I have the Bond 50th Anniversary Blu-ray set and am starting to watch the series in order with my teen-aged son. I have also started to re-read some of the original Fleming ‘Bond’ books. I read some of the books when I was a teenager and quickly realized that for the most part, little of the books other than the title found their way into the movie scripts.

Dr. No opens with Bond playing Baccarat in a casino and not on any apparent mission. Sounds nice, but the man is basically a civil servant, who as noted in the book Moonraker, earns about $2,000 pounds a year. So how is it that a ’00′ HMSS/MI6 agent is depicted as a wealthy playboy? As the supplementary material on the Disc suggested, it was director Terence Young who developed the character of James Bond, and much of the resulting character was based on Young himself and his lifestyle. Young reportedly took a fixed director’s fee rather than a percentage for the three films he directed. Many people commented on his extravagant spending, and one noted that if you saw Dom Perignon being drunk in a scene, it was real and provided by Young. Further, one person commented that Young was such a spendthrift that his income was one film behind his spending.

So, while the way Sean Connery is introduced as “Bond, James Bond” may be clever film-making and an iconic line, the playboy image and the civil servant-spy reality just don’t make sense.