What the Russians thought of James Bond in the 1960s

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-the-russians-thought-of-james-bond-in-the-1960s

by lermontov • 5 years ago

79 118 5 years ago

spectator.co.uk

neonate• 5 years ago

trhway2• 5 years ago

while 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

craz8• 5 years ago

I suggest that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is set in the Marvel universe, and Caracatus Potts is the grandfather of Pepper Potts.

CoastalCoder2• 5 years ago

Having 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.)

Brakenshire• 5 years ago

The 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• 5 years ago

This 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.

tiahura2• 5 years ago

“womanizer”

Isn’t that term sort of sexist in that it suggests women lack agency?

adolph4• 5 years ago

“adroit”

Isn’t that term kind of handist in that suggests lefties lack womanization?

https://blog.oup.com/2010/09/left-hand/

laserDinosaur• 5 years ago

I think it was also the timing that the books came out, and that they were more or less travel blogs with card games and shoot outs. To quote a post on a forum where they read every james bond novel, there was this interesting tidbit:

"[The books] serve as a looking glass into life in the 50s and 60s. The Bond series was a form of escapism for red-blooded British men still living under rationing until 1954. In a world where the average reader has probably never left smoggy England except for war service and is still living off of Spam and brown bread while puttering around in a used Morris, James Bond gets to travel to exotic locations from sea to shining sea, eating all the local cuisine that the audience may have never even heard of and driving rare sports cars in breakneck chases."

I always thought that was an interesting take. It might explain why a set of books that were not widely regarded as the most well written, with multiple pages dedicated simply to how certain drinks or food in a certain region are made and taste, took off precisely for the same reasons that it might be classically regarded as "bad".

lstodd5• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Soviet 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.

freshpots• 5 years ago

So for both sources, as your description goes, is it 50:50, correct? Or was, most of the time, the Russian source the most inaccurate?

lstodd5• 5 years ago

This 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.

fortuna864• 5 years ago

In the New York Times about half of the things would be true and the other half false.

What is one example of something the NYTs reported, that has since been proven false but hasn't been retracted? (Not Iraq was examples, that was reporting on false intelligence not NYT providing the false info).

deanCommie• 5 years ago

"Everything they told us about Communism was a lie. Unfortunately, everything they told us about Capitalism was true."

- Common joke across the former Warsaw Pact countries after the fall of the wall and the reopening of information access.

Soviet Propaganda didn't need to lie about the west - they reported the truth, just the subset of the truth that presents the desired impact. Good Propaganda does this even to this day. When the Russians hack both the RNC and the DNC, but only leak the Democratic National Convention secret files to WikiLeaks, it's the same thing.

skinkestek2• 5 years ago

Here is what I heard from my Dad who grew up in a country next to Sovjet:

- "Russia took a good second place while the Americans came second last!" (i.e. Americans won)

- "In America there are huge differences between people, in Russia everyone is equally poor!"

Can't say if this is Western propaganda or not but this is what was joked about across the border.

paganel• 5 years ago

My parents have a “propaganda” book written about the US by the Soviets back in the ‘70s (it’s a Romanian translation, I’m from Romania) which was quite spot on, meaning it was quite on point when it came to the Vietnam War, the condition of the black population in the States, the homelessness issue (this last one scared me the most, as we didn’t really have homelessness on this side of the Wall back then). All this to say that from time to time they were on point, but, I agree, when it came to internal stuff pretty much all of it was besides the truth.

lr1970• 5 years ago

Soviet news at the time was actually much more accurate than the USA.

This is simply false. Soviet news was an official and pure propaganda. For example, Cuban missile crisis was totally ignored by the Soviet media. While the world was balancing at the brink of nuclear war the Soviet population was blissfully ignorant. Another good examples of how Soviet propaganda lied were coverage of Prague Spring in 1968 and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979--1988.

Source: lived there, remember those lies.

trhway2• 5 years ago

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).

In USSR that phenomenon was known as "I haven't read it, but i condemn it" ("Не читал, но осуждаю") as a good Soviet citizen would of course never want to read/watch <insert whatever decadent/rotten product of the "West pop-culture" or USSR dissidents/etc.> (thus making the actual availability a moot issue) while of course a good Soviet citizen can't feel anything but condemnation to such a product. While it originates as used seriously by total Party suckers, it was used by most people with a double meaning of a satirical sum-it-all-up of the USSR ideological approach to culture, and in many cases the satire was going beyond culture as like Bond movies a lot of things weren't available in USSR - like "i haven't experienced the rotten luxury of the West cars/etc., but i condemn that luxury".

dredmorbius• 5 years ago

Not a phenomenon limited to the former Soviet Union, for what it's worth.

regnull• 5 years ago

Hate to be a pedant, but Izvestiya was a propaganda branch of the Supreme Soviet, not the communist party. Whatever the minor difference it can make.

lstodd5• 5 years ago

As if there was any difference.

The whole circus of "Supreme Soviet" was itself a propaganda item ran from Старая площадь.

helge92106• 5 years ago

another front page useful as toilet paper

The concept of "toilet paper" didn't exist back than in the USSR. First toilet paper factory was built seven years later.

peter303• 5 years ago

What do Americans think of the Wolf Warrior movies from China? Part Bond/Rambo achinese guy geats bumbling evil Americans.

BobbyJo• 5 years ago

I 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.

habeebtc2• 5 years ago

I 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• 5 years 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.

CoastalCoder2• 5 years ago

I hadn't even heard of the Wolf Warrior movies.

More broadly speaking, I'm concerned that their production may be consistent with the CCP's recent saber-rattling. The more evidence I see of that posture, the more I worry that my sons will die in an unnecessary war.

qsmi• 5 years ago

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3540136/

Looks like people were not too impressed. I haven't seen it but from the description it looks like Chinese special forces fighting drug lords who happen to be American, not really the same thing.

Interestingly, just the other day I was reading a Tom Clancy novel and thought, surely other countries must've wrote novels or made movies where the Americans loose WWIII, or whatever. I'd be interested in a recommendation. I'm really curious how others see it going down. Although maybe it's boring, i.e. Luke gets to the end of the trench, and misses...

fivefifty• 5 years ago

From what I've seen it mostly it's Americans writing about the US losing the next world war in fictional books like Ghost fleet: A Novel of the Next World War or Twilight's Last Gleaming.

mark-r2• 5 years ago

I dimly remember a story about a wrong number phone call connecting a man with a woman in an alternate universe where the Japanese won WWII. Unfortunately both my memory and my Google-fu are failing me on identifying the source.

cronix• 5 years ago

I've only heard of it through China In Focus on YouTube. Our free press doesn't really report much on China. From what I've seen though, it would pass as pretty good comedy in the US. It's really over the top, similar to "The Interview" comedy movie about North Korea, except it's meant to be serious, which makes it funnier.

clockwork1235122• 5 years ago

I've seen both movies, though I'm Canadian. I enjoyed the movies because my family is East Asian, and I wanted to see what a real East Asian hero in the movies could look like (long before Shang-Chi came out). This differs from the typical depiction of Asian guys in Hollywood movies as unconfident, geeky, and not romantic interests.

In contrast, the hero of Wolf Warrior is athletic, confident, highly competent, and heroic (he saves civilians in the second movie).

I really enjoyed this because the absence of East Asian heroic figures has contributed to Asian men being seen as unattractive in the dating pool [0]. Career-wise, Asians are also the least likely in the US to be promoted, according to the Harvard Business Review [1]. It's also a struggle to lack Asian role models growing up.

You can't even really talk about this issue of underrepresentation in media as an Asian male without criticism. The first result when you search for issues facing Asian men today is a Slate article documenting radicalized men who have harassed Asian women ("Men's Rights Asians Think This Is Their Moment"). What those guys did is reprehensible, but if I speak about these issues in real life, I can get lumped in with them.

So, I enjoyed the movies, but don't typically talk about my enjoyment for fear of being ostracized. Anyways, Wolf Warrior is more G.I. Joe than James Bond or Rambo. He's also not fighting against American spies or representatives of the US government, but rather villains who happen to be American (and more vicious than bumbling). Also, the hero surprisingly disobeys the Chinese government several times (and ends up imprisoned, though he ultimately returns to alignment with the government in the end).

Sources:

[0] https://theconversation.com/asian-guys-stereotyped-and-exclu...

[1] https://hbr.org/2018/05/asian-americans-are-the-least-likely...

post_from_work• 5 years ago

>> I wanted to see what a real East Asian hero in the movies could look like

K-Pop Star Rain in Ninja Assassin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja_Assassin

Lee Byung-Hun as Storm Shadow in the GI Joe movies (a villian, but a damn cool one): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Joe:_The_Rise_of_Cobra#Co...

John Cho in the new Star Trek films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(film)

^Just in case you want to work through a back catalog of kickass Asian dudes in blockbuster films.

I've seen both of the Wolf Warrior films as well. I was curious how they would handle the size/physical strength disparity with the presumably-former-spec-ops American mercenaries. I like the approach taken, where the Chinese protagonists overcome them with agility and dexterity.

As an American, and one who has to deal with the Chinese military as an adversary on a regular basis, I still enjoyed these movies.

mc323• 5 years ago

Interestingly, what I have heard is that the CCP wants to 'de-Koreanize' its pop idols and wants less make up and plastic surgery in their idols and instead wants to emphasize maleness in its idols. In other words the Chinese government perceives their own "idols" as not being masculine enough --and thus it's not only Hollywood but popular culture in China (and east Asia in general).

coupdejarnac• 5 years ago

They don't look too great from the clips I've seen. I don't think I can watch either movie in its entirety without being plastered.

robocat• 5 years ago

I just watched the 4 Ip Man kung fu movies on Netflix: #1 is Chinese versus evil Japanese occupiers, #2 is Chinese versus evil Brits (Hong Kong occupiers), and #4 is Chinese versus evil Americans (Chinese immigrants in US).

I really enjoyed the depictions of foreigners from the Chinese POV, since their clichés are still visible, even as a Western viewer.

starik36• 5 years ago

It's peculiar that Soviets were treated to a review of a film that no one in the USSR would have the opportunity to see.

krasin2• 5 years ago

USSR 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

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryozka_(Russian_retail_store...

lstodd5• 5 years ago

You 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.

908B64B197• 5 years ago

Interestingly, it's still the case in modern communist countries such as Venezuella or Cuba. There's a paralel economy that's almost always underground with a paralel exchange rate using a real currency (the US dollar).

In Cuba, if you aren't good enough to become a taxi driver (and maybe get a tip in US dollars from a foreigner) your next best bet is to clean hotel rooms. Then for those who failed at both, it's to become a doctor. Fascinating societies.

TMWNN• 5 years ago

I 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.

FearlessNebula• 5 years ago

General Ourumov in Goldeneye is also a rogue Soviet agent

Apocryphon• 5 years ago

Well he was, then he was a rogue post-Cold War Russian agent.

the_decider• 5 years ago

I 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

zkirill• 5 years ago

Apologies 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• 5 years ago

It’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

gumby2• 5 years ago

Some 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• 5 years ago

It'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.

Andrew_nenakhov• 5 years ago

Russians 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.

gumby2• 5 years ago

Any Soviet equivalents anyone would recommend?

orbital-decay• 5 years ago

There 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.

aasasd2• 5 years ago

As 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• 5 years ago

I 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.

helsinkiandrew2• 5 years ago

Yes! - and a faithful adaptation would make a fantastic film - its a shame that we'll likely never see one.

helsinkiandrew2• 5 years ago

Russia had Stierlitz, Max Otto von Stierlitz:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stierlitz

bussiere• 5 years ago

Thanks for the discovery of these books :)

GreenWatermelon• 5 years ago

While we're on topic, Egypt had Adham Sabry (I read all of them)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragol_Al_Mostaheel

ncmncm5• 5 years ago

Ian 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.

What the Russians thought of James Bond in the 1960s

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