As a kid, I watched all the James Bond movies. And since I didn’t travel beyond the country of my birth until my late 20s, the films’ depictions of places made a big and romantic impact on me.

Many of the places featured in Bond films — from the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul (“From Russia with Love”) to the Louisiana bayou (“Live and Let Die”) — I’ve since visited myself, and I’ve always gotten an extra kick out of them because they’d been in the movies.

In fact, getting a place into a movie is a tried-and-true place branding technique. It is quick-acting, and for better or worse, can have a very long tail. (Midnight Express director Oliver Stone was still apologizing to Turkey more than 25 years after the film’s debut for “overdramatising” some negative aspects of the country).

Meanwhile, Bond’s creator Ian Fleming, himself an inveterate traveller and man of the world, “turn[ed] fiction into fact with a ‘Baedeker’ as exotic as any of his famous adventure novels — with a specific guide to tantalizing pleasures, fantastic sights, and memorabilia in his choice of the most thrilling cities of the world.” My own copy of Ian Fleming’s Thrilling Cities, from whose dustjacket copy that quotation was lifted, I found at a library sale a dozen years ago in Westport, Connecticut (which is not itself a thrilling city).

Anyway, it wasn’t appropriate to get into luscious locales in my review of the Bond-Fleming exhibit at the Imperial War Museum which ran in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, but I sneaked in one line about it.

Update (23 March 09): Just ran across the James Bond Lifestyle web site.