James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  It’s not the expected Baron Samedi who is given an encore from Live and Let Die but Sheriff J.W. Pepper, who happens to be on holiday in Thailand with his wife. Pepper’s recognition of Bond would have been bewildering to those who hadn’t caught the previous film. In fact, when he states, ‘You’re that secret agent – that English secret agent, from England!’ some will have assumed it merely a function of the fact that everybody on the planet now seems to know who 007 is. (‘Your reputation precedes you,’ a receptionist for the man who makes Scaramanga’s bullets says to Bond.)

  If the story is laughable, the high production values and quality stunts continue to impress. The highlight of the latter category is a remarkable river crossing where Bond makes a car perform a spectacular mid-air spin, even if it’s slightly undermined by being accompanied by a buffoonish drooping sound effect.

  Christopher Lee brings star quality to the role of Scaramanga, as well as a family connection: he was a step-cousin to Ian Fleming. His character’s third nipple is impressively generated by the makeup department.

  Bond doesn’t always come across as likeable. The way he shoves a chid beggar into a river is distasteful, as is the extent to which he slaps around Andrea for information, as is his scorn for the politesse of martial-arts combat, but those things are nothing compared with the way he starts cracking jokes at Scaramanga just seconds after finding out that the latter has murdered Andrea. Some or all of this is apparently due to Moore deciding to harden up his Bond, but this new persona is scarcely less contemptible than the lounge lizard of his debut.

  The Man with the Golden Gun has few fans. It was critically derided, and its worldwide rentals of $37.2 million made it the least successful entry since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. However, the Bond producers would shortly have worse problems than that with which to grapple. The year after the film’s release, Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman launched into a bitter legal dispute.

  The enmity between them was longstanding. They had alternated main production duties on Bond films since You Only Live Twice. ‘The tension between them towards the end of their partnership was not pleasant,’ Roger Moore recalls of Broccoli and Saltzman. ‘It boiled down to Cubby being content making Bond films, whereas Harry wanted to do more, and didn’t really know when to stop.’ Since he’d helped instigate it, Broccoli had devoted himself exclusively to the Bond franchise. The only exceptions were Call Me Bwana with Saltzman and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which he produced on his own and which might almost be attributed to Broccoli’s personal fondness for Fleming. Saltzman had produced worthy films such as the Harry Palmer trilogy, but his non-Bond ventures had left him $20 million in the red.

  Broccoli later claimed that Saltzman had broken the terms of their partnership agreement by pledging to Swiss banks 100 per cent of Danjaq to cover liabilities racked up by his non-Bond production work. As ever, Broccoli’s claims are open to question. Saltzman’s assistant, Sue St John, painted a less sinister picture: Saltzman had wanted to buy the company Technicolor and had simply pledged his own Danjaq shares to his creditors as collateral on the deal. Ultimately, Saltzman tried to sell his Danjaq shares but matters were complicated by the fact that both Broccoli and United Artists had a veto on the parties who would thereby become partners in Bond-film productions. Meanwhile, Saltzman – presumably for reasons of personal hostility – didn’t want to sell his half to Broccoli. As a consequence, the alternative story goes, the debt went unpaid for so long that Saltzman’s creditors attempted to take control of Danjaq.

  The closing credits of The Man with the Golden Gun might have read ‘James Bond will return in The Spy Who Loved Me’, but over the course of much of the next two-and-a-half years – as a follow-up failed to materialise – that began to seem more hope than promise.

  DING-DONG!

  In December 1975, the impasse in Bond film world was ended when United Artists bought Saltzman’s 50 per cent share in Danjaq.

  Saltzman subsequently rather dropped off the public radar. He would be reduced to a position of penury – literally having to sell his wife’s jewellery – although was probably less concerned with that than his wife’s terminal illness. His name appeared in the credits of just two further films: Nijinsky (1980, on which he was executive producer) and Time of the Gypsies (1988, co-producer). He concentrated instead on the chairmanship duties of his theatrical production company H. M. Tennent. He died of a heart attack in September 1994, by which time Saltzman had made his peace with Broccoli.

  The fact that his name has not appeared in a Bond film’s credits for over four decades has artificially diminished Saltzman’s role in the franchise’s success. Not only did he do the original deal with Fleming, it should be noted that in the early days of the film series he seems to have been by far the more visible and influential of the two partners. Certainly, from Fleming’s discussion of the burgeoning Bond motion-picture industry in his private correspondence, one could be forgiven for not knowing that Broccoli was even involved.

  Although Broccoli now had to carry the entire production burden of a franchise, from Roger Moore’s point of view the development was a good thing. ‘When Cubby resumed production alone, there was a very different, more relaxed atmosphere,’ he says. ‘It was largely the same crews, so there wasn’t any huge overnight change in that respect. Cubby just wanted to make the biggest and best film he could and that’s all we focused on.’ With The Spy Who Loved Me – whose London premiere was on 7 July 1977 – many felt Broccoli achieved that objective.

  That Broccoli opted to adapt The Spy Who Loved Me was surprising. The novel had something of a bad smell because of Fleming’s known displeasure with it, but, more importantly, the author had contractually insisted that it not be adapted. This meant that for the first time – notwithstanding the Bond films’ increasing departure from their source novels – Eon were working from scratch. According to Broccoli, Eon even had to negotiate long and hard with the Fleming estate just to get the right to use the title.

  Broccoli claimed that a total of fourteen writers were ultimately used. Among them are reputed to be Sterling Silliphant, John Landis and Anthony Burgess – an Oscar winner, a future superstar director and an acclaimed literary novelist respectively, a breathtaking list of talent that seems merely to demonstrate how difficult Eon were finding the unparalleled situation of not being able to lift anything from a Fleming novel. Broccoli claimed that he and his wife Dana rewrote the whole story with all the scripts spread out on the floor. None of which explains why the only screenwriters listed in the credits are Maibaum and Christopher Wood. Nor why Gerry Anderson was given an out-of-court settlement after claiming similarities with a treatment he had once devised at the request of Saltzman for an adaptation of Moonraker. Nor why there is an almost farcical overarching resemblance to You Only Live Twice, also helmed by this film’s director, Lewis Gilbert. Moreover, Tom Mankiewicz claimed that he did a ‘big rewrite’ but agreed not to claim credit because Broccoli was worried that an additional non-Briton officially working on the picture would mean it was no longer eligible for Eady Plan benefits.

  Eon had taken the peculiar decision to film Moore’s first two Bond films in standard aspect ratio, something they had spurned since Goldfinger. The reversion to widescreen for The Spy Who Loved Me necessitated a new gun-barrel sequence. This time Moore wears a tuxedo. The sequence would be used through the rest of Moore’s tenure, although the background colour would change each time.

  The pre-title sequence is possibly the most fondly remembered of them all. With both Soviet and British submarines going missing, the respective powers call up their best agents. In a genuinely delightful plot twist, Russia’s Agent Triple-X turns out not to be the hairy-backed man in bed to whom we cut but the woman underneath him, Major Anya Amasova of the KGB (Barbara Bach). Meanwhile, Bond is recalled from a mission in Austria. He flees Russian pursuers in an Austrian ski chase before tumbling off a cliff to his apparently certain death. Several silent seconds pass
as his tiny figure spins in the air. Then the ‘James Bond Theme’ blares in triumph as a parachute with a Union Jack design unfurls from his backpack. The combination of surprise, relief and patriotism (tied in with that year’s Silver Jubilee celebrations) had some British audiences whooping as if American. It’s both over the top and stirring, and in that sense is much like the rest of the film.

  The title is not worked into the script in any way. It also seems to find its way into the theme song only as an afterthought, featuring not in the title or the chorus but in a verse. ‘Nobody Does It Better’ – sung by Carly Simon, written by Carole Bayer Sager (lyric) and Marvin Hamlisch (music) – is additionally a modest pop tune rather than a widescreen anthem. It shouldn’t, therefore, work, yet it is very pleasing.

  It was, though, a last hurrah for Bond themes – a shocking fact considering that three-and-a-half decades have since passed. The reasons for the decline of the Bond theme are varied – the recruitment of fashionable pop stars who insisted on co-writing, the departure of John Barry, the adoption of cacophonous or soporific modern recording technology, the self-consciousness of young composers weaned on Bond … Bizarrely, the one person during this period to manage to write a Bond theme of high quality had not actually been recruited to do so: Spandau Ballet’s pulsating 1983 hit ‘Gold’ – composed by the band’s guitarist/keyboardist Gary Kemp – showed far more understanding of the prerequisites of a Bond theme than any of the latter-day limp film anthems.

  Hamlisch also provided the film’s score, as John Barry, in a dispute with the UK taxman, was refusing to work in his home country. Hamlisch had scored the ultra-successful stage musical A Chorus Line and garnered Oscar nominations for his music for The Way We Were and The Sting. However, his work here is a little ham-fisted, and his choice of pulsating rock instrumentation not in Bondian tradition, Wings notwithstanding.

  Maurice Binder’s title sequence consists of silhouettes of naked females doing gymnastics on the barrels of giant guns, leading to many split-second semi-convictions in cinema seats of having seen something explicit. These titles are also notable for being the first to feature Bond himself.

  Shipping magnate Karl Stromberg (Curt Jürgens) is swallowing up armed submarines with his supertanker The Liparus. He lives in a gargantuan submersible sea platform called Atlantis, from where he intends to use the captured subs to destroy corrupt civilisation and start afresh on the seabed. Strangely, his webbed hand is easily missed and its implications not explored.

  Stromberg was originally Ernst Stavro Blofeld but, in yet another hiccup in an extended production, the reappearance of SPECTRE had to be abandoned as a consequence of a legal challenge by Kevin McClory, who pointed out that the ten-year licence that he had granted Eon to use the evil organisation had now elapsed. Also expired was the ten-year period in which McClory had agreed with Eon that he would refrain from remaking Thunderball. He was currently actively developing a new Bond project, provisionally called Warhead.

  The syndicate that had underpinned all but one Connery movie would now not be seen in an official Bond picture until both McClory and Broccoli were long dead. It’s quite surprising to realise that, although SPECTRE is felt by many to be synonymous with 007, Blofeld never crossed swords with Bond in an Eon production over a period of three decades and that the character as played by Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan never once mentioned him.

  Stromberg’s henchman is Jaws (Richard Kiel), a silent behemoth (his paw looks huge on Moore’s face in fight scenes) with a gimmick weapon (teeth made completely of steel – perhaps the faintest echo from the book of the villain Horror, who had steel-capped teeth). The clownish allusion in Jaws’ name to Spielberg’s blockbuster movie of two years previously is a gesture of deference one can’t imagine occurring in the series’ triumphalist early days.

  The doe-eyed, softly spoken Agent XXX is not particularly physical, getting male minions to do her violence for her. She would have been made a much steelier character in a modern Bond picture. Bond and Anya are instructed by M and his Soviet counterpart, General Gogol (Walter Gotell), to team up to deal with the common threat. Their screwball-comedy romance comes to an end when Anya realises it was Bond who killed her lover: he was one of the skiers chasing 007 in Austria.

  Their confrontation has a real pathos even before Anya announces that, as soon as their joint mission is concluded, she will kill him. Bond seethes, ‘In our business, Anya, people get killed. We both know that. So did he. It was either him or me.’ It is Moore’s finest piece of acting in the series, and proof that he was not the mannequin many – including himself – have posited him as. Asked if he would have liked to have been able to demonstrate his range in Bond films more often, he responds, ‘Well it’s always nice to have more than just the one line of, “My name is Bond, James Bond” to say.’ However, he adds, ‘Though I’m not sure they’d have wanted to stretch my acting range too much.’

  A returning Ken Adam constructed the largest soundstage in history to accommodate the submarine bays of The Liparus, on which Bond and the crew of the captured British submarine do gun battle with Stromberg’s men. The set was not, as is the norm, pulled down after shooting wrapped but remains standing as the 007 Stage of Pinewood Studios, albeit rebuilt twice after fires. Rentals from other productions meant that it eventually paid for itself.

  Among the gadgets in the film are a Lotus Esprit car that is already futuristic-looking without turning, as it does, into an undersea vessel equipped with missile-firing capabilities. It became the most iconic Bond car – and most sought-after Bond toy – since the Aston Martin DB5. It was designed by Derek Meddings, a special-effects supervisor who specialised in miniature models – he was a veteran of Gerry Anderson’s various Supermarionation TV series – and who had joined the Bond/Eon family during the production of Live and Let Die.

  For the first time, the American market proved receptive to a Roger Moore Bond movie. The grosses of The Spy Who Loved Me were the highest of any Bond film to date, even if not inflation-adjusted. For Broccoli, the film proved that he could carry the franchise forward on his own. For the public, The Spy Who Loved Me confirmed finally that Roger Moore was now properly, unequivocally James Bond.

  That same year, another attempt was made to continue the James Bond literary heritage. It wasn’t, however, the idea of Glidrose. Instead it was Eon who had the audacious notion of commissioning a novelisation of the film of The Spy Who Loved Me.

  Novelisations were big business at the time. With the video industry in its infancy, the only way for most of the public to re-experience a recent movie was to go and see it again at the cinema. Consequently, every major motion picture of the time had a tie-in book. That is, every major motion picture not based on a literary work.

  That would, at first glance, rule out The Spy Who Loved Me as a candidate for such treatment. A second glance, however, would reveal the fact that The Spy Who Loved Me was not based on a book. It being the first Bond movie not even to retain a fragment (possibly excepting Jaws) of its theoretical source, it made a sort of sense – albeit a convoluted and mercenary one – to issue a book with the careful title James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me. Unusually for a novelisation, it was issued in hardback, albeit in the same year as a paperback edition.

  Peter Janson-Smith, then chairman of Glidrose, recalled to commanderbond.net, ‘We had no hand in that other than we told the film people that we were going to exert our legal right to handle the rights in the books. They chose Christopher Wood … and they decided what he would be paid.’ Speaking to universalexports.net, Wood himself said of the task of novelising the film he had co-written, ‘At first I was daunted by the idea of … trying to combine Fleming with the much larger-than-life movies …’ However, ‘Writing the books gave me the chance to put in things that had not appeared in the movies – and improve (I hope) some of the things that had.’

  Reaction from fandom was favourable, while the wider buying public sent the paperback
into the top ten of the UK best-sellers list.

  The New Statesman commissioned a review from the last person to have written a proper Bond novel. Kingsley Amis’s assessment was mixed. He said, ‘Mr Wood has bravely tackled his formidable task, that of turning a typical late Bond film, which must be basically facetious, into a novel after Ian Fleming, which must be basically serious. To this end he has, by my count, left out nine silly gadgets and sixteen silly cracks …’

  Although he allowed that ‘the descriptions are adequate and the action writing excellent’, Amis felt there was a fundamental problem with the project that no amount of either adequate or excellent writing could rectify:

  What nobody could have cut out is the element of second-sight contingency planning (or negligence) that gets by in a film, indeed is very much part of the style of these films, but obtrudes in a book. Your enemy has an explosive motorbike sidecar ready to launch at your car in case he’s forgotten to kill you for certain and in secret a few minutes before. In case that misses, he has already aloft a helicopter fitted with jets and cannon. Your car is submersible in case you meet such a helicopter while driving on a coast road. In case you submerge your car he has a midget submarine waiting. In case he has you have underwater rocket-launchers …

  Roger Moore’s original Bond deal had been for three films. Following The Spy Who Loved Me, therefore, new contract negotiations were in order. That Moore decided to ask for increased remuneration was, in the wake of the commercial triumph of his latest 007 picture, understandable. However, it nearly scuppered his chances of resuming the role. Although stories abound of Cubby Broccoli’s personal generosity, so do tales of his parsimony. When, for instance, no less a figure than Catherine Deneuve approached Broccoli about playing Anya in The Spy Who Loved Me, Broccoli refused to meet her fee. In a December 1976 Los Angeles Times article, it was stated that Broccoli also refused to meet the demands of Marthe Keller and Dominique Sanda. Boasted Broccoli, ‘The money I’ve saved by not using a well-known actress I spent on that marvellous ski stunt.’ He therefore wasn’t going to easily accede to Moore’s demands. One also wonders whether at the back of his mind Broccoli was beginning to worry about the fact that Moore was now on the brink of his half-century.