Bond, James Bonds (left to right): Craig (2 films), Lazenby (1), Dalton (2), Brosnan (4). (
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After he wrote classics like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” author Roald Dahl tackled another hero of young boys everywhere — James Bond. Working on the screenplay for the Japanese adventure “You Only Live Twice,” producers Harry Saltzman and Albert “Cubby” Broccoli let him in on the secret of their success.
“There must be three girls,” they said. “One of whom is bad, one of whom is good but must get bumped off in an inventive way, and one of whom is also good, and is there for snogging purposes in the final reel.”
Easy as Pussy Galore! Except, as former Telegraph newspaper editor Sinclair McKay notes in his brisk examination of the Bond films, try keeping that up for nearly 50 years, over 22 movies, in a way that entertains nearly half the world’s population, and grosses, adjusted for inflation, about $11 billion.
“You might think that there could be nothing easier in the world than thinking of a plot for a Bond film,” McKay says. “Well, try it for yourself. I bet you can’t. One of the difficulties is that you want to stick to tired and trusted elements while not battering the audience with repetition. You have to find a villain sufficiently outlandish and ingenious for Bond, along with henchmen who are sufficiently amusing, and who use amazingly diverting means of murdering those who stand in their way.”
Sure, there have been missteps along the way, critically if not financially (“Moonraker,” looking at you). But one need only look at McKay’s mention of abandoned ideas to see where the Bond series could have become a very odd job. Trying to come up with a villain for a returning Sean Connery to grapple with in “Diamonds Are Forever,” for instance, the writers briefly considered introducing Goldfinger’s brother, now out for revenge.
Movie geek side note — “Die Hard,” a virtual ripoff of “Goldfinger,” featured a sequel where the first film’s brother comes back for revenge. Lazier franchises apparently don’t have as much shame.
It’s a credit to the creative team, which has stayed the same through most of the series’ history, that a Bond film like “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” or “Goldeneye” can feel “new,” even when the underlying mechanics haven’t really changed. Even “Casino Royale,” the modern deconstruction of Bond that jettisoned Q, Moneypenny and the white dots, follows the formula. There’s gambling, martinis and an international villain who weeps blood. Bond’s power of seduction — over Eva Green — is as important as his aim, and ends up saving his hide. Yes, contrary to the template, she dies — but not before the snog.
So what elevated the Bond formula from shlock to scripture?
McKay gives a surprising amount of credit to set design. In the first film, “Dr. No,” the evil geologist Prof. Dent is given a tarantula to knock off Bond, because guns just won’t do. Dr. No speaks to him, unseen, in a shadowed room, containing nothing but a chair and a small wooden cage, “with a vast angled circular hole, open to the sky, covered with a lattice grille, the criss-crossing shadows matching the stark, elongated lines of that chair and the sinister vertical slates of the cage.”
Designer Ken Adam had “taken a scenario of almost unbearable B-movie creakiness and lifted it right up on to another level.”
Those wonderful sets — culminating in cat lover Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s massive volcano lair, complete with monorail and piranha pond, in “You Only Live Twice” — helped give Bond a space-age sheen that has lasted through the series. Bond films have featured the first mass exposure of everything from digital watches to Jet Skis, even extreme sports like bungee jumping and Parkour. Of course, when things go wrong, the ridiculous gadgets are partly to blame, as with the invisible car in “Die Another Day.” At its best, however, Bond is as much speculative science fiction as spy adventure.
The films also are pretty good at political speculation. Though the Cold War was a backdrop, Bond’s enemies were almost always meglomaniacs or terrorists, with Blofeld’s SPECTRE being the most famous.
“Broccoli had sensed from the start that if he wanted these films to have the widest possible international audience, and indeed the longest possible shelf life, then the villains would have to be apolitical and largely from the private sector,” McKay says.
It was so apolitical, in fact, that the Soviets invited Broccoli to produce a blockbuster in Russia in 1975. He didn’t, but two years later, in “The Spy Who Loved Me,” Barbara Bach’s Agent XXX was portrayed as Bond’s Soviet equal, when détente wasn’t necessarily in fashion. The only real flub in this regard is “The Living Daylights,” when Timothy Dalton’s Bond teams up with the Afghanistan mujahidin to bring down a Russian general. Edgy perhaps in 1987, unfortunate foreshadowing today.
Before movie studios thrived on such things, the Bond producers thought globally. They knew that shooting on location in Japan or Italy would increase box office receipts there; and when George Lazenby stumbled a bit in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” the producers were eager to get to Las Vegas in the Connery followup, “Diamonds Are Forever.”
“One recurring thing we tend to see with Saltzman and Broccoli is that if they were at all concerned with the series financially, then they tended to head back for American settings with American actors, in the hope that they would at least pull those vast US audiences in,” McKay writes.
Of course, none of this would have mattered without good source material. Besides a knack for titles and names, creator Ian Fleming’s genius inclusion were the touches of snobbery — the Savile Row suits, the shaken martini. Bond was an escapist fantasy, espionage in a tuxedo, not a dark alley. From the exotic locales, expensive cars and French models, there’s eye candy for everyone.
McKay’s focus here is the films, however, and he rightly notes how they took Bond in much more successful directions. They added humor, for one, and improved on the plots — jettisoning a giant squid from the end of “Dr. No,” and having Goldfinger out to irradiate the gold supply of Fort Knox rather than improbably stealing it.
And they’ve managed to change actors six times, and all have been successful in their own way (even Lazenby, whose one-shot is now adored by Bond geeks).
“In some respects, cinematic Bond as opposed to the literary version is a blank slate; an action-packed cipher waiting to be colored in by whichever actor happens to take the role,” McKay says. “There are not a great many occasions when the audience is permitted a look into Bond’s soul. In fairness, there are not a great many occasions when an audience would want such a thing.”
Yet we all have our favorite, and they’re all quite distinct. As McKay notes, “the minute Moore steps into Bond’s naff crocodile moccasins, you can feel that the entire tenor of the films has changed.”
Perhaps it’s best not to think of these things too hard. Beautiful women, cars with ejector seats, henchmen who decapitate you with bowler caps . . . does it need explaining?
McKay is at his most entertaining simply recounting the absurdity of the films themselves, sprinkled with bits of trivia. Like how cheap the early films were, with “Dr. No” costing only $1 million. Connery was understandably grumpy about his take, which was estimated on the fourth film, “Thunderball,” at about $350,000 — for a movie that took in $141 million worldwide!
Or the fact that most of the early actors, hired for their looks, had to be dubbed. Yet that only made Gert Frobe’s portrayal of Goldfinger better, McKay argues. The German’s lack of English lent him “a constant facial expression of belligerent confusion.”
Today, the greatest challenge facing James Bond is not coming up with an inventive way for the good girl to die — it’s the financial problems of film studio MGM, which has held up Daniel Craig’s third outing indefinitely.
It’s too bad. Because reading McKay’s retrospective, it seems like Bond is just getting started.