WELCOME TO HOLLYWOOD, MR. BOND   Decades before the global age of cinema the advertising campaign for the motion picture based on Fleming’s novel Dr. No revolved around the central image of a suave British gentleman (Sean Connery) sporting an amused grin and a Walther PPK—the gun barrel pointing north for obvious reasons. From that moment James Bond was borne by the movies.

Two years later the film franchise-holder EON Productions turned the film-going tide with the most commercially aggressive production in the industry. GOLDFINGER released in December 1964 without aspiring to greatness achieved perfection by simply being wonderful.

Now most of those beating hearts that grew up enraptured are sitting at home watching with bittersweet longing their DVDs. The rest are perennial hardcore and a cinch to still be sitting in theaters (over the past 44 years!) not having budged an inch. For these fanatics a Bond film is about something that can shine on a billboard.

Meanwhile, filmmakers have moved on to the next generation because that’s the nature of the business, as Fleming’s spawn continue to generate on screen the lively rat-a-tat-tat of gory murders (without the gore) which makes killing the bad guy somehow cool, not cruel. And because no matter how horrific those spasms of bloodshed (will never fill a thimble) the consecrated rule is that the Bond cuisine of dark menace, disturbing images and brief sexuality be presumptive family entertainment served on a PG-13-rated platter. That’s the rule with the masses unashamedly cheering 007 on.

The real James Bond, the one found in Fleming’s 12 novels and 9 short stories lived during the Cold War between the early Fifties and mid-Sixties; a Machiavellian death merchant for whom killing in cold blood can be as facile as smacking around an uncooperative woman for information. Agent 007 is a thug—a suave thug, but a thug—a Draconian relic of post-World War II.

Logically it follows that Sony Pictures’ marketing department, mindful of the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating board, pays particular attention to U.S. theater owners seeking to gratify that prized demographic willing to drop their cheeks in the seats at the local Cineplex (with children, if not rated R) rather than wait for the DVD.

But in truth it’s how the show will best travel around the world that decides the very nature of a Bond film.

BONDHOLDER   Distributors gainfully see real activity when selling these flicks overseas, so the decision by the studio to green-light a remake based on Fleming’s Casino Royale was done so with Australia, Germany and Japan in mind and where undoubtedly the film’s distribution rights have already been pre-sold. It’s in these foreign markets, and not U.S. theaters, that the picture is expected to post enormous profits.

The last time Producer Barbara Broccoli (with Michael G. Wilson) charmed Bond fans into going to the wickets, the eye candy was the high-octane thriller DIE ANOTHER DAY. The formula routinely applied is the equivalent of a rollercoaster falling into torrid overdrive with butts-in-the-seats caught up in the phantasmagoria of computer animation without much chance to ponder why their eyes are glued to the screen.

Relying increasingly upon the viewers’ urgent consumption, the gimmicks and gags never stops for an explanation which seems almost unnecessary as Bond ends his business with a huge, hyper-kinetic explosion that glazes the eyes and muddles the mind. Codified as a cross between videogame and amusement ride and acknowledged by filmgoers as something cool to watch, at full boil Agent 007 zooms around the world toward a biblical array of threats with angelic luck. Where an unrivaled sense of chaos is entirely appropriate, he escapes death miraculously and beyond all human error.

Producer Broccoli, as one might imagine, believes it’s better to leave a captivated crowd baffled than apathetic. For sure, the redoubtable James Bond will retain his universal appeal by kowtowing to the current Zeitgeist’s fondness for fantasy figures.

It’s by necessity then that Broccoli’s Bond is this breathless, buoyant spirit of an adrenalin junky with lots of practice who champions gaudiness and ostentatious displays. He’s the modern-day super-spy who doesn’t carry out renditions, doesn’t torture by water-boarding nor perpetrate sexual degradation of the enemy. Keeping the “real-world stuff” far outside our hero’s raison d’être comfortably if carefully constrains Bond to the fun of pure escapism.

Realistic espionage is always less simple with more lurid events, once in motion, making for a rougher film and an R rating. The caveat emptor being Steven Spielberg’s MUNICH, a joyless affair not for the faint of heart, spinning a tremendously intense yarn about secret assassins assigned to track down and destroy the architect, engineer and other big fish of Black September, the Palestinian cabal that masterminded the conspiracy ending with the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.

Critical brickbats aside, at a cost of $70 million MUNICHgrossed a mere $127 million worldwide.

Entirely formulaic, at times without traction but with great precision DIE ANOTHER DAY connects the dots between setup and payoff while never failing its fundamental purpose. The show debuted in the United States with an opening weekend of $47 million. But aboard grosses jumped dramatically where the picture hauled away $425 million in box office receipts—the high-water mark for a Bond film.

BONDSMAN   Halfway into its fifth decade the franchise periodically occasions a reboot which allows filmmakers a chance to wipe the slate, vacuum the void and work the magic of turning Pierce Brosnon into Daniel Craig—or for that matter Sean Connery into Roger Moore.

The obligation to jolt the fan base ever so often by calling upon a new actor to fill the role of Agent 007, if nothing else, affirms the epitome of what this film series is really all about. Whatever your idea of a satisfying take-home, it’s about Bond…James Bond.

Sean Connery, his image upon which the lens feasts, smiles coolly wicked into the camera—a debonair Cold Warrior physically powerful, subtly persuasive who even when idle can’t be ignored.

George Lazenby in a one-off, high testosterone performance (ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE)is thrilling, funny and ultimately surprising in twisting quips as skillfully as a knife with uniformed ruthlessness and masculine grace.

Roger Moore, wooing without wowing, delivers snide observances of a dandified aristocrat as though barely attached to whatever might be going on around him.

Timothy Dalton, while managing to have no fun at all, carries out his duties with business-like efficiency under the strain of some world-weary fatigue.

Pierce Brosnon bravely without wincing risks humiliation from some pretty awful puns as a slick post-Cold Warrior bloated by worldly smugness and unearthly aplomb.

Daniel Craig suggests neither pedigree nor succession following hard in his predecessor’s footsteps, trampling nostalgia about what Bond is by preempting what everyone believes he should look like.

Bond is the man that all men wish deep down inside they could be. Craig may have Agent 007’s moody soul and Mi6 credentials, but his blond-blue-eyed bona fides bare a striking resemblance to the new millennial Euro trash with Aryan pretensions rattling out of more than half of the collection so far—beginning with FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. What does such evidence suggest?

The last time out when Bond drove a multimillion dollar blockbuster over the rainbow and down that lucrative Yellow Brick Road, he did so inside an “invisible” car. There are worse things you can do for a pot of gold (or spend ten bucks on) but the only defense of the utterly ludicrous is none at all.

It’s a theory…but after reviewing the screenplay by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade based on Casino Royale, Producer Broccoli handed screenwriter Paul Haggis (CRASH)a copy of the script, asking him to re-conceive the character. And then with a grittier take on Bond the producer cast Craig in the role.

Puzzling, even arbitrary, or maybe downright stupid—could this drive the franchise into fiscal jeopardy? If you’ve seen it all before then propping up the same old American and Eastern European stereotypes, dreary British archetypes, hoary puns and dreadful clichés runs the inherent risk of audience apathy by foolishly giving the faithful nothing cool and refreshing to relish.

Haggis said in a MTV interview regarding his involvement: “I’ve either helped to re-energize this series or I’ve just ruin James Bond for everybody, forever.”

BOND ISSUE   “All history is sex and violence,” Ian Fleming once mused with dark delight. “I don’t have James Bond’s guts with women or his other lively appetites.”

The author’s hopelessly arrogant, impossibly intelligent brutal assassin made his less-than-auspicious migration into the United States in 1952 inside a thin slice of European espionage, Casino Royale. Neatly sandwiched between high-brow English literature and low-brow American pulp, the novel sold so poorly that in 1953 the publisher reissued a paperback reprint of the original hardcover edition and like a potboiler re-titled it You Asked For It.

Fundamentally a police procedural, the narrative shapes events shrouding Le Chiffre, a sleazy agent for Soviet Russia possessed of Gallic insouciance and Old-World charm. After embezzling funds from his benefactor, the scoundrel loses the money in a string of brothel investments which he’s now determined to win back in a high-stakes baccarat game at the eponymous casino. Of course Her Majesty’s Secret Service could have the rogue go unchallenged by sanctioning his assassination, but England doesn’t want to turn this sort into a martyr for the communist cause.

James Bond is Agent 007, a British field operative for Mi6 (the secret authority working within the Ministry of Defense) and its best gambler who believes he can calculate and beat the odds. So his superior “M” sends him to France in order to make sure that Le Chiffre doesn’t win at the game. As a result, 007 spends half his time glaring at this rascal across the gaming table; to make matters worse, the other half is spent being tortured until finally branded on his hand.

We don’t need to get too deep into this, but the upshot is that, thanks to Bond’s intervention, Le Chiffre fails to regain his client’s money.

Ciphering a tale of greed, treachery and the outré methods of a cold-blooded killer, Fleming’s war-of-nerves allegory imagines a sophisticated spook with expert knowledge and keen discrimination ably predicated upon instinct and tradecraft.

Not long after its publication in Britain this epiphany on British intelligence became the pedestal for a 1954 lackluster British TV production; and in 1967 furnished the rudiments for a spoof that used the title, names of characters and the casino setting but little else. It’s not what these outings fail to say about Agent 007 but how they fail to say it.

If not the definitive translation of Fleming’s writing, the latest production does typify the regrettably growing number of bibliophiles and moviegoers who may never fully appreciate the authentic difference between literature and cinema. Whatever the differences between book and movie, Fleming aficionados with a rooting interest in Bond on film have long ago made a friend of disappointment.

For good or ill, this new version draws on roughly a third of the material written by the author. The other two-thirds places Bond in the evil clutches of global terrorists—hopefully with self-assurance and sense of humor in tact and a solid script beneath him.

Clearly, to guarantee a return on the investment by Sony, producers are obliged to avoid an Ian Fleming story that couldn’t possibly fit the mold of a James Bond film. Make sense? To put it another way, a by-the-book interpretation of the author’s adult fiction without some cleansing and lots of embellishment wouldn’t begin to live up to the popular image of Agent 007.

COMPLETION BOND   Forty-two years ago Fleming died, but connoisseurs of all-things-Bond continue to hope that somehow the remainder of the author’s oeuvre might make it into the official film canon.

Producers have already commissioned the next Bond issue under the working title “007” with filming to start in anticipation of a 2007 release. Fleming’s ardent devotees might wonder why go through all this trouble of coming up with something new and different when there are four tales by the author which have gone untouched.

“THE HILDEBRAND RARITY”   James Bond on holiday in the Seychelles Islands has been commissioned by “M” to see whether the location might prove feasible for the Admiralty to relocate its fleet from the Maldives. His report summarizes that any conceivable security hazard lay in the beauty and ready availability of the Seychelloises. Now waiting for the S.S. Kampala to take him to Mombasa, he meets an uncouth American millionaire named Milton Krest who invites him to aid in the search for a rare fish know as the Hildebrand Rarity. Bond agrees, joining Krest and his wife Elizabeth aboard the Wavekrest. During the voyage Milton verbally and physically abuses Elizabeth whom he punishes with the moribund tail of a sting ray, a flagellum nicknamed “The Corrector.” After capturing the Hildebrand Rarity and setting sail for port Milton Krest becomes inebriated, insults his guests then schedules an appointment for Elizabeth with The Corrector. Late in the night Bond hears Krest choking and later discovers the rare fish stuffed down his throat.

“QUANTUM OF SOLACE”   James Bond attends a boring dinner party with a group of snobbish people he cannot stand. He listens as the Governor of Nassau tells about a relationship between a former employee and an airline hostess after meeting on a flight to London. They eventually marry but unhappily so. After some time she begins a long and open affair with a golf professional; but on holiday in London with her spouse the illicit affair ends. Her husband fully aware of the dalliance returns home having decided to end the marriage, though they will continue to appear as a happy couple in public for the sake of his job with the Governor’s office.

“007 IN NEW YORK”   James Bond in a taxi is off to warn a young woman who’s dating a Soviet intelligence agent…she has agreed to meet him in the Reptile House at the Central Park Zoo, when he realizes that the zoo has no reptile house! No matter, Agent 007 looks forward to the many pleasures of Manhattan. He loves the town, where he carried out his second “assignment” that qualified him for Double-0 status. But on this occasion he looks forward to spending the night with a girl named Solange….

“THE SPY WHO LOVED ME”   Vivienne Michel clerks for a motel in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State where two men mysteriously appear to await the arrival of her boss; but in truth these thugs have been hired by the owner to burn down the establishment for the insurance with blame for the arson falling on Vivienne who will perish in the fire. Captured and beaten after attempting to escape, she lives on borrowed time under the threat of rape. James Bond, having concluded Operation Thunderball, stops by the motel—the consequence of a flat tire—and winds up spending the night protecting Vivienne from these two goons whom he ultimately thwarts in a gun battle.

Sticking to the soul of the character if not the facts of the story click here with your ideas about how to turn these simple sketches into a serviceable screenplay. Good luck.

BONDING AGENT   From book page to sound stage no doubt the third manipulation of Casino Royale has become the controversial Bond discourse, taking into account the pointless remake of THUNDERBALL (a/k/a NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN), and marking the first time since “The Living Daylights” that the franchise has covered the author’s fiction for a feature.

Hollywood really shouldn’t be remaking so many damn movies, especially if they’re not re-making them very well, but as things now stand about a third of the 21 Bond films—featuring Roger Moore—could honestly be rehabbed starting with the one based on The Spy Who Loved Me.

Dissatisfied with the results of his effort and never happy with the plot, Fleming gave producers permission to use the title but not the content, so the movie scenario fashions an altogether different set of circumstances for Agent 007.

This “lost” Bond novel deals with experimental storytelling in rendering the female point of view as memoir, with the author ameliorating his personal involvement by claiming to have found the manuscript lying on his desk with a note signed by “Vivienne Michel” then going so far as to gift his fictional character with co-author credit.

And to validate this fanfare (though frequently the author did pay for ideas and research) Fleming scribbled an empiric foreword: “I was much interested in this view of James Bond through the wrong end of the telescope so to speak and, after obtaining clearance for certain minor infringements of the Official Secrets Act, I have much pleasure in sponsoring its publication.”

Fleming’s least successful entry in the Bond sweepstakes, also his shortest and utmost sexually explicit, the book was actually banned in some countries when originally published in 1962. After condensing and bowdlerizing the text, Fleming shrewdly authorized its use inside a U.S. men’s magazine (Stag) under the alias “Motel Nymph”— even though three years earlier the author voluptuously served his dry humor by famously naming a female character Pussy Galore.

No stranger to controversy, Fleming published in 1954 Live and Let Die about an underworld voodoo leader suspected by “M” of selling 17th Century gold coins to finance Soviet covert operations in the United States. The author’s feverish telling depicts blacks in America with Chapter Five entitled “Nigger Heaven” and sizable passages handed over to the supernatural.

Developing the main plot for the 1973 flick, scriptwriters returned to the source twice to harvest story elements later used in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY and LICENSE TO KILL.

Sins of narrative incest remain a common practice. To offer the latest example, DIE ANOTHER DAY finds Bond at a private club and thrust into “an affair of honor”—a duel at sword’s point cunningly disemboweled from Moonraker.

The piecemeal plunder of Fleming’s work began when (the late) Producer Albert R. Broccoli modified Diamonds Are Forever by tossing out certain plot points that allowed room for the central theme based on a dream Broccoli had about—Howard Hughes!

Respect for the source material is a very heavy weight so all’s forgiven, of course. And if all goes well the fruity alchemy of adaptation could yield “The Hildebrand Rarity” a supporting role in an upcoming Bond film, “Quantum of Solace” a featured appearance and “007 in New York” a cameo. What better way in 2008 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Ian Fleming’s birth than a final homage to the creator of James Bond?

GOODBYE, MR. BOND   Over 50 years ago a literary species of secret agent inspired a series of novels that became emblematic of a film franchise where of late the sun has been attempting to set. Maybe then it’s prophetic and fitting that Agent 007 be transformed from Fleming’s graphic creation to Broccoli’s cinematic wonder, given that the author before all others had realized Bond’s screen potential.

Somewhere between the publication of Dr. No in 1958 and Goldfinger in 1959, the author began working with film producer Kevin McClory and screenwriter Jack Whittingham to transmogrify the skin-and-bones of an idea into the flesh-and-blood of a screenplay. The process, however, proved tedious for Fleming who grew bored by the whole undertaking and soon abandoned his collaborators by returning to Goldeneye, his home on the north shore of Jamaica to begin work on his next book.

By March 1959 McClory and Whittingham completed their work under the title “Thunderball” but the script languished when in 1961, by no coincidence, Fleming published his 8th novel which he called…you guessed it.

On August 12, 1964 Fleming at the age of 56 deserted Bond inside the unfinished manuscript for The Man with the Golden Gun, leaving behind the legacy of a sobering prediction—that the spy-thriller genre (as he conceived it) would be dead in a few years. But for radically stalwart enthusiasts, the author’s creation died with him on that day.

Below the gloss of the 1962 poster for DR. NO was the banter: “He turned the technique of lovemaking into an art, the art of murder into a science.”

A bit breezy for an elegy without the twilight glimmer but could the real James Bond have a more likely epitaph?

By Frederick Louis Richardson
July 30, 2006
Copyright © 2006 DreaMerchant All Rights Reserved