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Plot line: Casey moves to London. Murders British official's babies and manages to escape justice. Casey goes back to Florida because she has immunity from the law there. Bond tracks her down in Florida and kills her. However, Bond seduces Casey before killing her, faces near death experience, but live is saved only after receiving numerous penicillin shots.
I honestly don't recall what you said about her, but believe me, I'm as apalled as the next person that she escaped justice. I'm sure one day, karma will come around and get her.
Edit: Never mind, just backed up to the first page. Child and animal abusers are the worst. At the risk of going off track, I can understand your point of view, but that's the easy way out for them. Now. a lifetime of being abused in prison is actually more fitting for them.
Ted Bundy? I can't see how a psychotic sexual prediator serial killer could make a good villain. What would be the storyline?! What would be the tag line? "he doesn't want to destroy the world or hold it to ransom, he just wants to rape and murder girls!" I don't think that would be a good idea!
I couldn't agree more and also as a parent myself I would love to see them strung up. However this post is about real life villains who could be the inspiration for a Bond villain and I can't see how this could or would work in a Bond movie, see my post about Ted Bundy.
It worked in Zodiac, and he was nameless. Amazingly tense film, one to watch alone at night with the lights snapped off. :D
Probably not accurate, mate.
Maybe not 100 % accurate, but what story or film is about a real person.
Another contender would be Julian Assange. Some people regard him as a hero risking his freedom to expose the dirty truth that the U.S. and its allies are trying to suppress. To others he's an arrogant, attention seeking narcissist who unnecessarily puts people's lives at risk for his own glory. Take the latter interpretation and apply it to a character and you've got the potential for a great villain.
Exactly.
No, Victor Bout was a gun runner.
Kin Jong Il was a Bond type villian in Team America.
Benito Mussolini as a prototype James Bond villain?
Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), who was Italy’s youngest Prime Minister and Il Duce from 1922 to 1943 and the leader of the German puppet regime in the Republic of Salo in Northern Italy from 1944-45 could be considered as a prototype for the ultimate Bond villain. A little research reveals references linking Mussolini to some two of the literary Bond villains and Ian Fleming’s interest in the Italian dictator and the inventor of fascism. Mussolini’s ambitions to rebuild the Roman Empire by territorial expansion led to him entering into an alliance with Adolf Hitler’s Germany in the Rome-Berlin Axis in 1936 and the Pact of Steel in 1938. He entered Italy into the Second World War in June 1940 by attacking France from the south but this was only a token gesture as he wanted his share of the war booty from Hitler, but he was always very much the junior partner in the Axis alliance. Italy was either always the lesser of the great powers or the greater of the lesser powers in Europe during the inter-war period, and as Mussolini’s ambitions for the domination of the Mediterranean and for a new Roman Empire were far in excess of the man-power and natural resources Italy had at its disposal, he can be seen as a template Bond villain.
The first visible influence that Mussolini has on the structure of the literary Bond villains can be seen in the first novel, CASINO ROYALE (1953). When M is reading the dossier on the villain Le Chiffre, the physical description contains this passage:
‘Eyes very dark brown with whites showing all round iris.’ (‘Casino Royale,’ Pan Books Ltd., 1965, p. 20). Later on in the novel when Bond is facing directly across from Le Chiffre at the baccarat table in Casino Royale there is the following interesting physical description of the character that was the prototype Bond villain and the epitome of evil and sadism:
‘Le Chiffre looked incuriously at him, the whites of his eyes, which showed all round the irises, lending something impassive and doll-like to his gaze.’ (‘Casino Royale,’ Pan Books Ltd., 1965, p. 77).
The character trait of a dark iris totally surrounded by the whites of the eye is continued in the novel THUNDERBALL (1961). When Fleming introduces Ernst Stavro Blofeld as the head of SPECTRE in his first of three appearances in the novels he describes him thus:
‘Blofeld’s own eyes were deep black pools surrounded – totally surrounded, as Mussolini’s were – by very clear whites. The doll-like effect of this unusual symmetry was enhanced by long silken black lashes that should have belonged to a woman. The gaze of these soft doll’s eyes was totally relaxed and rarely held any expression stronger than a mild curiosity in the object of their focus. They conveyed a restful certitude in their owner and in their analysis of what they observed. To the innocent, they exuded confidence, a wonderful cocoon of confidence in which the observed one could rest and relax knowing that he was in comfortable, reliable hands. But they stripped the guilty or the false and made them feel transparent – as transparent as a fishbowl through whose sides Blofeld examined, with only the most casual curiosity, the few solid fish, the grains of truth, suspended in the void of deceit or attempted obscurity. Blofeld’s gaze was a microscope, the window on the world of a superbly clear brain, with a focus that had been sharpened by thirty years of danger and of keeping just one step ahead of it, and of an inner self-assurance built up on a lifetime of success in whatever he had attempted.’ (‘Thunderball,’ Pan Books Ltd., 1963, pp. 50-1).
In GOLDFINGER (1959) Fleming describes the gangster Billy (The Grinner) Ring of the famous Chicago ‘Machine’ in the following way:
‘It was a pale, pear-shaped, baby face with downy skin and a soft thatch of straw-coloured hair, but the eyes, which should have been pale blue, were a tawny brown. The whites showed all round the pupils and gave a mesmeric quality to the hard thoughtful stare, unsoftened by a tic in the right eyelid which made the right eye wink with the heart-beat.’ (‘Goldfinger,’ Pan Books Ltd., 1965, p. 167).
After quoting this passage from GOLDFINGER, Kingsley Amis notes in THE JAMES BOND DOSSIER (1965):
‘To have one’s pupils entirely surrounded by white, ‘as Mussolini’s were’, and as Le Chiffre’s and Blofeld’s also are, ought to qualify one for the highest villainous office. Billy’s part, however, is little more than a creep on one; he appears only momentarily after his first scene.’ (‘The James Bond Dossier,’ Pan Books Ltd., 1966, p. 65).
The physical descriptions of these three Fleming Bond villains match those of Mussolini who had imposing eyes with black irises that commanded those subservient to him to obey his command. Mussolini also shared the physical characteristic of a totally bald head with the literary Dr. Julius No and with the screen adaptations of Ernst Stavro Blofeld as played variously by Donald Pleasence, Telly Savalas and John Hollis. He also shared a love of cats with the screen version of Blofeld, though larger than the Persian variety. In Nicholas Farrell’s recent biography of the Italian dictator we are told:
“‘He especially loved cats. There is a photograph of him taken in 1923 hugging a female lion cub, which had been given to him as a gift. He kept the lioness, which he called Italia, in a room next to his study in his Rome home, until it was a young adult when it was moved to the Rome zoo.’ (‘Mussolini, A New Life,’ Nicholas Farrell, Phoenix, Orion Books Ltd., 2004, p. 13)
‘…the flat was also home for a while to Italia, Mussolini’s lion cub, whose smell combined with that of the eau-de-cologne. […] After several months Mussolini reluctantly gave Italia, which he took for walks on the lead, to Rome’s zoo after she pounced on him one day and scratched him. Mussolini loved animals, in particular cats. ‘If I could do whatever I liked, I should always be at sea. When that is impossible, I content myself with animals. Their mental life approximates that of man and yet they don’t want to get anything out of him: horses, dogs and my favourite, the cat.’ In 1943 he wrote that ‘animals are superior to men because they have instinct and not reason.’” (‘Mussolini, A New Life,’ Nicholas Farrell, Phoenix, Orion Books Ltd., 2004, pp. 150-1)
Ian Fleming also had an interesting connection with the life of Mussolini. In John Pearson’s biography of Fleming we are told:
‘While Fleming was a student at Geneva it seemed as if his future was already mapped out: a cultured dilettante, a highbrow litterateur of private means, eccentric tastes and no conceivable interest in anything that could appeal to the public in general.’
We learn that ‘he bought an old passport that had belonged to Mussolini.’ (‘Alias James Bond – The Life of Ian Fleming,’ John Pearson, Bantam Books, 1967, p. 41)
John Pearson later recounts how Fleming also based his first Bond villain on his wartime acquaintance, Aleister Crowley:
‘One was the villain figure who made his bow in Casino Royale in the fat, white sluglike Le Chiffre, with his sadistic impulses, his Benzedrine inhaler, and his insatiable appetite for women. It is likely that Fleming borrowed some of his external characteristics from the necromancer Aleister Crowley. Not only does the general figure of Le Chiffre, with his size, his ugliness, and all the overtones of unmentionable vice match the impression Crowley usually created, but minor parallels exist between them. Both called people “dear boy,” and both, like Mussolini, had the whites of their eyes completely visible around the iris.’ (‘Alias James Bond – The Life of Ian Fleming,’ John Pearson, Bantam Books, 1967, p. 180)
In Andrew Lycett’s biography of Ian Fleming there is a description of the contents of Fleming’s ‘tall, dark, masculine bachelor’s pad, loosely based on the vast downstairs studio at the back of his mother’s Cheyne Walk house:’
‘Other paraphernalia included the framed obituary of his father, an enamel miniature of Admiral Nelson, who had become a substitute hero, Mussolini’s passport from Switzerland, and a shelf-full of silver cups he had won at Eton.’ (‘Ian Fleming,’ Andrew Lycett, Phoenix, Orion Books Ltd., 2002, p. 80)
Later in the biography Lycett describes Fleming’s one and only visit to the House of Commons in the year before the outbreak of war in Europe when Chamberlain had assured ‘Peace in Our Time’ after the Munich Conference in September 1938 which Mussolini had suggested should be called to solve the Czechoslovakian crisis:
‘…in an effort to broaden his own minimal understanding of politics, Ian paid his one and only visit to the House of Commons in late 1938 when, as he put it, “we were unattractively trying to cajole Mussolini away from Hitler.” (‘Ian Fleming,’ Andrew Lycett, Phoenix, Orion Books Ltd., 2002, p. 95)
These collected extracts from the fiction of Ian Fleming do show the influence Mussolini as a tyrant had on literary Bond villainy, and by extension on some of the film Bond villains, such as Blofeld. Mussolini’s other credentials for being an early template for a Bond villain also included the fact that he was a fencer (as was Sir Gustav Graves in 2002’s DIE ANOTHER DAY) who fought many duels before he came to power and that he also considered himself a swordsman in the bedroom. His definition of foreplay was the time it took him to push his conquest to the floor, and although a married man he had several mistresses throughout his life. This also ties in with Le Chiffre’s ‘insatiable appetite for women.’
Mussolini’s physical appearance, his extravagant choice of pets and his views on the nature of animals, his background as a fencer and his flamboyant dreams of leading a second division power like Italy to recover its lost Roman Empire all add up to make him a pioneer Bond villain and a template that certainly appears to have influenced Fleming’s villains.
Oh, controversial opinion on such a liberal forum! That said, I have a book called The Black Mussolini (2011) by H. von Bulow:
"People elect their own dictators and tyrants...
Germany elected Hitler...
Italy elected Mussolini...
Venezuela elected Chavez
America elected Obama!
Will we follow suit?"
The title intrigued me so I bought it from Amazon.
P.S. I think Obama was just a big celebrity presidency but that he delivered NOTHING.
And excellent observation, @00Beast.
Thank you @Thunderfinger. It's a bit of an amateurish article to be fair (as is all my stuff I guess!) but it was written back in 2007 and I have since added a lot more to those bare bones posted above.
Yes, I started re-writing it in 2007 then kind of gave up on it after writing a lot. I'll have to dig it out again. Mussolini is a thing with me - did my history dissertation on him!