James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  The rest of the cast is no less impressive. Long-time matinee idol David Niven is the ‘real’ Sir James Bond – something that from comments made by Feldman was not unrelated to the fact that Niven’s younger self had been Fleming’s choice to play his character. Orson Welles takes on the role of Le Chiffre. Woody Allen is 007’s nephew Jimmy Bond. Ursula Andress is Vesper Lynd. Even the supporting players are a veritable who’s who of British character actors, among them Geoffrey Bayldon, Derek Nimmo and Bernard Cribbins. Also no small deal is that top songwriter of the day Burt Bacharach provides the score (which spun off the hit Bacharach/Hal David single ‘The Look of Love’ for Dusty Springfield) and that the ultra-successful Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass perform the title music. However, a harbinger of disaster is that no fewer than five directors are listed: John Huston, Ken Hughes, Joseph McGrath, Robert Parrish and Val Guest.

  The credited screenwriters are Wolf Mankowitz, John Law and Michael Sayers. However, Catch-22 author Joseph Heller is rumoured to be one of the half-dozen people from whom Feldman commissioned a Casino Royale script following Hecht’s abrupt death. In addition, both Allen and Sellers are believed to have written some of the sections in which they feature. The upshot of all this is a story sprawling across more than two hours wherein Jimmy Bond, who in the shadow of his uncle feels inadequate with women, hatches a plan to eliminate all men over four-foot-six. Bond is forcibly pulled out of retirement to help a Service in peril. It is at this juncture that, to sow confusion in the enemy ranks, all MI5 (sic) operatives are renamed James Bond – including the female ones. Card expert Evelyn Tremble (Sellers) is recruited to be another Bond. In one of the few resemblances to the book, he takes on Le Chiffre at baccarat with the object of cleaning him out. In the final section, everybody dies in an explosion.

  An early indicator of what we are in for is the dwelling on the lions that run free in the grounds of Sir James’s stately home. It serves no purpose, comedy- or plot-wise. The film is laden with such quirky longueurs. Although the picture buffoonishly goes up hill and down dale for laughs, the humour literally doesn’t get better than the statement that M’s wig is a ‘hairloom’.

  It should be pointed out, however, that, when it premiered on 13 April 1967, Casino Royale was a box-office success. A big promotional push was given what was a lavish, star-studded production. The success may have been partly caused by a misleading poster that featured a rear shot of a nude, splayed female with a montage of imagery from the film preserving her modesty. However, it is much more likely that, at this point in history, the very name ‘James Bond’ had an appeal that no amount of bad reviews or poor word of mouth could fully dispel. In Boston, there were riots when people were turned away from a free 4 a.m. screening.

  Casino Royale did not succeed in Feldman’s objective of destroying the Bond cinema franchise. The only long-term damage it did was to Feldman, whose heart attack during production he himself attributed to the stress of making the movie. His death in 1968 rendered Casino Royale his dubious epitaph.

  The year’s ‘real’ James Bond movie premiered on 12 June. Unfortunately, You Only Live Twice was scarcely less a parody than Casino Royale.

  Lewis Gilbert took over the directorial reins from Young, for whom Thunderball was a finale. The theme song of You Only Live Twice is not that well known, and the choice of modish Nancy Sinatra to sing it soon seemed ill-judged when her star waned precipitously, but the music is a lovely lilting affair and Leslie Bricusse’s lyric manages to work in the title phrase in an unusually uncontrived manner (‘One life for yourself and one for your dreams’).

  When promoting Thunderball, Connery told Playboy, ‘… we’ve reached the limit as far as size and gimmicks are concerned … What is needed now is a change of course – more attention to character and better dialogue.’ The fact that the opening shot of Thunderball’s follow-up is of a NASA craft just about to be swallowed up by a mysterious space vehicle shows that his hopes were in vain.

  Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad had Richard Maibaum been on board. This was the first Bond screenplay lacking his input. That the script was provided by Roald Dahl (Harold Jack Bloom has a credit for ‘Additional Story Material’) was a matter of a dispensed favour. Primarily a children’s novelist, although also known for macabre adult short stories, Dahl had extremely limited cinematic experience. However, he was a friend of Ivar Bryce, whose brother-in-law had been helpful in easing the passage for Thunderball location shoots in the Bahamas.

  Although most of the film is set in Japan, where signals indicate the appropriated space craft has ended up, the story bears little relation to Fleming’s novel. Dahl’s claim that the book consists of a travelogue unsuitable for translation to film might be true. However, his screenplay proceeds at the preposterous pitch at which it starts as he whisks Bond from one venue and adventure to another via ludicrous and often contradictory plot turns. Having placed the character in absurd but dangerous positions, he extricates him from them by ridiculous serendipity and preternatural intuition: more than once, an ally zooms up in a car in the nick of time. Meanwhile, the gadgetry is not self-parody but beyond parody: the world in Dahl’s eyes is full of car-lifting magnets and trapdoors concealing metal chutes.

  The warping of natural behaviour reaches a crescendo when Bond is taken up in the air by a villainess, who then drops a smoke bomb in the plane’s cockpit, parachutes out and leaves 007 to what she hopes is a fiery fate. Why she didn’t simply kill her captive on the ground and dispense with an aircraft altogether is a question with which Dahl doesn’t detain himself.

  Dahl also commits a cardinal sin. When Bond is handed a Martini that is ‘stirred, not shaken’, he responds, ‘Perfect.’

  There are some good points. Ken Adam excels himself. The villain’s lavish HQ located inside a dormant volcano is awe-inspiring even by his sets’ standards. We finally get to see Number One, and find out that his name is Blofeld, played by Donald Pleasance. There is a build-up to the reveal of Pleasance’s face that is worth it for the shock of his bald pate and the disfiguring scar above and below his right eye.

  During the making of You Only Live Twice, Connery veritably spat to interviewer Sheila Graham, ‘The sooner it’s finished the happier I’ll be. I don’t talk to the producers …’ Connery had been granted bonuses and 5 per cent of profits by Eon, and Broccoli and Saltzman had in July 1966 even symbolically released him from his contract. That, though, wasn’t enough for the actor. ‘If they’d had any sense of fairness, they could have made me a partner,’ he said. His basic fee of $50,000 for Goldfinger was eight times less than what he received for appearing in Hitchcock’s Marnie earlier the same year. Moreover, he is reported to have received less cumulatively for the first four Bond films than Dean Martin – granted a healthy percentage of the grosses – had for Bond spoof The Silencers. Connery’s disgruntlement was so severe that it led to his doing something inconceivable: walking away from the biggest movie phenomenon in the world.

  The first attempt to further the James Bond literary heritage took a curious form. October 1967 saw the appearance of The Adventures of James Bond Junior 0031⁄2, ‘a story for boys and girls aged 8-14’, by R.D. Mascott.

  James Bond Jr is not, as might be expected, the son of agent 007, but his nephew. The title therefore doesn’t make any more sense than the existence herein of a Bond brother (David) never mentioned by Fleming. Nor that young James Bond has the nickname 0031⁄2 conferred on him by his housemaster: why would a civilian know the code number of a secret agent?

  Highly unpromising though all this might be, the book is actually quite good. The narrative has dark, adult undertones and a gnarly descriptive style. Its only major problem for a Bond enthusiast is that it really has nothing to do with James Bond. The protagonist may be named after his uncle but he has never met him (‘he was always on some mission or other’). Moreover, Young James’s investigations of the mysterious goings-on at nearby Hazeley Hall, which involve him uncovering the c
ulprits behind a gold bullion robbery, don’t make him any different from any halfway resourceful protagonist from oodles of children’s literature.

  The 22 July 1967 edition of The Bookseller declared, ‘Harry Saltzman plans to make a series of television films based on the book.’ The series never materialised. Meanwhile, the book went quickly out of print and was seldom reissued.

  The identity of the pseudonymous R.D. Mascott was a long-term secret, leading to conjecture involving names such as Roald Dahl and Kingsley Amis. In 2001, it was confirmed by the executors of the estate of the versatile British writer Arthur Calder-Marshall that he was the author.

  The first adult Bond ‘continuation novel’ was commissioned partly because it was felt to be a good way of preserving Bond’s pre-eminent status in a sea of imitators. It was Kingsley Amis who provided it after Glidrose had rejected as substandard Per Fine Ounce, written by South African thriller writer and former Fleming Sunday Times colleague Geoffrey Jenkins.

  As the author of Lucky Jim, a novel considered to be part of the Angry Young Man literary trend in the UK of the late fifties/early sixties, Amis might be considered an unlikely chronicler of the adventures of a blunt instrument of state and establishment man. Certainly Ann Fleming thought so, predicting in an unpublished review for The Sunday Telegraph, ‘we shall have a petit bourgeois red-brick Bond …’ However, not only had his politics lately lurched to the right, Amis had demonstrated both considerable writing gifts and deep knowledge of the character.

  Published in March 1968, Amis’s Colonel Sun was issued under the pseudonym ‘Robert Markham’. Raymond Benson explains, ‘They thought if they were going to do a lot of books they were going to use the Robert Markham pseudonym for every author. [Also], Kingsley Amis didn’t want his own name on it.’ This house-name tradition was long-established, albeit in rather low-rent series such as Doc Savage. However, the identity of the real author was no secret, and reviews – and sometimes book covers – freely mentioned Amis’s name. The Markham house name was never used again.

  The book’s action takes place the summer after the events in The Man with the Golden Gun. When Bond goes to visit M at his house, he finds himself in the middle of a kidnap plot. Bond evades his pursuers, and then has to follow the trail of the abducted M to Greece, where he slowly realises that Colonel Sun of the People’s Liberation Army of China is planning to blow up a meeting of top brass from Soviet and African states and, via the resultant misunderstandings and recriminations, open up the Eastern Mediterranean to Chinese penetration.

  It comes as a shock how all of Amis’s witty mocking in The James Bond Dossier of Fleming’s occasional bad writing or plot holes doesn’t automatically translate into his being able to write as well as – let alone better than – the James Bond creator. Amis was a far more celebrated author than Fleming, but Colonel Sun is simply dull.

  There is an additional problem. Colonel Sun was the first proof that reading a non-Fleming Bond story is an intrinsically strange experience. In its review, The Sunday Times declared that James Bond was so personal to Fleming that Amis’s work ‘doesn’t ring true’. It would ever be thus. However well written or knowledgeable a Bond continuation novel, the reader will never be able to get over a vague feeling of impertinence and inauthenticity. As soon as the opening pages of this one, we feel that Amis is already stepping outside the established margins of the Bond literary canon: such an occurrence as the abduction of the head of the Secret Service seems more the sensational stuff of the Bond films. Fleming often took his character down unexpected, even illogical, avenues of course, but the instinctive feeling is that the creator is the only person who has the right to so transgress. Yet the continuation author is in a bind: attempting to avoid presumption leaves him merely with the option of pastiche, which so often tips over into formula.

  Although Colonel Sun was a literary event by default, its sales were disappointing. Benson offers, ‘I think it was too soon after Fleming’s death to have another Bond author.’ Aside from the necessarily one-off project James Bond: The Authorized Biography by John Pearson and two movie novelisations, there was no further sanctioned literary Bond activity for more than a decade.

  Yet, ultimately, Amis’s book was the first entry in what became a significant industry. Continuation Bond novels proliferated, as did spin-offs that include books for children about the junior Bond and even narratives from the perspective of Moneypenny. Such books now dwarf Fleming’s original corpus by a factor of five. Adjudging them all invalid for simply second-guessing Fleming would logically mean that a Fleming aficionado could never allow himself to enjoy any of the worthy Bond films not based on Fleming’s original tales.

  Uncomfortable as it may be to the Fleming fan or the Bond purist, with each passing year Ian Fleming’s original Bond stories are increasingly reduced to the status of something akin to a taster for Bond’s further adventures across the media.

  AN UNCERTAIN ERA

  On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the first Bond movie whose soundtrack was in stereo. That, though, was hardly the main change.

  At first, Eon toyed with the idea of a plot device wherein Bond underwent plastic surgery because he was too recognisable to his country’s enemies. Such an idea sounds ludicrous now, but – the Casino Royale farce excepted – the wider public had never seen anyone else as 007. Presenting them with a new actor in the role was a worrying step into the unknown. Only slightly less outlandish was David V. Picker’s suggestion of casting professional sportsman John Newcombe. He says, ‘I thought, What an interesting idea: terrific-looking tennis player to become a movie star.’

  Such bizarre ideas were a manifestation of the uncertainty that hung over James Bond, whether in book or movie form. Within the space of a few years, the Bond world had lost both Fleming and Connery. Colonel Sun had seemed to prove that there was no future for Bond novels without Fleming. The uncertainty about the viability of the cinema 007 without Connery would appear to be demonstrated by the fact that, following You Only Live Twice, there was a two-and-a-half-year gap before a new Bond film. Finally, after endless auditions and speculation, Eon bit the recasting bullet. It was announced that in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service one George Lazenby was to inhabit the tuxedo and steer the Aston Martin.

  Lazenby was, like Connery before him, neither of fine breeding nor English. Born in 1939 and raised in Australia, he had come to the UK in 1964, where he took up modelling. Although he was successful – reportedly earning £20,000 a year (astronomical for 1968) and becoming fairly recognisable from such things as a commercial for Turkish Delight chocolate – he had never spoken on film before. He was, however, handsome in Bond’s conservative style. At a burly six-foot-two, he also looked as if he could handle peril. Also like Connery, he managed to suppress his natural accent enough to convince as a native of the same country as Elizabeth II.

  Although some doubted the wisdom of recruiting a novice, Lazenby had been a sufficiently good actor to convince the seasoned Broccoli and Saltzman of his actually non-existent thespian background, something that so tickled Peter Hunt – who had graduated to director – that he said he insisted on him as the new Bond. (An alternative – and not necessarily contradictory – story is that Lazenby convinced Broccoli and Saltzman he was right for the part when during a screen test he accidentally broke the nose of stuntman Uri Borienko.)

  Remarkably, with OHMSS the slightest of Bond books was turned into arguably the best 007 motion picture of all. The producers took such scenes as the assault on Blofeld’s mountain lair and Bond’s battle weariness when running from Blofeld’s men and drew from them the excitement and pathos Fleming mostly failed to. The smaller scale necessitated by this particular story was complemented by a policy of avoiding the gadgets that Saltzman publicly pronounced ‘overdone’. It all meant, ironically and by coincidence, that the newcomer got the classy Bond movie that Sean Connery had always wanted but been denied by two postponements, once because of the need to placate McC
lory by filming Thunderball, the second time because the latter’s shooting overran so much it made impossible the filming of Blofeld’s mountain lair at a clement time of year.

  Lazenby does something different with his gun-barrel sequence, dropping to one knee as he fires his bullet. The wash of blood actually obscures him rather than presents him through a red haze, as had been the case with Connery.

  The title sequence is a version of the opening of the Fleming book wherein Bond saves Tracy from suicide. As with Connery’s first appearance, we are tantalised about the appearance of the new actor, here shown only in silhouettes and close-ups of his dimpled chin until the point where he introduces himself in the traditional surname-first manner. As an ungrateful Tracy zooms off in her car, Lazenby breaks the fourth wall to remark to the viewer, ‘This never happened to the other fella.’

  The now-unfamiliar lack of a lyric to the film’s theme is due to the fact that John Barry and Leslie Bricusse couldn’t find a way to work in that mouthful of a title. Instead, Barry devised an alpine horn-propelled affair that is both distinctive and stirring, if doomed to obscurity in the wider world by its lack of a vocal hook.

  Mercifully, Richard Maibaum is back to produce a script proffering the authentic Bond, rather than an outsider’s idea of 007. Getting an ‘Additional Dialogue’ credit is British novelist and Bond fan Simon Raven.

  At first, everything seems gauche. Costuming is a problem throughout. Bond is variously shown in white suit, ruffled shirt, knee boots, sleeveless tweed cloak and even a kilt. Admittedly, the last two costumes are part of his Hilary Bray disguise, but they are effete departures from what we imagine Connery ever consenting to. The relationship with Moneypenny is all wrong: it is initially 007 who is the pursuer – even to the point of goosing her – while she is uninterested.