Rumble In the Jungle
While reading The Man With the Gold Gun recently for the first time in fifty-seven years, besides sensing the almost unavoidable Western-gunslinger vibe, I suspected that I could name the actor Fleming had cast as Scaramanga in the movie playing inside his head while he typed his hero’s final adventure.
Fleming’s so-called novel might more accurately be described as two short stories strapped together. In the first, Bond returns after his supposed death in Japan, having been brainwashed into attempting to kill “M.” After being deprogrammed, he attempts to redeem himself in the second part by taking on a suicide mission in Jamaica to kill a notorious assassin, Francisco “Pistols” Scaramanga.
I’ve made guesses earlier about the clues for Fleming’s casting preferences, such as hints that point to Orson Welles as a model for Blofeld, and Victor Mature for Largo. Both Cary Grant and David Niven make appearances as Bond until You Only Live Twice, when the role is clearly written with Connery in mind.
A flamboyant gunman over six feet tall with long sideburns, ears that lie flat against the sides of his head, a pencil mustache and a habit of referring to Bond as “feller,” seemed a role tailor-made for Richard Boone, star of the CBS series Have Gun Will Travel. Having become familiar with the way Fleming lays out clues to the source material for his novels, I started searching for an episode of the series in which Paladin squares off in a duel with another knight in the American West.
Since the show ran for six seasons, with nearly forty episodes per season, this might have entailed investing a considerable amount of time looking for a golden needle in a haystack of vintage television. And then, a special episode popped up on YouTube for my consideration.
What I found was a colorized version of a 1962 entry called “Genesis,” listed as “the forgotten episode.” “Genesis” tells the story of how Paladin earned his professional name and the insignia adorning his holster and business card. In a flashback to one decade earlier, we see the hero tricked by a corrupt businessman into fighting a duel with a pistoleer dressed in black who goes by the name “Smoke.” The grizzled gunman, who defends local ranchers from the predatory businessman, talks repeatedly about knights sallying forth to slay dragons, while dubbing his younger opponent, “Paladin.”
Smoke suffers from a debilitating cough which, on a TV series, signals that his days are numbered. After capturing Paladin he trains the younger man in the art of gunfighting, well enough that Paladin fatally wounds Smoke in their inevitable showdown, while Paladin is only grazed by a bullet. When Smoke exhales his last breath, Richard Boone (who plays both roles) leans down and, with the aid of photographic trickery, seems to close the eyelids of his deceased doppelgänger.
It’s hard to avoid seeing a note of cruel foreshadowing in the teleplay today, since Boone reportedly smoked as many as five packs of cigarettes a day and would die from throat cancer at the age of sixty-three.
The colorization process unintentionally provides a fitting touch for an early scene where Paladin disarms a would-be assassin in his palatial room at the Carlton. After stand-ins have pummeled each other in a lengthy display of acrobatic fight choreography, Paladin brandishes his opponent’s weapon, which has been tinted to reflect the ornate interior, giving it the appearance of a golden gun.
The episode was written by Sam Rolfe a few years before developing The Man From U.N.C.L.E. with Norman Felton, who was acquainted with Ian Fleming and proudly accepted a few suggestions from the creator of James Bond.
If you ask me, ideas may have been flowing in both directions.