When we think of Ian Fleming (
if we can remember that he even existed) then it's in relation to just one name: James Bond. This is just about the single reason why the memory of pop culture can recall the creator of the world's most famous secret agent. The explanation for why this should be is pretty simple. Bond is the one creation out of all his other artistic efforts that got the best notice. Double-O-Seven is the one character in the author's gallery of wonders who managed to capture the public's Imagination in what was somehow the right time and in just the right place. Bond himself was the product of a number of influences. Part of it came from Fleming's own experiences as a member of the British Secret Service during World War II. Another and more important factor, the one which seems to have been the most influential in terms of the character's ability to leave an indelible footprint in pop culture, is down to the time period in which his name first saw the light of day. The first adventure in which the world's premiere super spy made his debut was in Fleming's 1953 novel,
Casino Royale. It was this mid-century bestseller which introduced audiences to a world of deadly secret operatives, intrigue, seduction, and a combination of action thrills combined with an improbable yet impressive technological conceit in terms of gadgets and wheels that has pretty much gone on to shape the way we conceive of espionage in the realm of make-believe. The key thing that made all of this work so well was how Fleming became such a major beneficiary of his own particular cultural zeitgeist.
Bond can be thought of as something very close to the ultimate manifestation of the Cold War period. He was just the sort of hero that Western cinemas were looking for in a time when all of the major Atlantic nations were locked in a global competition with the Soviet Union for ideological supremacy of the hearts and minds of the public. It seems to have been this conflict, which was going on even in the aisles of movie-goers that first gave Bond his fame, and then immortalized him as a pop culture staple; one of many, in point of fact. It turned Fleming's creation, if maybe not it's author, into a household name. The perfect irony that compliments this achievement is that, just like with so many other artists, it is the one, defining accomplishment that has swiftly erased any awareness of the author's other works. It's the same fate that Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Lewis Carroll all met with. Each of them, along with Fleming has managed to imbue one particular imaginary figure with so much Creative life, that it's as if the audience has decreed that nothing else they ever did matters. Roald Dahl's has met with a kinder variation of this same fate. If the name of this Swiss-English writer means anything to anyone, then it's as the creator of Willy Wonka. Fate has been kinder to Dahl, in this regard, however. Far from decreeing that he never wrote anything else of worth, Dahl's other writings, such as The Witches, The BFG, or James and the Giant Peach have become household classics just as well.
Fleming was never able to have that same luck of the draw. He never got the chance to become known as the same level of versatile talent that Dahl is now still regarded as. Instead, whatever else the rest of his literary output may have been, pop culture memory has seen fit to consign it all to the dustheap of history. It's James Bond we want from now on. If it has nothing to do with the adventures of 007, then what's there to give a rip about, anyway? There's a mercenary style quality to such zero sum thinking, and it could be worthwhile to someday examine just how this particular factor shapes the nature of modern audience reception. It might be able to tell us a great deal of how we can be so receptive to certain Creative Ideas at one time, while others from the same artist leave us cold to the point of hostile indifference for almost all the rest. It's a fascinating occurrence worth paying attention to, yet that's not what this review is about. Though there may be parts of the story under examination today which can help shed some light the questions asked above. Before we can get to any of that, however, there's the background for how the tale under the microscope came to be made. It all happened near the end.
It starts with a heart attack, one the author suffered near the end of his days in 1961. Fleming had nine successes to his name by the time of March in that year, and all of them were due to just one man.
Bond...James Bond. He'd written other non-related texts by this point, yet I think it's telling that most of them were of the non-fiction variety. These include, in seeming total, one true crime book, a travelogue, and one semi-romantic short story (
web). The only other notable title to his name is the book adaptation under discussion here. At least it allows the critic an answer to one part of the conundrum for why Fleming isn't known for much else besides Bond. It really does seem to be the case of the author allowing himself to be defined by success of his greatest creation. He's almost like a version of Conon-Doyle if he were willing to rest content, for the most part, with writing Sherlock Holmes stories and not much of anything else. It's the author's apparent comfort with this state of personal affairs that makes
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang stand out all the more as the great creative anomaly of the artist's life.
The book had it's genesis in the wake of the heart attack which Fleming can be said to have survived, yet just up to a point. It was while he was convalescing that a friend did a personal favor for the author that, on the surface of things, seems like the last sort of gift you'd give to the writer of a book series centering around the exploits of a serial womanizer. Fleming was given a copy of Beatrix Potter's
Squirrel Nutkin to read while bedridden. His immediate reaction is one that fans might expect from the creator of 007. Fleming came away less than impressed. What happened next is the part most audiences would never have expected. For all intents and purposes, Fleming appears to have been seized by the idea that he could write a better story for children than that. However unexpected or unprecedented the final results may seem, this is what happened. He began to compose a story with the working title of
The Magic Car, and proceeded to pack a lot of his own previous enthusiasms into the plot (
web). These include the tell-tale penchant for taking a simple yet stylish looking automobile, and then transforming it into a fantastical marvel of technical engineering. This part of the author's repertoire should be familiar enough to longtime fans of the franchise's trademark Astin-Marten.
The car at the center of Fleming's single children's novel amounts to a toned down version of this same conceit. It's possible to posit the author as creating a children's librarian version riff on the usual tropes that had defined his fiction in an up till then adult key. The somewhat poetic irony is that this tale of a Magic Car that transports its owners on a grand adventure turned out to have been the very the last writing Ian Fleming ever accomplished. On the 11th of August, 1964, the creator of James Bond passed away, as much a victim of the work schedule that sudden fame catapulted him into, in addition to a lifetime of hard living, both within and aside from the call of duty (ibid). The story of how the author's single children's novel found it's way to the big screen is somewhat fitting considering that it was none other than Albert R. Broccoli, Fleming's longtime collaborator and producer of the Bond film adaptations, who was ultimately responsible for the film we're looking at here today. The book was published in three installments after Fleming's death, and when Broccoli had the completed manuscript in front of him, his reaction probably mirrors that of a lot of longtime Bond fans who learn that Fleming also wrote for children (however briefly). He came away less than impressed, thinking there was no way material like this would ever make for a good movie. Then Walt Disney changed his mind.
The sudden breakout success of the Mouse House's freely adapted version of P.L. Travers
Mary Poppins seems to have been enough of an incentive for Broccoli to swallow whatever doubts or misgivings he might have had about the manuscript, and instead hit the green light that got the ball rolling on this story's eventual road to the big screen. The filmmaking process as a whole seems to have been time consuming on this one, as it was first in pre-production for almost two years, and that was all about trying to get the script right (more of which anon), and the production process itself seems to have dragged on for three whole months. Whatever behind the scenes issues were going on with this picture, the movie adaptation of Ian Fleming's final novel at last made its feature debut on December 16th, 1968. What remains to be seen now is just how well the film holds up after all of these many years.
