![]() ![]() ![]() This term came to mean “manservant,” a meaning that is now obsolete, and later came to mean “a trusted follower,” “a member of a gang,” or “a right-hand man.” ![]() Henchman ultimately derives from the Old English word for “stallion,” hengest, plus man, designating a “horse man” or a groom (a person who takes care of horses). This tends to end badly for the villains. These henchmen also usually have a showdown with Bond toward the end of each film, which may be part of the reason that the Bond villains themselves make long and detailed explanations to Bond when he is captured, showing that their priority is to explain their evil plans as plot exposition rather then eliminating the immediate threat of the British secret agent. No, this was partly due to the fact that he had no hands.) They always represent the head of a large and devious organization, and they are accompanied and protected by characters with specialized and visually entertaining violent skills. Part of the menace of typical Bond villains is that they never get their hands dirty. With the more grounded and gritty take on the character as played by Daniel Craig in recent years, the equipment has been more plausible and minimal, to the point where the filmmakers gently mock the excesses of the earlier Bond gadgets. The Oxford English Dictionary posits that a possible connection can be made with the French term gâchette, meaning part of a locking mechanism or the trigger mechanism of a gun, but for now there is no convincing proof of this etymology. Its precise origin-perhaps appropriate for the name of a spy’s tool-is unknown. The word gadget is relatively new to English, first attested in the late 1800s. As the films placed the character in increasingly impossible situations, he was issued with increasingly improbable gadgets, from small underwater breathing devices, ultramagnetic watches, exploding pens, and jetpacks, to cars with the firepower of an army tank that can eject passengers or function underwater like a submarine. It also contained a device that released tear gas, something used later in the film to save Bond from a seemingly impossible situation. The first gadget issued to Bond is a very sensible attaché case containing spare bullets and gold coins to help get a stranded agent home from a mission. The formula for most Bond films, along with the gun barrel introduction, the pre-title action sequence, the elaborate schemes of an evil villain, and, at least until recently, sexist and misogynist depictions of women, includes the presentation of esoteric and complicated tools and weapons to be used on his mission. Blofeld’s organisation, we are told, is a ‘private enterprise for private profit’ – in the parlance of modern intelligence agencies SPECTRE is a potent, hostile ‘non-state actor’.The mystique of James Bond is partly personal, from the suave charm and physical daring of the character, and partly technological, from the (very often fanciful) tools of his trade. He is no longer simply an organ or agent of state. Put simply, the new organisation appeared to offer more wide-ranging potential for an engaging thriller narrative, not least because the master-criminal or super-villain now truly represented a universal, international threat to humanity. Fleming’s Playboy interview also suggested a literary logic behind the change, proposing that SPECTRE represented a ‘much more elastic fictional device’. (Bond himself admits in Thunderball that ‘with the Cold War easing off, it was not like the old days’.) The reality was that, as Fleming knew, Britain’s ability to act as an effective force in the international struggle against ‘Redland’ was, by this time, stretching the bounds of credulity. He suggested instead that the villainous plot be the work of an international terrorist group known by the acronym SPECTRE.įleming claims that he closed down SMERSH in his novels and invented SPECTRE to reflect what he saw as a partial thawing of the Cold War. In a memo dated 15 June 1959 Fleming wrote that it would be unwise to directly identify Russia as the enemy: ‘Since the film will take about two years to produce, and peace might conceivably break out in the meantime, this should be avoided’. What you need to know is here, it was Fleming himself who suggested the change whilst working for producer Kevin McClory on the script for what would become Thunderball (book and film) prior to making the first film Dr No: ![]()
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