Edited by author 08-18-2004 12:19 PM
By a strange coincidence, Kevin Myers has a column in today's Irish Times on this same topic. Inspired by news that Quentin Tarantino wants to direct a Bond movie but set in the 1960s, Myers points out that Casino Royale is actually set in 1953, a decade before the movies were made.

So James Bond's sexual liasons were not set in the permissive 1960s but in the altogether different decade of the 1950s, when most Englishwomen still lost their virginity on their wedding nights. The Bond heroines are therefore women of some courage and spirit, and Bond really is an utter cad.

Further down he says

Some aspects of the novels have been sacrificed for the sake of the market. Fleming filled all his Bond works with gratuitous sadistic violence, true portrayals of which would have given the films a commercially disastrous 'X' rating. And his sex scenes were, at the time, among the most graphic and explicit in English literature, which if properly depicted, would also have earned X ratings.