Similarly, Fleming describing British World War II veterans in the “Red Bull Express” (a real-life unit composed of Black servicemen) as Black in Goldfinger has been expunged. As has Fleming’s attempt to write in an “ethnic” dialect, multiple uses of the n-word, and in other novels entire Black characters who were depicted as subservient to Bond. For instance, a passage in which Fleming described the dialect of Harlem residents in Live and Let Die as “straight Harlem-Deep South with a lot of New York thrown in,” has been deleted. It’s reported that new printings of all of Fleming’s books will remove language that can be fairly deemed as racist and derived from dated attitudes and cultural norms. As per the British newspaper’s reporting, the company which owns the literary rights to the late author’s work has commissioned a review of Fleming’s novels by “sensitivity readers” ahead of the forthcoming 70th anniversary of Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale, later this year. has set for themselves, according to The Sunday Telegraph. That is the massive, and frankly insidious, task that Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. Yet if you think their work is cut out for them, just imagine trying to “sanitize” (or rewrite) Fleming’s actual mid-20th century’s point-of-view for the sensitivities of today. In other words, the Bond movie producers have yet to truly reckon with what Fleming’s iconic superspy looks like in the modern world. Going into that movie, Craig’s Bond had retired and attempted to settle down-something Ian Fleming’s original literary creation occasionally fancied yet never got past a doomed walk down the aisle-and by the end of No Time to Die, the same actor’s interpretation of the character was a father who sacrificed his life for mother and child. While 2021’s No Time to Die was the first 007 flick made after the #MeToo movement began an ongoing (and hopefully lasting) change in the culture, that film also was designed from the ground up to be the swan song of a very distinct and strangely already antiquated version of the character from less than 20 years ago: Daniel Craig’s brooding, tortured superspy.

As Eon Productions prepares to reboot the James Bond movie franchise for the second time in the 21st century, there is a lot of apprehension about what that will look like in the 2020s.

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