Tuesday, October 6, 2015

...the 'face' of James Bond of Ian Fleming's description...


Ian Fleming's description of Bond, at least through the veil of his characters, he appears to be a "cold and ruthless" Hoagy Carmichael, with a scar upon his right cheek.  An interesting turn of popular culture, Carmichael was a star of music and film.  His song credits include Stardust, Georgia on my Mind, Up a Lazy River, Lazybones, and Heart and Soul.  The long angular face of Carmichael graced countless record players in the late 30s and through the 50s.

In Fleming's Moonraker, the character Gala Brand thinks that Mr. Bond is "certainly good-looking....Rather like Hoagy Carmichael in a way. That black hair falling down over the right eyebrow. Much the same bones. But there was something a bit cruel in the mouth, and the eyes were cold."

Bond is consistently six feet (or taller), athletically below 170 pounds.  He also has a faint scar on the back of one hand, in memorial of his run-in with SMERSH, a counter SAS unit from Russia.

SMERSH is a contraction of two Russian words, SMERt SHpionam, or 'death to spies'.

Wildly, the SMERSH agent that carved the initials into Bond actually stopped Le Chiffre from killing the British spy and let Bond go.

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