How could any thriller-writer not fall in love with a department whose name (SMiERt SHpionam) means "Death to Spies"?

Amusingly, Smiert Shpionam was a plot point in the later Bond movie The Living Daylights...

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I always wondered (re. that comment about the great name) why it took the movie franchise such a long time to make use of it. After all, it's not as if it was something fictional being held under copyright.

According to one theory, Fleming went over to using SPECTRE instead of SMERSH so as not to annoy the Soviet Union. This seems a bit unlikely, especially since they can't have been much of a potential market at the time.

Maybe someone finally reminded him that SMERSH no longer existed, and that MGB had become more familiar as a rather neat sports-car.

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As I remember it (it's been years since I last read the Bonds), SPECTRE didn't show up until Thunderball. Which was originally conceived as a screenplay. You probably know the history of that story better than I do.

So maybe SPECTRE hadn't really been created by Fleming, but rather by the studio who wanted a more generic villain, one who was less political?

In which case I may be the only one who is amused by how far ahead of their times the Bond-makers were, in creating an international terrorist group as their Big Bad.

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McClory, co-creator of Thunderball, was responsible for SPECTRE and, I think, the characters Blofeld and Largo. Certainly someone besides EON Productions ("the official Bond franchise") retained enough rights to the basic stolen-missiles plot that it was re-run as Never Say Never Again.

The whole thing degenerated into one of those acrimonious "Mine! / No, Mine!" arguments that ended with old friends (Fleming and McClory) permanently falling out.

The "spectre" of international terrorism and Fleming's prophetic use of same has been commented on since 2001 - see the Wikipedia entry on SPECTRE for an example.

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You never know; it could happen. They remade whatchamacallit, The Thomas Crown Affair, and 3:10 To Yuma, and other midcentury pieces. The perceived supplanting of a living, successful actor, Sean Connery, would be the sticking point, I bet. After he dies, it might well occur.

Just as an FYI, and you likely know this already, but Moscow architecture is very much like NYC architecture in eclecticism. For much of the 20th century, it took serious political will to tear down anything and build something else in its place. The wild mixture of styles and eras was one of the most unusual things to me when I was there in '94.

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Interesting idea - not that I'm in any hurry to see Connery shuffle off the mortal whatever, you understand - but The Thomas Crown Affair was modernized, while 3.10 to Yuma, being a Western, is as fixed to the mid-late 19th century as the The Other Boleyn Girl is fixed to Tudor England.

Making movies set in a "living-memory" period is usually much more difficult than anything set more than a century ago: there'll be enough people in the audience who lived through it, that anachronistic mistakes in cars, clothes, buildings etc. will be more easily spotted. Look at the IMdb "goofs" section for anachronisms in any such film and you'll see what I mean. Some are nit-picky to an extent that amused even master-nitpicker me ("the typewriter was a 1946 model and wouldn't have been available in 1945...") but others point up errors that should not have been allowed to happen.

That's interesting about the look of buildings in Moscow (I didn't know about it - never been there - so thanks!) The reason I specified "Stalinist" rather than "Moscow" architecture is that I was thinking of a specific ponderous, overwhelmingly large and rather brutish look; the odd thing is that Wikipedia's article shows buildings that, what with spires, towers and surface details, don't have the blocky look at all.

Maybe what I had in mind was more like Speer's plans for New Berlin/Germania, or the Parliament Palace in Romania, or maybe even the interior designs that Ken Adam did for the Bond movies and Dr Strangelove with low ceilings, indirect lighting, reflective surfaces - you know the style: sleek and ominous, dwarfing the mere humans who scurry about beneath it.

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"Mussolini Modern," I've heard it called. We have one or two here in Philadelphia. Bleah. I'd have made the same mistake about Stalinist architecture nomenclature. We could call it Khruschevite architecture instead-- dull, squat, heavy on the poured concrete.

I would hope if they were doing something in the 1950s they'd hire the same people that did L.A. Confidential, in which I could see nothing incorrect.

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In the movie Bond does refer to SMERSH. When Grant keeps calling Bond "old boy" Bond asks "Is that how you talk to people in SMERSH?", and Klebb is also referred to as having worked for SMERSH. It sounds as though in the films SMERSH is still there (or possibly recently renamed) but is not the threat, it has changed to SPECTRE as an independent power-grabbing organisation (a theme which seems to then run through the later movies, although not always the same one).

(When I was a teenager my friend and I read all of the Bond books (or all which were available at that time), and wanted to write something similar. However, we were hampered by our lack of knowledge of cars, guns, gambling -- or women...)

(I thought I recognised the name Gael Kathryns. I know her as Gael Baudino, but I vaguely remember her mentioning the pseudonym.)

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In the movie, Rosa Klebb has changed employer from SMERSH to SPECTRE (better dental plan?) but yes indeed, SMERSH is mentioned on a couple of occasions - maybe to enhance the link between the "new, movie Bond" (this was only the second film, after all) and the "classic, book Bond".

(I keep wanting to write "brooke Bond", but James wasn't very keen on tea: "a flat, soft, time-wasting opium of the masses..." He'd never met tea the way my Dad liked it, which ate spoons.)

If you can find the "For Martha" tape, do so, because the harp music is beautiful. I listened to it a lot last year.

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