May 13, 2012 |
The simple declarative sentence, “Bond, James Bond” still elicits visions of diamonds and champagne, curvy girls and brutal assassins, and luxury products placed carefully embedded in a breathless text. A British public weary of rationing and cheap demob suits, coal fires and smog, devoured Ian Fleming’s sexy and ultra-violent novels, whose fabulous covers alone were worth the price of admission.
The films that followed were likewise packed with eager women, lavish food and drink, bespoke tailoring, casual mayhem and futuristic weaponry. Fleming’s sadistic, misogynistic tales embroidered our callow imaginations and primed us for the onslaught of sex and drugs that the 1960s would unleash. But in the beginning there was Bond.
In real life, Sean Connery would never have been admitted to Bond’s profession, having been born the son of a cleaning lady and a lorry driver in Edinburgh. The public (ie private) school was closed to boys like Connery, who came up the hard way, fighting off psychopaths in lowlife Scottish pubs. The director Terence Young (Dr No, From Russia with Love, Thunderball) coached the ingénue in how to imitate the ways in which the upper half lives, and walks, and holds their silver forks. It worked, and Connery passed as an ex-naval officer, now working as a “blunt instrument” for the British government. His slightly rough trade edge only added to his instant appeal, and Connery quickly became synonymous with the suave Bond character, which in turn engendered a long struggle to divest himself of that image. This might explain why he agreed to strut around in a red nappy in Zardoz (1974) as the wild man Zed, indeed even to summon a boner on command in appreciation of the beauty of Charlotte Rampling (not that difficult a task, really). Connery, wearing only a long ponytail and a shred of cloth, somehow kept his dignity intact, his facial expression betrayed not a sign of the absurdity of this particular demand on his thespian abilities. He remained stoically Bondian, even while compelled to spout Nietzschean platitudes like, “He who fights too long against dragons, becomes a dragon himself… ” as John Boorman’s bizarre post-hippie opus unravelled, an aberration in an otherwise-distinguished directing career, even though sci-fi nerds love it, apparently. Connery’s noble effort to throw off the shackles of Bond, didn’t work – the image was too deeply implanted in the public’s collective mind (a terrible entity, capable of crushing an artist’s career with a single blow), which is why few actors wanted to follow in his footsteps.
In any case there weren’t that many actors who could project the particular kind of testicular fortitude that Connery exuded as Bond: a mixture of extreme charm and physical threat that certain military types possess, veterans of dirty wars, hard men who had spiked the guns of Navarone, handy with a pistol knife and club, men with blood on their hands. And they can take it, as well as dish it out. When the laser is bearing down on Bond’s wedding tackle in Goldfinger and the psychopath Auric G leaves him to his fate, Bond looks vaguely alarmed but the audience is still certain that their hero will somehow avoid singing in the castrati choir.
In 1964 sexual intercourse was still an undiscovered country, and yet we were suddenly confronted with these glossy films, absolutely dripping with gorgeous women, all of whom seemed freely available to Bond – even Pussy Galore (the name was shocking back in 1964), played as a Sapphic-flavoured dominatrix with a history of child abuse by Honor Blackman, who would later excite me no end throughout the 1960s with those extraordinary leathery outfits she wore on The Avengers. Pussy, who had a team of acrobats-turned-cat-burglars (in the movie they morphed into stunt pilots) eventually shed her Sapphic tendencies and fell for Bond’s manly charms, causing Goldfinger’s well-laid plans to invade Fort Knox to go badly wrong.
The image of Ursula Andress in Dr No stepping out of the ocean like a lustier version of Aphrodite was worshipped nightly by many a boy locked in his suburban bedroom with a box of Kleenex. The way her incredible feminine shape interposed itself between ocean and sky, elemental, and just in case you didn’t get the picture, holding a very pink conch shell with its inward curving lips… Bond comes jogging along the beach and, having just reduced his tobacco intake to 10 unfiltered cigarettes a day from his usual 60 (specially ordered monthly from Morlands of Grosvenor Street), was feeling very fit… Later, or perhaps in another film, he would swim ashore in a neoprene black frogman suit and then strip down on the beach to reveal an immaculate, handmade, ivory Brioni tux – another indelible style moment. A thousand boys decided in that moment that, when they grew up, they, too, would have handmade suits with trousers that could be unzipped in the corner of a casino garden in Monte Carlo by the elegant hands of someone resembling Andress, undressed.
Apart from all the free-flowing sex, implied and actual, the Bond films were filled with sophisticated weapons and unpleasant murders, performed by a cast of eccentric villains, though the films downplayed the sadism that Fleming can barely suppress in the novels. The character of Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love gave Lotte Lenya some much-needed employment, but best of all, apart from her ratchet-like jaw, were the custom-built shoes she wore that contained a poison-tipped spike. In the book she managed to poison Bond with a well-placed penalty kick, but in the film she fails to spike him and is eventually dispatched with a bullet. In the same film, the dyed-blond killer Red Grant, superbly played by Robert Shaw, wore a watch that contained a hidden wire, used to garrotte his victims. Bond almost succumbs to this form of execution in a magnificent and claustrophobic struggle on the Orient Express, before finally deceiving Red and strangling him with his own customised Timex.
Then there is Oddjob’s bowler. Fleming’s sly irony, tinted with a hint of racism, managed to convert something so iconic and British as a bowler hat into a deadly weapon wielded by an Asian strongman played by Harold Sakata. Oddjob’s trademark was this steel-rimmed hat, doubtless made by Lock of St James’s Street, which he used with lethal accuracy on various victims, before Bond fried him with an electric charge as he tried to recover the hat jammed in a steel fence. Before Google I always thought Oddjob was the same actor who played the Asian trick in Belle de Jour (1967), the guy whom all the working girls shun, who shows the contents of a little ivory box to Belle, and Catherine Deneuve’s long hand wraps around his plump neck and she smiles and embraces him. A delightful moment. But that wasn’t Oddjob moonlighting for Buñuel. Sakata served only Cubby Broccoli.
Bond’s back-up team at MI6 were an eccentric crew. M’s secretary, Miss Moneypenny, had a long-standing flirtation with Bond that always seemed sexier and more realistic to this goggle-eyed teenage viewer than many of the actual liaisons Bond does have, which often seemed shallow and peremptory, and in the case of many of the women, punishable by death. How often I wished they would just go into a broom cupboard and get it over with while waiting interminably for M to summon Bond to his next mission.
A psychologist, who wishes to remain anonymous, observes that M and Q resemble shadowy paternal figures for the orphan Bond. Indeed, now that M is a woman (played by Judi Dench), the mummy connection seems more marked, and her severity in the way she relates to Bond perhaps harks back to the way Fleming’s own mum treated him, harsh, demanding, severe. Fleming called his own mum “M”. Case closed. And where does Q fit in this psychological puzzle? Q is the weapons man and though a gun is sometimes just a gun he seems to take a deep enjoyment in endowing Bond with all manner of phallic firepower, not to mention the sleek and penile Aston Martin.
I had stopped watching the Bond films by the time Roger Moore came aboard. The zeitgeist had changed by then. Moore had been that clever toff The Saint in the TV series of the same name, and he was way too upper clarse for my taste. Nice enough chap, but he reminded me of the mustachioed snobs who drove around in Triumph TR3s picking up girls in Nottinghamshire towns, faking their military and Oxbridge background, getting pussy galore with their fake credentials. Further, Moore seemed to lack the innately sadistic qualities that Connery’s Bond displayed, and which so excited Fleming that he retooled the character to be more swinishly Sean after seeing Connery in the role. Moore’s acting was famously minimal, his expressive eyebrows doing most of the emoting. But the film-going public seemed happy enough, and yet he cranked out another seven Bond films full of gizmos and gadgets, defeating lethal foes who usually wanted to take over and/or destroy the world. Moore was a passable Bond, he fit that lightweight late-1970s ethos, perhaps a reflection of the rapidly diminishing power of the British Empire, still getting the job done, but without quite the same brutal and overweening authority as this little kingdom once had. One never felt he could deliver a beating or indeed a sexual pounding with the same tartan vehemence as auld lang Sean.
Timothy Dalton, an accomplished Shakespearean actor, was a very brief Bond, playing him perhaps too realistically as a depressive alcoholic with homicidal tendencies, disabused of ideas of patriotism and honour, which may have been accurate as far as the novels were concerned, but not so promising for the decisive man of action that Bond was supposed, at least by producers Broccoli and Saltzman, to represent. Dalton supposedly sat around on the film set reading and underlining scenes from the book; one can imagine how that must have frightened the director. Audiences didn’t want a depressed Bond, they wanted an ass-kicking sexual predator. Pierce Brosnan followed Dalton with a seven-year stint that produced four unmemorable films. By this time, audiences were tired of fake villains when there were more than enough real ones ruining the world. The Brosnan Bond seemed out of sync with the times, his glances bordered on the smug, and his Bond run came and went without fanfare or new fans. Maybe a theme song by Shirley Bassey would have re-energised the franchise.
Daniel Craig has drop-kicked Bond into the 21st century with his parkour-packed rendition, portraying a Bond who gets beat down but gets back up and kills people quick and looks incredibly good in a tux, almost as elegant as Connery emerging from the wetsuit. Craig has a long list of excellent credits, from a breakthrough portrayal of Francis Bacon’s slightly simple but lovable boyfriend George Dyer, to amoral drug dealers and Jewish Resistance fighters. As Bond he wears that combination of weary machismo lit by tiny sparks of tenderness like an expensive suit. I spotted him on Lispenard Street in New York a few weeks ago, scouting locations, surrounded by a bevy of beauties masquerading as producers. He was doing Sean proud.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/james_bond
by Max Blagg
