James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  The Bond-movie cash-in game began in 1964, when the Carry On team almost inevitably decided to apply their saucy style to 007. In Carry on Spying, Charles Hawtrey played Charlie Bind, agent O-O-Oh! and sworn enemy of STENCH.

  From there, vehicles exploitative of Bond – serious and comedic – came pouring out of the movie studios. In 1965 alone, there were over fifty spy-themed cinematic releases; in 1966 over sixty. Bulldog Drummond was even brought back to the screen as a consequence of Bond’s popularity, completing a circle insofar as he was one of the characters responsible for Bond’s existence. Another circle was completed by Drummond being played by Richard Johnson, once considered for the role of 007. One of the more bizarre Bond spoofs was 1967’s OK Connery, a.k.a. Operation Kid Brother, a.k.a. Operation Double 007. It was not only stuffed with faces familiar from Bond films but secured the curious additional coup of engaging the services of Sean Connery’s non-actor brother Neil for the lead role.

  The films based on Len Deighton’s aforementioned anti-Bond literary trilogy starred Michael Caine. Produced by Harry Saltzman, they inevitably boasted much of the creative personnel behind the Bond films. In James Bond: My Long and Eventful Search for His Father, Deighton revealed Saltzman told him that Saltzman’s joint stewardship of the cinematic 007 meant that ‘I am the only person in the world who won’t try to make your working-class hero into some kind of James Bond.’ Sure enough, The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain (1965–67) were a sort of mixture of Bond and Saltzman’s kitchen-sink films. The hero – nameless in the books, but called Harry Palmer in the films – was a laconic, bespectacled man with a hint of a cockney accent who worked out of dreary offices and spent much of his time form-filling.

  Danger Man was one of the earliest of the television cash-ins. Made by production company ITC and broadcast on Britain’s commercial television network ITV, it featured Patrick McGoohan as John Drake. The programme got progressively more Bondian after it debuted in 1960 and was even renamed Secret Agent in some territories, although the pompous puritanism of McGoohan rendered out of the question any sex quotient.

  When McGoohan switched his attention to The Prisoner, ITC quickly replaced Danger Man with Man in a Suitcase, featuring the global freelance sleuthing work of McGill (Richard Bradford), a disgraced ex-US Intelligence agent. ITC, in fact, would specialise in shows that would probably never have existed without the template provided by Bond, among them The Baron, Department S, Jason King, The Persuaders!, The Adventurer, The Protectors and Return of the Saint. Another of their specialisms was the puppetry-oriented kids’ TV shows created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. The two creative strands crossed with Joe 90 (1968), a programme about a nine-year-old spy, and The Secret Service (1969), which featured a middle-aged vicar who moonlighted for governmental agency BISHOP.

  September 1964 saw the television debut of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. It featured good-looking, gun-wielding characters with Fleming-esque names such as Napoleon Solo and April Dancer, who worked for a government agency that battled THRUSH (not the sniggering joke it seemed). Because of the obviousness of the cash-in, many are amazed to find out that the U.N.C.L.E. project originated with Ian Fleming. The Bond creator had in 1963 been approached by a Hollywood producer named Norman Felton about devising a globe-trotting secret-agent television series that would be a cross between Bond and the ‘Thrilling Cities’ articles Fleming wrote for The Sunday Times, which became his travelogue of the same name. After some preliminary work, Fleming changed his mind about participation, partly out of fear that it would use up his hardly plentiful ideas for Bond plots. Perhaps learning a lesson from the grisly business of the Thunderball lawsuit, Fleming willingly rescinded all rights in the property for the token sum of £1.

  Running The Man from U.N.C.L.E. a close second as the most fondly remembered Bond TV take-off is Mission: Impossible. The CBS show debuted in September 1966 and featured the adventures of the Impossible Missions Force, a team of secret agents who took on Bondian madmen and organisations. It opened with an unforgettable, much-loved, frequently parodied gimmick: its agents would receive instructions about their missions on audiotapes that promptly self-destructed. As smoke rose from the tape, Lalo Schifrin’s pounding, hook-stuffed theme music – as stirring as even the best Bond theme – kicked in.

  Get Smart was an NBC (later CBS) television show that debuted in September 1965. That Mel Brooks was a co-creator will immediately give away that it was a vehicle that took up a notch or two The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’s twinkle-eyed approach into outright farce. The series lasted five seasons and bequeathed several catchphrases including ‘Missed it by that much!’ and ‘I asked you not to tell me that!’

  A more serious American spy show debuted in the same month as Get Smart. Some stations in the Deep South of the US banned I Spy because it portrayed black secret agent Alexander Scott (Bill Cosby) working alongside white secret agent Kelly Robinson (Robert Culp) more or less as his equal. The two bickering, wisecracking agents posed as tennis-playing itinerants as they went about their Pentagon-mandated business.

  The TV rip-offs did not really, contrary to assumptions, include The Avengers. Although the British show that debuted in 1961 may via osmosis have had some Bond DNA in its genome, by the mid-sixties it had set its face against any recognisably real aspects of the espionage genre. The bowler-hatted John Steed and his latest female companion in British intelligence work, Emma Peel, battled antagonists from no particular axis against backdrops so surreal that they might have been devised by Salvador Dalí.

  Perhaps the most significant Bond imitation in either film or television came in the form of Mike Henry’s Tarzan movies. The former NFL player appeared in three ape-man films, the first two of which – Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966) and Tarzan and the Great River (1967) – did the ostensibly impossible in making his jungle-based character look like a secret agent from civilisation. It was shocking – and to many laughable – to see a Tarzan who sported short hair, a suit and a briefcase boarding planes and helicopters, tussling with rich megalomaniacs and making Bond-like wisecracks.

  Although the Tarzan series wasn’t at the time the longest-running film franchise – that accolade belonged to Sherlock Holmes – it was the most successful. In retrospect, it can be seen that the advent of Bond marked the point where cinema audiences would no longer be satisfied with uncomplicated, wholesome fare like Tarzan. While the Bond franchise continued through thick and thin, Tarzan films began dwindling in number. Between 1918 and 1967, there were thirty-nine official Tarzan cinematic ventures. From 1970 to 2016 (almost as long a time period), there have been nine. The Mike Henry Tarzan can be posited as a moment in cinematic history where the other guy blinked.

  CONTINUING THE LEGACY

  On 23 June 1966 came the appearance of a coda to the Fleming Bond canon in the form of Octopussy and The Living Daylights.

  It was a slender volume of ninety-four pages containing merely two Bond short stories, both already published if not widely disseminated or even – in the world of segmented information that existed before the Internet – known of. It’s precisely because of the Internet that, these days, such a volume would also automatically mop up ‘007 in New York’ and ‘The Property of a Lady’, the other Bond short fiction then uncollected in volume form. While the latter story was added to the book when it went into paperback the following year, it took three-and-a-half decades for the New York story to also be hauled in.

  ‘Octopussy’ had been serialised in the Daily Express in October 1965 and in Playboy across March and April 1966. It’s a tale in which Bond is, as in ‘Quantum of Solace’, merely a bit-player. However, it is on a far higher plane of quality than the latter work.

  It’s also odd, beginning with the fact that central figure, Major Dexter Smythe, feels like an older, decaying version of James Bond. An ex-British Secret Service man, he was once a ‘brave and resourceful officer and a handsome man who had made easy sexual conquests all his militar
y life …’ He is now fifty-four, slightly bald, has a sagging belly and varicose veins. He also sounds a lot like Ian Fleming towards the end of the latter’s life: domiciled in his beloved Jamaica, he enjoys underwater diving and continues to smoke and drink excessively despite two coronaries. Smythe’s defiance of medical advice is due to the fact that he – in the first of several exquisite phrases herein – ‘had arrived at the frontier of the death wish’. Tropical sloth, self-indulgence, widower status and guilt had worn him down to a state of ‘spiritual accidie’ – making him the third of Fleming’s villains after Mr Big and Ernst Stavro Blofeld to suffer from this condition. The only thing that has lately kept him clinging to life is the anthropomorphism he has invested in the birds, insects and fish that inhabit the grounds of his villa, particularly a small brown octopus he has nicknamed ‘Octopussy’. A couple of hours earlier, though, there had been an occurrence that made him realise even this circumscribed life was futile. The occurrence was a visit by one James Bond.

  Flashback. When Bond states that he is from the Ministry of Defence, Smythe recognises it as a euphemism for the Secret Service. As the two men begin to talk, Fleming captures in Smythe the supplicatory, almost pathetic state of mind to which those with a guilty conscience are reduced: when Bond asks him if he minds if he smokes, ‘Somehow this small sign of a shared weakness comforted Major Smythe.’

  Bond’s questioning leads to Smythe thinking back to the period immediately following the war. While employed cleaning up Gestapo and Abwehr hideouts, the major had stumbled upon the existence of some hidden gold bars. He had found a pretext to pull in for questioning an Austrian mountain guide named Hannes Oberhauser. Once Oberhauser had acted as his escort to the mountain where the gold was hidden, Smythe had cold-bloodedly killed him as the only potential witness to his theft.

  Shell-shocked by his distant past thus returning, Smythe tells Bond the whole story. He is curious as to why Bond volunteered to investigate following the emergence of Oberhauser’s body from the glacier in which the major had dumped it. ‘He taught me to ski before the war, when I was in my teens,’ Bond replies. ‘He was something of a father to me at a time when I happened to need one.’

  We are brought back to the present. As he quests along the reef, Smythe is musing that Bond’s advice that it will be a week or so before someone is sent to collect him is a version of leaving a guilty officer alone with his revolver. The major suddenly notices three bleeding pinpricks on his stomach and realises that a scorpion fish has stung him. It takes fifteen minutes for people to expire in agony from such wounds. Smythe’s whimsical experiment with Octopussy turns now into the urgent resolve of a final act. In a state of delirium, he makes his way to the creature’s lair. Octopussy is surprisingly friendly – but Smythe then realises it is attracted by his blood. He is dragged under as the octopus sets to work on his hand with its beak-like jaws.

  The story should really have ended on that powerful and horrific note, but a subsequent short paragraph details how Smythe’s body was discovered by fishermen; another, much shorter, one details Bond’s assumption of suicide from Smythe’s file, a sentence without which this would be the only Bond tale devoid of 007’s point of view; and a final one almost spoils the story, suggesting as it does that the preceding events were pieced together via Smythe’s autopsy, which would have been impossible.

  Fleming wrote ‘Octopussy’ in July 1962 on an unusual mid-year visit to Jamaica. Michael Howard of Cape thought it better than any story in For Your Eyes Only but cautioned Fleming that such a Bond-light tale might provoke the same grievances as did The Spy Who Loved Me. The rescuing of the story by his literary executors from Fleming’s metaphorical bottom drawer was a wise course of action, for ‘Octopussy’ is an intriguing and superbly crafted tale, and absolute proof that Fleming was more than capable – had he wanted – of branching out into different and supposedly more elevated fields of fiction.

  Unfortunately for Fleming’s legacy, the Bond movies were just about to plumb the depths of even low culture.

  There was no Bond film released in 1966. The following year, though, there were two, for 1967 was the year that Charles K. Feldman finally got his adaptation of the first Bond novel to the big screen.

  It wasn’t worth the wait. The 1967 Casino Royale is the embarrassing deformed relative of the James Bond family locked away from public sight. Cherished by nobody, it rarely receives TV screenings. Ultimately, its value was deemed to be so low that in 2009 Sony – who had taken over ownership from original distributors MGM – made it available free of charge on YouTube. It was a sad conclusion to a saga that had started so promisingly with those glittering Ben Hecht scripts of the early 1960s.

  In June 1964, shortly after Hecht’s death, Feldman told the Daily Mail that his ‘ideal man’ to play Bond was Roger Moore. (Unknown to both Feldman and Moore, the actor had been briefly considered by Eon in the run-up to Dr. No.) ‘I’ve had no approach from Mr Feldman yet, but this is a wonderful piece of news,’ Moore was quoted as responding. ‘I’ve always fancied myself as a Bond.’ This means that, at a certain point in history, Sean Connery could have gone head to head with Moore in rival Bond pictures.

  The idea of Moore was abandoned when it appeared Sean Connery was a real possibility. In the 12 May 1965 edition of Variety came the announcement of a joint United Artists– Columbia Pictures production of Casino Royale with Connery in his usual role of Bond. There have been some suggestions that Broccoli and Saltzman were ultimately deterred from this venture by the unpleasant co-production experience that was Thunderball. In Broccoli’s version of events, however, Feldman kiboshed the project by demanding 75 per cent of the profits. Feldman said he himself was put off by the fact that Eon insisted that Casino Royale be the sixth Bond picture. As the unhappy Connery would by then be nearing the end of his Eon contract, Feldman would be able to approach him directly. Feldman did indeed do this, but is said to have baulked at Connery’s terms of a million dollars.

  Not necessarily after his Connery overture, Feldman signed one Terence Cooper to play 007, although contractually forbade him to tell anyone. A Northern Ireland native in his early thirties, Cooper was dark, imposing and handsome. Feldman – initially – would seem to have had considerable confidence in his ability to be something then almost inconceivable: a Bond actor who wasn’t Sean Connery.

  Cooper was not happy about his enforced idleness and the veil of secrecy over his casting. ‘Do you have any idea how long that is to do nothing?’ he complained to the press in early 1966 about his two years of well-paid idleness. ‘I’m an actor. I have to work.’ No doubt he would have been even more aggrieved had he known of the overture made to Connery probably while he himself was under contract. There was to be more heartache: Cooper did appear in Casino Royale but only in a small, silly part as a British agent called Coop. By then, the tone of the film had changed drastically.

  Feldman could have opted to continue with his original plan for a straightforward Bond picture. The character’s proven cinema track record guaranteed him a high budget. Ultimately, he and co-producer Jerry Bresler were able to spend more money on Casino Royale – $12 million – than was poured into either any previous Bond film or the official Bond movie of the year of its release.

  Amazingly, Feldman decided instead to spurn both the fine scripts by Ben Hecht to which he owned rights and the convincing leading man he had under contract in favour of a spoof movie stitched together from scripts from multiple sources and starring an ageing thespian. His rationale seems to have been no more than spite over failing to get a deal with Eon or Connery or both. When Feldman told Time magazine in May 1966 that he was planning ‘the Bond movie to end all Bond movies’, he didn’t mean it in a nice way. Four months later, Woody Allen – one of the stars of the film – told Look that Feldman wanted to ‘eliminate the Bond films forever’. By making Bond seem ridiculous, Feldman felt he could undermine the entire Bond industry. Accordingly, the only major element that survive
d from any of Hecht’s scripts was the most risible one: that 007 was an inherited codename. It enabled a comic-book plot strand whereby the Secret Service planned to confuse the enemy by re-naming several spies ‘James Bond’.

  Jeremy Duns theorises of Feldman’s reasoning for abandoning a straight Bond picture, ‘“What’s the point? Why would people come to see it? It has to be something that’s different.” We’re speaking from the hindsight of several people having played Bond. In the public’s imagination, Sean Connery was James Bond and James Bond was Sean Connery.’

  That the movie featured Peter Sellers was no small matter. Only three years before, he had turned in what is arguably the greatest movie-acting performance of all time with his multiple, massively varied roles in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Sellers, though, was apparently responsible for many of the things that went wrong in a shoot that – like that of Cleopatra before it and Ishtar after it – gave the picture a bad smell before it was even released. His bizarre behaviour included refusing to share a set with Orson Welles despite their being in the same scene, turning up late or not at all, commissioning lines from a third party to ensure he hogged the screen and walking out on the film before completion.