by Sean Egan
Bond contrives to get inside, where he explains to Viv, ‘We’ve got to sit these two hoodlums out. Wait until they make a move …’ In order to help pass the time, Bond explains to Viv how he came to be in this neck of the woods. Cue an amazingly implausible piece of indiscretion and boastfulness in which Bond spills the details of a just-completed case. Also implausible is the absence of colloquialism in Bond’s recounted story.
Eventually, it transpires that the gangster pair have been employed by Sanguinetti to burn down the motel for the insurance money. That Viv was to have been portrayed as the cause of the blaze necessitated her death. Bond ensures that Sluggsy and Horror fail to dispatch either Viv or him, but the action depicted is disjointed. Viv’s mounting adoration for Bond, meanwhile, is a lurch back to the cliché of femininity Fleming has spent much of the book avoiding. In the action’s aftermath, a policeman named Captain Stoner delivers Viv a lecture about Bond types. ‘Keep away from all these men,’ he sternly tells her. ‘They are not for you, whether they’re called James Bond or Sluggsy Morant.’ Fleming’s tacking-on of this cautionary note is absurd: Stoner has never met Bond, who has saved Viv’s life. It all makes for a disappointing conclusion to a text that had started at a high level of quality.
Nonetheless, The Spy Who Loved Me is more than merely a worthwhile experiment. While one would not wish all Bond books to be like it, one is glad that this lateral view of 007 exists.
Harry Saltzman was an odd choice for Ian Fleming to entrust with the character who represented his greatest professional achievement in life.
It was Saltzman to whom, in December 1960, Fleming sold an option regarding motion pictures for all of his existing and future Bond books except Casino Royale. Born in Quebec in 1915, Saltzman was most well known for kitchen-sink dramas and Angry Young Man vehicles: Look Back in Anger, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Entertainer. These films were both very good and innovative in providing a window on the world of the proletariat that had hitherto been largely denied British society. Their tableaux, however, were the antithesis of Bond’s rarefied environs. Saltzman’s daughter Hilary has suggested that Saltzman may have gained the rights to Fleming’s character because of his classified work for the Psychological Warfare Division of the US Office of War Information during World War II. In October 2012, Hilary told David Kamp of Vanity Fair, ‘… they had a similar background during the war, which was in confidential missions, they had a mutual understanding. Even though they couldn’t publicise it, I really think Ian felt that this series was safe in my father’s hands.’ Some suspect that the two men even met during the war.
However, Saltzman’s live-action option on Bond might well have – like those of almost everyone before him – come to nothing. With only around a month of his option remaining, there remained no apparent prospect of studio funding. It was then that Albert R. Broccoli entered the picture.
Broccoli – known to one and all as ‘Cubby’ – was born in New York in 1909. He was also a producer with a good track record, if with slightly less ‘worthy’ fare. Among his nineteen pictures as either producer or executive producer were The Red Beret, Cockleshell Heroes and Safari, although The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) was an early cinematic tilt at compassion for homosexuals. Broccoli had actually spotted the celluloid potential of Bond books before. He had tried to interest Irving Allen – his partner in the production company Warwick Films – in licensing them. According to the (admittedly often unreliable) word of Broccoli, Allen’s scepticism about the Bond property alienated Fleming and his literary agent, Robert Fenn. David V. Picker of United Artists heard a slightly different story: that Fleming’s putative CBS Bond TV series and Fleming’s dislike of movies alienated Allen. The latter story has one convincing element: Fleming was never much of a moviegoer; his stepdaughter Fionn’s memory is of his going off of an evening to the Portland Club to play bridge, not off to the local Odeon.
Whichever story was true, it was ultimately all for the good, according to Richard Maibaum, who would become a long-term Bond scriptwriter. Speaking in Pat McGilligan’s Backstory (1986), he said, ‘… with the censorship of pictures that existed then, you couldn’t even have the minimal sex and violence that we eventually put into the pictures. They just wouldn’t have been the same.’
One or two years after this (his dates varied), Broccoli had a meeting with novelist and screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz, whom he sometimes employed. Broccoli mentioned that he’d long wanted to make a James Bond film and lamented that someone else now had the options on the properties. Mankowitz revealed that he knew that person. Mankowitz further revealed that Saltzman had been unable to put a deal together. The writer offered to arrange a meeting between the pair.
The meeting occurred the very next morning. By the end of it, Broccoli and Saltzman had agreed to enter into a partnership. Broccoli always maintained that he never wanted a partnership but that it was his only way to ensure the Bond property came his way: with Saltzman’s option expiring within three weeks, Broccoli was worried the rights would be snapped up by someone else. This reluctance is in some ways understandable, for the two men made for an odd couple. Norman Wanstall, soundman on five Broccoli–Saltzman Bond films, says, ‘I always found Harry a little bit scary really. He was a very strong, silent character and I would have always called him “Mr Saltzman”, whereas Broccoli was always a father figure. I would have been very relaxed with Broccoli.’
‘Harry was a peculiar man,’ says Monty Norman, who wrote music for Broccoli–Saltzman films. ‘A friend of mine did a film with him and he was having trouble getting paid, and Harry said something like, “But I’ve just bought a Cadillac – I can’t do it!” Like you’re supposed to sympathise. He was a difficult man. Whereas Cubby … was basically a really nice guy.’
The mismatched pair had meetings about James Bond with United Artists and Columbia Pictures. Some sources cite the UA meeting as taking place on 20 June 1961 but Broccoli has stated 21 June, a date one might assume to be reliable from being embedded in his brain: it was his wedding anniversary. Picker, then United Artists’ head of production, recalls of the planned meeting, ‘Bud Ornstein, who was our man in London, told me about it. I was absolutely thrilled because I had been trying to see if we could get those rights and had been told by Fleming’s agent that he wasn’t prepared to sell.’
Both Broccoli and Picker are in agreement that the meeting ended on a handshake production agreement. Memories differ on specifics. Broccoli recalled a profit division of 60 per cent to Broccoli–Saltzman, 40 per cent to the studio. Picker recalls a 50–50 deal. Not in dispute is that Broccoli and Saltzman more than once got their margins raised over the succeeding years. Picker: ‘When they came to us and the projects were obviously turning out to be successful, we had no trouble whatsoever in renegotiating the deal.’ However, he also points out that this was essentially largesse on the part of UA: ‘Under no circumstances could they have ever taken [the Bond films] elsewhere simply because we refused to renegotiate a deal that we had in place. We had the right to option all the projects.’
Although of course Broccoli and Saltzman were at the time very pleased to have made the deal, it would come to be seen by the pair as a poisoned chalice. When UA was taken over in 1967 by Transamerica Corporation, it set the pattern for what would happen over the following decades, when the studio was incrementally reduced to little more than a logo by predators who at the same time brought their own financial crises to the table.
Broccoli and Saltzman set up a production company called Eon, short for a phrase that had the smack of a Bond title: Everything or Nothing. Danjaq – a portmanteau of the first syllables of the men’s respective wives’ first names – was the company set up to control the copyright of Eon’s films
Eon decided to make Thunderball the first 007 motion picture and commissioned Richard Maibaum to provide the screenplay. It has been contended that Maibaum was handed a Jack Whittingham Thunderball script to rework. This appears to be
true: although his script was generally faithful to Fleming’s book, Maibaum’s inclusion of a plastic-surgery element emanates from a Whittingham script, not Fleming’s treatment or prose. This shortly became moot when it was decided to make the first Bond film Dr. No. The switch was executed, according to both Broccoli and Maibaum, because of the legal case Kevin McClory instituted with regard to Thunderball. Not so moot is the suggestion that Whittingham – though now permanently out of the 007 picture – had a profound effect on the moulding of the cinema Bond by dint of his script’s interpretation of the character – less intense, more charming and humorous – being adopted by Maibaum, and thence naturally by every succeeding screenwriter. Germane to the ongoing Thunderball court case is that Maibaum’s reworking a Whittingham script would suggest that Eon knew full well that Fleming had sold elsewhere the film rights to Thunderball.
Broccoli and Saltzman decided to reward Wolf Mankowitz for being the broker to their partnership by appointing him as co-screenwriter with Maibaum on Dr. No. Things did not get off to a flying start. Maibaum recalled in Broccoli’s autobiography When the Snow Melts, ‘… we decided that Fleming’s Dr. No was the most ludicrous character in the world. He was just Fu Manchu with two steel hooks. It was 1961, and we felt that audiences wouldn’t stand for that kind of stuff anymore.’ Their solution to this absurdity, however, seems even more ludicrous. Their forty-page treatment gave the name ‘Dr No’ not to the human villain but a marmoset monkey sitting on his shoulder. After a dressing-down from the producers, the writing pair set to work again, with the instruction to stick more closely to the literary antecedent.
Bond’s creator attended several script meetings, but Fleming had no contractual approval over the scripts and did not try to interfere. Broccoli – who was glad of his pleasingly louche presence – recalled that Fleming instead offered notes about espionage protocol and weaponry. He also provided a memo that sounds similar to, or the same as, the one he gave to CBS regarding their proposed Bond TV show, containing as it did warnings against cartoon Englishness. It also stressed the need to make the audiences like Bond.
The final screenwriting credit for Dr. No was shared by Richard Maibaum, Johanna Harwood and Berkely Mather. Maibaum was irritated that Harwood got a formal credit when he felt her role had been merely to anglicise the dialogue. Harwood – a long-term scriptwriting employee of Saltzman – has insisted that she actually wrote a first draft before anyone else set to work. In any case, it was swings and roundabouts: Mankowitz does not appear in the credits because he was initially disgusted with his and Maibaum’s script and, by the time he had changed his mind, the titles had been completed and he didn’t want to pay to have them redone. Broccoli also claimed that director Terence Young and his own wife Dana – an established screenwriter – threw in ideas.
That tangled tale had an upshot that might not on the surface be the expected one: Maibaum went on to be a fixture in Bond scriptwriting credits, writing or co-writing thirteen of the first sixteen official 007 movies. Although the collaborative nature of filmmaking means it is always difficult to pinpoint and evaluate individual contributions, Maibaum must go down as one of the people principally responsible for the personality of the cinema Bond. Maibaum clearly felt so. He said, ‘… my work on the first four films set the pattern and had something to do with the character of Bond – his humour, his savoir faire. I know I insisted on the elegance of the villains – especially after I saw how great Joseph Wiseman was in Dr. No.’ Yet, of course, Jack Whittingham might suggest that, in the process described above, Maibaum was merely picking up the thread Whittingham had started to sew in his Thunderball scripts.
In any case, a lot of people could claim the father-of-cinema-Bond title. Many of them had worked together previously. Maibaum’s retention would seem to be related to the fact that for Dr. No and its successors Broccoli imported wholesale the staff of Warwick Films. Not only had Maibaum worked for this outfit, but so had Terence Young, editor Peter Hunt, set designer Ken Adam, cinematographer Ted Moore, stuntman/stunt coordinator Bob Simmons and sound technician Norman Wanstall.
‘It was always said that we had a family atmosphere,’ says Wanstall of the crew on Bond films. ‘I think it was because it was very unusual for there to be a series, where a film finished and soon after that another one was made and then another one was made.’ Eon’s Bond productions were a family affair in another sense. Anecdotes abound of behaviour by Saltzman and (especially) Broccoli that was more the method of indulgent parents keen to keep those around them happy than of hard-ass movie producers with an eye on the bottom line. This veritable Bond family crafted the 007 movie signatures over a sufficiently long period as to make them immutable.
Adam created the sort of elaborate, towering sets – especially for villains’ lairs – that are comparatively unremarkable today but were awe-inspiring when he pioneered them.
Hunt’s editing spurned the stateliness then common in cinema for something approaching frenetic and almost illogical: he would abandon pans in what would normally be the middle and start a cut with action that contrasted with what was seen in the previous frame. Wanstall says of Hunt’s work on Dr. No, ‘When he first saw the rushes and he began to see how the film was being directed, he said to me, “We don’t want people stopping and thinking about this and that and ‘Why didn’t he do that?’ Let’s keep the film moving” … The other films followed in the same way.’ Interestingly, this approach was something that had been in Fleming’s mind at the time of his 1959 script for Thunderball. He advised his collaborators ‘not to allow the audience time to worry about probabilities’.
Wanstall had his own part to play in the unconscious building-up of franchise hallmarks. Operating in the days before large sound libraries and computer-generated effects, he had to seek out or improvise wild and weird sonics to provide accompaniment to sights never before seen on screen. Those often futuristic sounds were ratcheted up to exaggerated levels by directors, making Bond films even more exclamatory than their action already dictated.
Then there was Bob Simmons. When a budding young actor, Simmons had been mates with both Sean Connery and Roger Moore. When fate put him into the stunt game and Connery and Moore successively into the Bond role, he ended up doubling for them, tussling with them and choreographing their fights. His contribution went further than many might assume. It is he, not Connery, in the ‘gun barrel’ sequence at the beginning of the first three Bond films. Moreover, it was a confab with Simmons, Sean Connery and Ken Adam that led to the iconic moment in Goldfinger when Oddjob is electrocuted while reaching for his bowler hat. Simmons noted in his autobiography, ‘There were no clues in the screenplay as to how Oddjob … was going to be beaten in a fight with Sean Connery … I choreographed the entire sequence …’
With the studio and producers behind the picture being North American, it could easily have been the case that Eon followed in the footsteps of CBS and Gregory Ratoff before them by making 007 a nephew of Uncle Sam. However, Broccoli and Saltzman concluded that only a Briton should play James Bond. Picker was in agreement. ‘Why would anybody possibly think that’s a good idea?’ Picker laughs in response to the possibility of an American Bond.
Cary Grant – handsome, English, big box-office, a close friend of Broccoli, an acquaintance of Fleming and a Bond fan – was a logical choice for the part of Bond. Although soon to turn fifty-eight, he looked twenty years younger. However, he turned down Eon’s overture. Money may have been a part – Dr. No’s entire budget was adjacent to his normal fee – but the consensus seems to be that his unwillingness to commit to more than one picture was no use to producers trying to create a franchise. Patrick McGoohan, already familiar as a British espionage figure from the TV series Danger Man (a.k.a. Secret Agent), turned down Bond for moral reasons. James Fox had similar misgivings. The suave Richard Johnson told Cinema Retro in 2008, ‘I turned the job down … I was under contract to MGM anyway, so that gave me a reasonable excuse to say no, becaus
e they told me I’d have to be under exclusive contract to them for seven years.’
The reasons for Grant’s and Johnson’s reluctance might be why a belief began to develop that an unknown was needed for the role. Picker explains, ‘Whoever played that first role had to be signed up to do all the subsequent movies if it turned out they were successful. The only way you can do that is if you hire somebody who is prepared to give you the options you want. Most major “stars” are not going to do that. An unknown actor is going to be delighted to do that because he wants the opportunity.’ Additionally, Broccoli said he felt a newcomer would ensure that the audience would not be distracted by familiarity.
Broccoli couldn’t stop thinking about an actor to whom he had been introduced a year previously. Sean Connery, born in Edinburgh in 1930, was dark-haired, handsome, six-foot-two and powerfully built. That he had a rough-hewn quality not quite in keeping with Fleming’s suave template was no longer an issue. Now lost in the folds of history is the fact that when the Eon partners decided to cast Connery it was as what Broccoli called a ‘subliminal spoof’. He is backed up by others, if in a roundabout way. In 1983, Richard Maibaum told Lee Goldberg of Starlog, ‘Sean was nothing like Fleming’s concept of James Bond … the very fact that Sean was a rough, tough, Scottish soccer player made him unlike the kind of English actors that Americans don’t like … The fact that we attributed to him such a high-style epicure was part of the joke … It was a slight takeoff, not belaboured or done consciously. But it came off as if it was planned and was a great, great plus.’ Richard Johnson offered, ‘Sean … was completely wrong for the part. But in getting the wrong man they got the right man, because it turned the thing on its head and he made it funny.’