JFK, Conservatives , and the James Bond Films

BIg Hollywood has such an interesting post on the Bond books and films including how President Kennedy helped make James Bond!! See For Conservative Movie Lovers: Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and ‘Goldfinger’ Part 1

I never knew he was so controversal early on. This part is fun:

And yet even a movie with the esteem and cultural impact of Goldfinger has its enemies and party poopers. Anyone who’s made a cursory study of the Bond phenomenon is familiar with many of the early critical bashings. The most infamous came from the (then young and liberal, now old and conservative) historian Paul Johnson, who in 1958 wrote a New Statesman review of the novel Dr. No titled “Sex, snobbery and sadism,” in which he wildly attacked Fleming’s achievement: “I have just finished what is without a doubt the nastiest book I have ever read. . . Fleming deliberately and systematically excites, and then satisfies the very worst instincts of his readers. This seems to me far more dangerous than straight pornography.”
You might assume that Johnson’s half-century-old opinions were superseded long ago by more modern tastes. Not so — mainstream critics and bloggers continue to lament the perpetual popularity of the Bond franchise. Over at BBC News Finlo Rohrer asks “Is James Bond loathsome?” Techland’s Matt Selman accuses Fleming’s stories (and, to the degree they adhere to them, the films) of being “packed with outdated, but probably deeply-felt, sexism, racism, and, yes, even homophobia. . . a recent re-read of Goldfinger revealed the hate-speech was hilariously explicit.” He also condemns Bond’s successful seduction of Goldfinger’s lesbian pilot, the aptly named Pussy Galore, as “every idiot male moron’s fantasy.” Even Fleming fans grant, as Bond expert Bob Chapman does in the above-mentioned BBC article, that the stories are “sexist, heterosexist, xenophobic, everything that is not politically correct.”