A Tale of Two Tales
I now understand how far off the mark I was when I named the homepage of this website “Sleeping Beauty On the Orient Express.” Yes, Fleming does borrow the dragon, the sleeping princess, the hero with a magic sword, and an old crone who packs poisoned needles, all from a tale which the Walt Disney Company was just then adapting into an animated classic as Fleming toiled over his own magnum opus. However, while acknowledging that the book contains bits of other Disney classics, I hadn’t realized that the entire first half of the novel is chock full of deliberate references to the 1950 Disney version of Cinderella.
Before she puts on the disguise of a Parisian crone innocently tending to her knitting, Colonel Kleb is Tatiana Romanova’s superior, an authority figure who tells the poor cipher clerk to think of her as her own mother, even while attempting to seduce the girl before pimping her out for a romantic suicide mission. In short, as wicked stepmothers go, Rosa Kleb could send Lady Tremaine to school.
I’ve previously covered the passages in From Russia, With Love which link the faithful “Darko” Kerim with Cinderella’s Bruno the bloodhound, and the ones that tie the cruel Krilencu to Lady Tremaine’s cat Lucifer. While I was steadfastly convinced that Fleming was inspired to create the subplot about a gypsy camp by those lovable mice in Cinderella, I still felt that the sadistic fight between rival girls competing over the same man, had to be a product of Fleming’s own lurid imagination.
I hadn’t noticed that it’s actually in the Disney movie. Or at least the seed is there. Did I fast-forward through this part earlier? A second viewing seemed necessary when I recalled Lady Tremaine’s unpleasant daughters. What were their names? And do the girls actually come to blows? This time through I paid close attention to Anastasia and Drizella.
“Anastasia” is, of course, the name of the 20th century's best-known Russian princess, one whose impersonator was the subject of a popular play that was also being turned into a film while Fleming revised his manuscript.
But perhaps more famous in her own time was Anastasia’s beautiful older sister Princess Tatiana. By giving his orphaned office-drudge a name that suggests Russian royalty (perhaps triggered by its ironic use in the Disney film), Fleming manages to have it both ways - she’s the poor servant-girl from one fairy tale who is also secretly the beautiful princess from another. She is both Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.
More importantly for this discussion, Anastasia and Drizella are equally smitten with a handsome prince. Their jealousy is contained until their much more attractive stepsister tries to accompany them to the prince's ball. That’s when all hell breaks loose. Lady Tremaine points out adornments to Cinderella’s outfit which her girls had previously tossed aside as dowdy trash, before being rescued and repurposed by those thieving gyp... er, mice. The ugly stepsisters claw and tear at Cinderella’s makeshift gown until it has been reduced to tatters, her bodice remaining suspended by a single strap.
It’s a violent and disturbing scene, especially in a children’s movie. Fleming takes the girls’ efforts to degrade a rival much further in his retelling, a fight which could not have been filmed as written, not in 1963 or even now. Not for a Bond movie, anyway.
So, for the record, From Russia, With Love is every inch a Cinderella story until the moment when our heroes set foot aboard the Orient Express, which is when they step out of one fairy tale and into another.
Still frames are from the Walt Disney Company’s Cinderella and MGM/UA’s From Russia With Love