The Swiss Bond
"Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. " Harry Lime (Orson Welles), The Third Man (1949).
What Harry Lime couldn't have foreseen was that the Swiss would move on from cuckoo clocks to films. But the results are just as predictable, which is why the owners of the James Bond franchise should never have allowed Marc Forster within an Alpenhorn's range of Quantum of Solace. Yes, it has enough terror, murder and bloodshed to satisfy any Borgia, but what it lacks is the Renaissance humour and humanity of a Dante or a Boccaccio. When the next Bond adventure is being filmed, Eon Productions should take a look at The Ipcress File (1965). To be sure, Daniel Craig is no Michael Caine and no one wants Bond to turn into a jester, but Len Deighton's Harry Palmer expresses more wit and empathy in four minutes than Marc Foster allows Bond in his entire film.
Talking of Harry Palmer, when I met Michael Crichton three years ago I asked him what advice he'd give to somebody setting out to write a thriller. Here's what he said: "There was a writer named Len Deighton who had done a series of books about an agent named Harry Palmer that Michael Caine played. But how they were done, how they made me feel exactly, how they were structured I studied quite intensely — not in an attempt to necessarily do what Deighton had done, but to really see how the effects were created. And I think that's a very good thing for writers to do." Film directors, too.
