for emphasis.
"I don't think Mitchell smoked," Bond says mildly, the implicit criticism being that M didn't know Mitchell very well either.
They find a clue to someone who might be Mitchell's control, a man named Edmund Slate in Haiti. M orders a charter flight for Bond to Haiti.
M: Bond, if you could avoid killing every possible lead, it would be deeply appreciated.
Bond: Yes Mum. I'll do my best.
M: I've heard that before.
Bond breaks into Slate's apartment in Haiti, but he is waiting with a knife. After a furious fight, Slate is accidentally killed when Bond shoves him through a glass door and a piece of glass slices Slate's carotid artery. Since Bond was told not to kill him, and did, Bond stops answering M's calls.
This is very childlike behavior, and it is not an isolated incident. Bond and M have a mother/son relationship, but it is very strained and weird.
For example, later in the movie, Bond appears to have gone rogue, and both the British and Americans are after him. Despite all evidence to the contrary, M tells her men to stand down because "he's my agent, and I trust him."
Later still, Camille asks Bond why he is after Greene.
Bond: Among other things, he tried to kill a friend of mine.
Camille: A woman?
Bond: Yes. But it's not what you think.
Camille: Your mother?
Bond: She likes to think so.
Bond stops at the desk of Slate's hotel, and is given a briefcase that had been delivered to the late man. When Bond steps out in the street with it, a woman recognizes the case and tells him to get in. They are followed by a man on a motorcycle.
"Friend of yours?" the girls asks. "I don't have any friends," Bond replies.
As the girl tries to lose the motorcycle guy (another chase scene), she peppers him with questions. He plays along and quietly steals her ID, discovering she is "Camille Mendes." They open the briefcase, and there's nothing inside but blank paper and a gun.
Suddenly, both realize that Slate was on assignment to assassinate Camille. And she doesn't know that Bond isn't Slate. They fight and he exits the car. But he swipes their tail's motorcycle, and begins tailing Camille himself.
She leads him to a Greene Industries warehouse at the harbor, where she challenges Dominic Greene about the assassination. This doesn't make much sense to me; she's putting herself in the hands of a man she knows just tried to kill her. It's amazing he doesn't plug her right then and there, since she's not exactly being civil or calm.
Instead, though, a General Medrano arrives, and Greene and he work out a deal where Quantum will overthrow the existing Bolivian government and put Medrano in charge instead. And all Quantum wants is a bare piece of desert.
Medrano is practically salivating over Camille, so Greene throws her in as a sweetener. He asks only that when Medrano's done with her, he throw her overboard. Nice guys!
Bond races to the rescue, literally powering into the water and trusting that he'll land on one of the clutch of boats at the harbor's edge. He does, and hops over various ones until he gets a launch he apparently likes (or can't go any further). In a boat-chase scene that makes every other Bond movie boat-chase scene green with envy (and there have been many), Bond rescues Camille.
But she isn't grateful. She wanted to get on the boat with Medrano — to kill him. She explains that he killed her father, then raped and murdered her mother and sister, and then set fire to their house. She was just a child, and nearly didn't make it out. It's unspoken, but this explains the scars on her back.
At MI6, M bellows "Get me the Americans!" and asks about Greene. She is transferred to South American station chief Beam, who says Greene is not a person of interest to the CIA.
M is not fooled; the fact that she was transferred to the South American station means the CIA is perfectly aware of who Greene is, what he's up to and, tellingly, where he's up to it.
The camera pans back from the phone call, and we get a scene of Beam, played by David Harbour of Stranger Things, cutting a deal with Greene: no U.S. interference in the coup in exchange for Bolivian oil. Beam's subordinate, Felix Leiter, is clearly not pleased with this.
Greene shows them a photo on his phone of Bond that he took in Haiti. Beam says he doesn't know him, and Felix — who worked with Bond in Casino Royale — also says he doesn't know him. Felix is clearly not on Team Greene.
Bond follows Greene to Bregenz, Austria, where he attends a performance of Puccini's "Tosco," an opera full of murder, vengeance and suicide. Bond infiltrates, and notes that select guests get a special goodie bag, so he kills one of them in the bathroom and rifles through the bag. He finds an earpiece that allows him into a private conversation among the members of Quantum's executive board.
He climbs to where he has a good view of the audience, then breaks into the conversation. As some get spooked and leave, Bond photographs three and sends the photos to MI6 for ID. They all turn out to be rich and powerful, but moreover, they are also all ex-intelligence from different countries.
Mr. White is one of the Quantum members who didn't flee, and Bond walks right by him. "I guess 'Tosca' isn't for everyone," he remarks drily.
Greene spots Bond as he's leaving, and fighty-fight and shooty-shoot ensues. Bond throws one guy off a roof, who is an agent of Special Branch who is bodyguard to one of the P.M.'s advisors, and Greene's men finish the job by shooting him.
Bond doesn't bother to defend himself when M says he has to turn himself in for killing a Special Branch agent, and she cancels his credit cards and passports. Like in Licence to Kill, Bond goes rogue.
He goes to an Italian villa where lo and behold, we see René Mathis. Bond says he's the only one he can still trust. Mathis is still angry about the events of Casino Royale, but eventually softens when he hears what Bond is up against. He agrees to go to Bolivia with him, where he was once stationed, to help him stop the coup.
I'm glad to see this. One of the dangling threads of Casino Royale was Mathis' fate. Bond was smart enough in the movie to know that his cover was blown by somebody on the inside (in the book he was not) and Le Chiffre convinced him it was Mathis. ("You see, your Mr. Mathis is my Mr. Mathis," Le Chiffre said.) At the end, after Vesper had been uncovered as the traitor, M asked if they should let Mathis go. Bond said to keep him a little longer, to see what else they could learn.
That's pretty cold.
But this movie establishes that when Mathis' innocence became obvious, he was released and France gave him the villa as recompense. Now he's coming back in from the cold.
On the flight to Bolivia, Bond gets drunk on Vespers at the bar. When Mathis asks what he's drinking, Bond says "Three measures of Gordon's Gin, one of Vodka, half a measure of Kina ..." and trails off.
"Kina Lillet," chimes in the bartender helpfully, "which is not Vermouth. Shaken well until it is ice cold and served with a large, thin slice of lemon peel.
"Six of them," he says pointedly.
"That would kill either of us!" my wife exclaimed.
Bond and Mathis have a short but pointed exchange about sleeping and forgetting things.
They are greeted in La Paz by a consular employee who identifies herself as Fields (right), and says Bond must come with her immediately and return to London. Bond basically ignores her and changes their hotels, finding the one Fields booked to be beneath his standards.
"I think that girl has handcuffs," Mathis says.
"I hope so," Bond replies.
Naturally, Bond seduces Fields, and then invites her to a fundraiser Greene is throwing that night. Camille shows up, and Bond rescues her just before Greene throws her over a railing. As they leave, Fields pulls her weight by tripping Greene's bodyguard as he pursues Bond down a flight of stairs. The next time we see him, he's wearing a neck brace.
As Bond and Camille drive away, they are pulled over by Bolivian police. Earlier in the evening, Bolivian Police Chief Cuervo told Mathis and Bond the police force was at their disposal. Nevertheless, Bond is pretty sure these guys are on Greene's payroll.
The cops insist Bond open the trunk, and inside is a badly beaten Mathis. Bond pulls him out, and the police open fire, hitting Mathis point blank. Bond takes them out, and holds a dying Mathis in his arms.
"When one's young, it seems very easy to distinguish between right and wrong," Mathis says. "But, as one gets older, it becomes more difficult. The villains and the heroes get all mixed up."
This is a truncated version of the same speech Bond gave Mathis in the hospital in Casino Royale, the book, only with the characters reversed. Somebody's done their homework!
Mathis' dying words are for that Vesper died for him, and he should forgive her and himself.
I'm sorry to see Mathis go, especially since he was treated so shabbily in this version of Bond's life. But even at the end he is carrying forward the movie's themes of revenge (bad) and redemption (good).
Camille and Bond lease an old Douglas DC-3 to scout the land that Greene wants so badly. They are attacked by a fighter plane and a helicopter, so somebody doesn't want them snooping around. Bond manages to squeeze the fighter plane against a cliff face but the helicopter finishes the job of shooting down the DC-3. Bond and Camille bail out too low to survive, but miraculously land in a sinkhole with enough room. They discover an underground river that has been dammed, and now Greene's plan is clear: He's going to hold Bolivia's water supply hostage. It is the dammed rivers that are causing sinkholes.
Back in La Paz, Bond is apprehended by M and an MI6 squad. It turns out that Fields is dead, covered in oil (with some in her lungs). This is nod to Goldfinger, a black bookend to that movie's gold one.
Bond escapes and tracks down Felix, who agrees to meet with him. It is a trap, of course. But Felix tells him it's a trap, and also tells him where Greene will meet with Medrano and Cuervo to give them their payoff. It's a green-energy hotel Greene has built in the Atacama Desert.
"You know, I was just wondering what South America would look like if nobody gave a damn about coke or communism," Bond says. "It always impressed me the way you boys would carve this place up."
"I'll take that as a compliment coming from a Brit," Felix says. That made me laugh.
Bond escapes, and he and Camille drive to the hotel. They set off an explosion, which sets off other explosions and a fire. Bond kills Cuervo — "We had a mutual friend!" — and Camille goes after Medrano. Greene comes after Bond with a fire axe (like Max Zorin did in A View to a Kill), and manages to hit himself in the foot. But Bond is forced with a choice when he hears Camille scream. He leaves Greene and goes after her.
Revenge, which up to this point had been his main priority, just slipped into second place.
Camille has killed Medrano, but is trapped by the fire — and her fear of it, from childhood. Bond finds her, only to be trapped himself. They obliquely discuss Bond killing her before the fire does. Yikes! But Bond shoots a fire extinguisher instead, and the explosion opens a hole in the wall and snuffs out enough flames for them to jump out.
In the next scene, Bond drives up to Greene, who is walking through the desert. Through dialogue it's obvious that since the previous scene Bond had caught up to the limping Greene and interrogated him. And Greene spilled the beans, upon which Bond let him go.
In this scene, Bond tells Greene that the bad news is his Quantum buddies are going to know he squealed. The good news is that he's in the middle of a desert. Bond tosses Greene a can of motor oil.
"I bet you make it 20 miles before you consider drinking that," Bond says.
Bond and Camille share a kiss at a train station. Uncharacteristically, there is no sexy time. She leaves his life.
In the coda, we see a young couple in Kazan, Russia, and the man is Yusef (we recognize him from a photo Bond has carried throughout the movie). They enter Yusef's apartment, and Bond is waiting for them in 00-approved black coat and gloves.
He explains to the girl, who is Canadian secret service, that Yusef romances female intelligence agents professionally, gets "kidnapped" and turns them. He explains that happened to Vesper, who had a necklace identical to the one the Canadian girl has on. She gives Yusef a look and leaves.
Minutes later, Bond exits, where M and a squad are waiting. She's surprised to discover that Bond left Yusef alive. She also says that Greene was found dead in the middle of a Bolivian desert, with two bullets in the back of the head and motor oil in his stomach. She asks if that means anything to Bond.
"Wish I could help," he says.
After some other stuff, Bond says, "Congratulations, you were right."
"About what?" she says.
"About Vesper," he says, and walks off.
I've seen some conversations about this online, at Reddit, Quora and elsewhere, expressing bewilderment about this exchange. It seems obvious to me. Bond had been denying that he was doing what he was doing out of revenge, but his brutality indicated otherwise. M asked on several occasions if he was sure he was acting objectively, if she could trust him. Bond denied everything.
"You said you weren't motivated by revenge," M said in an earlier conversation.
"I'm motivated by my duty," Bond said.
"No," M said. "I think you're so blinded by inconsolable rage that you don't care who you hurt."
So in the end, M was right, and Bond was admitting he could see that now. He drops Vesper's necklace in the snow, indicating he has found peace.
SUMMARY
This movie is a series of heart-stopping chase scenes with occasional plot bits sandwiched in between. And Dominic Greene, with his plan to destabilize Bolivia, isn't a very memorable Bond villain. But what plot we get is poignant, with Bond learning to deal with Vesper's death and M trying to save her agent from his own self-inflicted wounds.
STRAY BULLETS
- While the title "Quantum of Solace" was used from one of Ian Fleming's short stories, none of the story's plot was used for the film.
- The cinematography owes a lot to the Bourne films, popular at the time. It's was a trend, so a Bond movie stole it.
- How did they get Ukrainian-born actress Olga Kurylenko so brown?
- Her Spanish accent was terrific.
- Mathieu Amalric, who plays Dominic Greene, bears a strong resemblance to Roman Polanski to me. Which is not a compliment.
- In my first run through the Craig films, I kept waiting for the Bond/M relationship to slip into something professional and predictable. It never did, and now I see that was the point.
- Bond leaves Mathis' body in a dumpster. "He wouldn't mind," he tells Camille. Sadly, this is good tradecraft. But we know Bond valued Mathis.
- Fields doesn't have a first name in the movie, but according to the credits, it's "Strawberry."
Replies
What, three in a row? I can't keep up!
"Quantum of Solace" isn't really a James Bond story, just an anecdote being recounted to James Bond.
"I was fascinated by the descriptions here, because I have no idea what it's like to be married in the upper crust in an English colony in 1960. I didn't know what a woman could or could not do, or how society would react. This sort of thing adds context to all the Bond stories, since it is basically the same social set Fleming would hang with in Jamaica."
Interesting. I hadn't considered that. I'll keep it in mind.
"We quickly learn that this takes place about 10 minutes after the end of Casino Royale."
IIRC, this is the shortest of the Craig Bonds; I tend to think of it as a continuation of Casino Royale (or perhaps a coda to it).
"Kina Lillet," chimes in the bartender helpfully, "which is not Vermouth.
This line is just too, too metatextual, and yanked me right out of the film. Kina Lillet hasn't been available for more than 35 years (much to the chagrin of James Bond aficionados who want to sample a "Vesper"). Because it is like a martini, some have attempted to substitute Vermouth. Why would the bartender point out that it is not Vermouth? And how is it that he has some?
Tracy and I watched all of the Craig Bonds fairly recently so they're all pretty fresh in my mind, but I don't have anything in particular to say about them (that I haven't said already).
The Commentary on this movie is a bit long, because as I was posting, I discovered to my horror that somehow it had not been saved. I remember writing it, I remember editing it, I remember pulling art for it. But somehow not a single version got saved. I don't know how this can be. I expect one day I'll open something totally unrelated and it'll be there.
Anyway, I had to re-write it on the fly, so it's not edited very tightly. And I still didn't get in everything I wanted to mention!
"Quantum of Solace" was published in Cosmopolitan in the U.S. in 1959, and in Modern Woman Magazine in the UK the same year as "A Choice of Love and Hate.”
At the risk of sounding cynical, I’m inclined to think Fleming was writing for the audiences of those two magazines: women. This is easier to believe than a guy who constantly writes female characters as weak and untrustworthy suddenly (and temporarily) having an epiphany.
At the dinner party, when Bond is asked about what shows he had seen recently, he answers as best he can. Which is not well. "He had not seen a play for two years, and then only because the man he was following in Vienna had gone to it." That made me laugh.
This fits his character. Unless the story is a murder mystery he wouldn’t be able to connect to it.
Bond and The Governor, it is explained, are forced to talk to each other until 10:30, when both will be free to go to bed. Is this some formal rule for 1950s dinner parties, that they have to last until 10:30? But then, why did the other guests leave before 10:30? Why could Bond not leave as well? It's probably nothing more than a plot device, but I was looking for a concrete reason and couldn't find one.
The Governor probably wanted Bond to leave. He didn’t take the hint when everyone else left. Maybe Fleming did what Bond did earlier in his career and also didn’t realize he was expected to leave.
"It would be fine to have a pretty girl always tucking you up and bringing you drinks and hot meals and asking you if you had everything you wanted. And they're always smiling and wanting to please. If I don't find an air hostess, there'll be nothing for it but marry a Japanese. They seem to have the right ideas too." Bond is just yanking The Governor's chain here, and thinks to himself that he'd never marry "an insipid slave." Glad to hear it! But that Japanese crack seemed a bit too sincere.
It doesn’t seem to occur to Bond or the hapless husband in the story that the airline stewardess is doing the job she signed up for and trying to keep her job. Hopefully she also knew what to do in an emergency.
Philip Masters was the name of the protagonist in Blanche's real-life story, a police inspector whose marriage blew up. Let's hope he never read "Quantum of Solace."
When I see the name Masters I remember meeting the FF villain the Puppet Master in my teens. He had no name until they decided that the last name for him and Alicia was “Masters.”
I can't read "Rhoda" without thinking of Rhoda Morgenstern, the only other Rhoda I've ever heard of.
Me too! There might also have been a victimized woman in an EC story.
THE MOVIE: QUANTUM OF SOLACE
White is taken to a safehouse in Siena, Italy, for interrogation. Present are M, Bond, M's bodyguard Craig Mitchell and another guard.
This may be a safehouse (except for the traitor), but has anyone titled M ever been outside of London in any other story?
She explains that he killed her father, then raped and murdered her mother and sister, and then set fire to their house.
This is what the Viet Cong used to do to non-compliant village elders, except they made the father watch before killing him. (But I digress)
Bond infiltrates, and notes that select guests get a special goodie bag, so he kills one of them in the bathroom and rifles through the bag.
Hopefully, he was convinced that this guest was part of the evil plan before killing him.
Le Chiffre convinced him it was Mathis. ("You see, your Mr. Mathis is my Mr. Mathis," Le Chiffre said.) At the end, after Vesper had been uncovered as the traitor, M asked if they should let Mathis go. Bond said to keep him a little longer, to see what else they could learn.
That's pretty cold.
Why would Bond believe anything his enemy said?
Fields doesn't have a first name in the movie, but according to the credits, it's "Strawberry."
That’s like the movie You Only Live Twice. The object of affection in it is (like the book) identified as Kissy in the credits but is completely unnamed in the course of the movie. Maybe in both cases a preview audience laughed, so they dropped it.
At the risk of sounding cynical, I’m inclined to think Fleming was writing for the audiences of those two magazines: women. This is easier to believe than a guy who constantly writes female characters as weak and untrustworthy suddenly (and temporarily) having an epiphany.
That sounds likely. Some of his women (Honey, Judy Havelock) show more agency than I expect, but in the end they always need Bond the Protector. This story doesn't follow that script.
When I see the name Masters I remember meeting the FF villain the Puppet Master in my teens. He had no name until they decided that the last name for him and Alicia was “Masters.”
This may be a safehouse (except for the traitor), but has anyone titled M ever been outside of London in any other story?
And his first name was established as Philip, so his initials are P.M. in both identities.
This may be a safehouse (except for the traitor), but has anyone titled M ever been outside of London in any other story?
If by story you mean movie, it's not that unusual. In Licence to Kill, the Robert Brown M took the Timothy Dalton Bond's licence to kill away in Key West (at Hemingway House). In Moonraker, M and the Secretary of Defence go to Venice for the Roger Moore Bond to show them Drax's secret lab, but Drax has cleared it out and covered it up, embarrassing Bond. The Judi Dench M is seen at home in Casino Royale, where the Daniel Craig Bond has broken in, and she spends most of Skyfall out of the office (and dies at Bond's family estate, I think). I remember the Bernard Lee M and the Secretary of Defence outside somewhere in some movie, but I've forgotten which one. (And it might have been in London.) I haven't seen three Connery and three Craig movies lately, and I haven't seen three Moore and four Brosnan movies at all, so there might be more such scenes.
Hopefully, he was convinced that this guest was part of the evil plan before killing him.
Now that you mention it, I don't know that Bond killed him. As Bond leaves the bathroom, there's a quick shot of the guy with a bloody head, maybe unconscious, maybe dead. Given Bond's brutality in this movie -- which was a plot point -- I'd guess dead. But they don't establish it one way or the other.