Jodhi has even managed to track down what appears to be the sole surviving copy of the shooting script. Actress Susan Teale, who played the small role of Bond's secretary Loelia Ponsonby (a character from the books who more or less stands in for Moneypenny here) produced the handsomely bound screenplay when Jodhi went out to interview her in Florida, where she now resides. Apparently she would often keep scripts as mementos, and has built up quite a collection. ("In the film they made Loelia - or Lil, as Bond calls her, a blonde," Miss Teale told Jodhi. "To avoid my looking too similar to Brenda. In the book, though, both women are dark-haired, the same type. Ian Fleming had this thing about dark-haired, blue-eyed women. And working with Dirk was sheer delight. A lovely man, so handsome and charming.")
Credited to Welles and Mace, from an outline by Fleming, the script stays scrupulously faithful to the novel - the most significant departure being the "lifelike mask" that Hides Drax's wartime scarring.
Interestingly, Bond is presented here not as the never-a-dull-moment action man of the Eon films, but a civil servant who endures periods of desk-bound boredom between assignments. The film opens with a series of establishing shots of London on a dull workaday morning. Packed buses, rain, yawning commuters. Slowly, we close in on the tall, grey building near Regent's Park and - in a scene shot by Welles with an almost fetishistic attention to firearm aesthetics worthy of Sergio Leone - we find the shadowy figure of Bond killing time, as in the novel, with some target practice.
(Welles cheekily borrows from his own famous entrance from The Third Man, allowing us the first proper glimpse of Bond's face as he flips out his gunmetal Ronson and lights a cigarette.) Next, in sharp contrast, we see 007 ploughing through a pile of routine reports in his office before, mercifully, receiving the longed-for summons from "M". After the briefing, and a short scene showing Bond at home, brushing up on his card tricks, we cut to the Blades club, where Bond enjoys a gourmet dinner with "M", then teaches the cheating Drax a lesson at the gaming table. (This dramatic encounter, with fencing substituted for bridge, along with disappointingly reworked versions of the Drax and Gala Brand characters, eventually found its way into the recent Die Another Day.)
