Spy Films with Clumsy Spies: Stephen Chow’s Response to the James Bond Craze

During the Cold War ( 19-t6-90), the world was divided in two, represented by the superpowers of the Soviet Union and the Untied States. Espionage became a major task for many nations (Lisanti and Paul 2002:8). Ian Fleming (1908-1964), the British writer best known for his series of James Bond Spy novels, joined by the British Naval Intelligence in 1939. After the war, he published fourteen novels on the adventures of British secret agent James Bond in thirteen years between 1953 and his death in 1964 (Lisanti and Paul 2002:11). Fleming revealed that James Bond was based on hard-boiled detectives of American crime fiction (Chapman 2007:24). In the first seven novels, from Casino Royale (1953) to Godfinger (1959), the real-life Soviet assassination bureau SMERSH (Soviet Assassination Division of the KHB, the Soviet Union Committee of State Security) were the villains (Lisanti and Paul 2002:12). This changes in the eighth novel, For Your Eyes Only (1960), in which the villain, were another Russian assassination outfit, SHAPE (Lisanti and Paul 2002:12).  Beginning with the ninth novel, Thunderball (1961), and continuing until his last work, Octopussy (1966), a short story collection. Fleming introduced a deadlier yet fictional organization, SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion), which comprised former members of SMERSH and other villains  (Lisanti and Paul 2002:12).  According to the media historian James Chapman, the early Bond novels epitomized "the historical and ideological conditions of the Cold War" and are characterized by "an explicit anti-Communism that may also have upset critics on the left" (2007:32).  SMERSH's conspiracy is either directed against Britain or the West, while SPECTRE was "apolitical in so far as it was not motivated by ideology but was a freelance organization dedicated to the acquisition o wealth and power through terrorism" (Chapman 2007:32).  This ideological shift within Fleming's novels "is usually interpreted as a reflection of a mile 'thaw' in the Cold War after the anti-Communist paranoia of the 1950s" (Chapman 2007:32).  For instance, the scholar Umberto Eco contends that Fleming had "ceased to identify the wicked with Russia as soon as the international situation rendered Russia less menacing according to the general opinion" (1966: 59; emphasis in original)