James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  In the end, Moore did sign up, but on a one-off basis. The fact that Moore continued to decline to sign contracts for more than one Bond at a time meant that there would be further showdowns over money across the rest of his tenure. ‘Not at all,’ Moore responds when it’s suggested that this led to repeated, unnecessary brinkmanship. ‘I never discussed business with Cubby, and he never with me. That was left to agents and lawyers.’ That Moore ultimately appears to have always had his pay demands met does seem to suggest that Eon had learned a lesson from their conflicts with Connery.

  The end credits of The Spy Who Loved Me had stated that James Bond would return in For Your Eyes Only, but that plan changed around 1977, when Star Wars enraptured the public. Handily, the only Bond novel not yet adapted to the big screen lent itself to a fashionably star-speckled backdrop.

  Moonraker, therefore, premiered in the UK on 26 June 1979 as the third Bond movie of the last four to shamelessly jump on a bandwagon. The results of such cynicism had so far been mixed but worldwide box-office grosses of $202.7 million showed that it certainly worked in Moonraker’s case. If that was the only way Eon measured success, everything was fine. Unfortunately, Moore had followed possibly his best Bond picture with probably his worst.

  Christopher Wood has the sole writing credit, although Broccoli claimed that Mankiewicz and director Gilbert worked on the story too.

  The pre-title scene depicting a large vessel being hijacked feels groanworthily reminiscent of both You Only Live Twice and The Spy Who Loved Me. In 1979, though, it could be said to be ahead of the curve in one respect: the vessel in question is a NASA space shuttle – herein also called Moonrakers – which in real life wouldn’t be formally launched until 1981.

  Bond meets Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles) when he goes to the California mansion of Hugo Drax (a subdued performance by Michael Lonsdale), who builds the Moonrakers for America. (Britain’s involvement comes from the fact that the missing shuttle has been lent to it by the US.) The beautiful but no-nonsense Dr Goodhead is a qualified astronaut on loan from NASA (she will also transpire to be a CIA agent), but, introduced to her, Moore exclaims, ‘A woman!’ This reaction would have felt less oily in 1979, when women were not so common in the workplace, but Moore is beginning to seem like a dinosaur in more ways than one. Liver spots are beginning to appear on his hands and he is a vision of clubland in his blue blazer and flannels. British viewers would have half-expected him to exclaim, ‘Ding-dong!’ – the slavering catchphrase of senior, upper-class, comedy acting lech Leslie Phillips.

  When Bond is sitting in a centrifuge trainer, a huge spinning contraption that simulates the crushing inertial force produced by rapid acceleration into outer space, a Drax minion proceeds to sabotage it. As he spins helplessly, we are provided a glimpse of vulnerability rare for Moore’s Bond, who looks distressed when he realises he can’t quip or punch his way out of this one. Finally able to bring the machine to a halt by improvising with a Q-supplied gadget, he staggers from the machine, angrily pushing away Holly’s comforting hands.

  Now suspecting Drax, and having uncovered evidence that Drax has an operation in Brazil, Bond makes his way to Rio, where an attempt on his life is made by Jaws, who just happens to have been offered employment by a second megalomaniac with whom Bond has wound up in conflict. After another attempt to kill Bond – this time on a cable car – Jaws is rescued from the rubble by a bespectacled girl in plaited pigtails. She never speaks but is named in the credits as Dolly (Blanche Ravalec). It’s at this point that the film tips over from merely the nadir of self-parody into tut-provoking idiocy: the two fall for each other on sight and instantly walk off hand in hand to the accompaniment of Tchaikovsky’s overture Romeo and Juliet.

  When the action moves to the Amazon, another attempt is made to bump off Bond by the indefatigable Jaws. The secret agent escapes it by abandoning his boat at the edge of a waterfall and swooping off on a detachable hang-glider. Conveniently, he alights in the immediate vicinity of a Mayan temple being used by Drax to house his space shuttles, into which 007 makes his way almost without breaking stride. This is a perfect example of the oleaginous timbre of the film, Bond slithering effortlessly from country to country, ancient splendour to ancient splendour, providential lead to providential lead, gadget to gadget, expressing no surprise or wonder as he does.

  Inside, Bond witnesses Drax launching a series of space shuttles. ‘What exactly are you up to here, Drax?’ demands Bond, which at least makes a change from the villain’s usual unprompted exposition. What Drax is up to is planning to wipe out life on Earth and transport via his Moonrakers some beautiful young chosen ones to a new outer-space Eden. Drax, naturally, has sufficient wherewithal to have built and launched a space station the size of a city and, naturally, has done so undetected. The hijacked Moonraker was actually nabbed by Drax because one of his own developed a fault.

  Bond and Holly are whisked off to the space station. The American government sends up a marine squadron, resulting in a massed laser-gun battle in vacuum. Also floatingly taking place in zero gravity is Bond’s final-stages lovemaking with Holly. An unknowing Q informs the White House and Buckingham Palace, ‘I think he’s attempting re-entry.’

  Moonraker’s necessarily high budget motivated Eon to solicit massive amounts of product placement. One particularly unsubtle example comes in a scene wherein a car crashes into the mouth of a flight stewardess depicted on a billboard emblazoned with a well-known British Airways slogan. Product placement in Bond movies – which had started with Goldfinger – would shortly become so ferocious that it even contaminated areas outside the action: the opening credits of Licence to Kill artlessly featured a beauty taking pictures with a camera pointedly made by Olympus.

  The soundtrack saw the return of John Barry. While his score is fine, the melody to the title song is featureless and Hal David’s lyric works in the title word rather awkwardly. Not even Shirley Bassey – returning to perform her third Bond theme – can do much with it.

  Listed as executive producer of Moonraker was one Michael G. Wilson. He, in fact, was a lawyer by training. His strange switch in careers is explained by the fact that he was also Cubby Broccoli’s stepson. As well as his production role on every Bond movie since, he co-wrote scripts for a period.

  This might smack of nepotism and insularity. Roger Moore has certainly publicly noted that a dual role of producer and scriptwriter was a conflict of interest. However, the concentration of power in the hands of the Broccoli family engendered by Saltzman’s departure may well be the explanation for James Bond’s enduring position in the culture. Saltzman and Broccoli was a combination that had worked well up to a point, but the fact that the two men ultimately fell out indicates how precarious partnerships can be. And, if those two were unable to see things the same way, what implication did that have for harmonious relationships among the eventual respective familial heirs to their 007 rights?

  With there now being only one non-studio set of heirs to those rights, the situation became less complicated. It became even less complicated in 1986 when the studio element was erased from the ownership picture by Broccoli buying out UA’s 50 per cent share of cinema Bond.

  That the James Bond franchise is – uniquely in motion-picture history – a true family business has meant a certain guarantor of care. Bond films have not been made perfunctorily, carelessly or grudgingly by hired studio hands. Instead they have been crafted by people whose application has gone hand in hand with the subconscious apprehension of the responsibility of birthright. This and an inevitable element of sentimentality creates total conscientiousness. This is not the same thing as saying that all Bond films are outstanding – as Moonraker itself emphatically demonstrates. It is the reason, however, that no Bond movie has ever been a true commercial flop. The family ownership has meant the type of careful nurturing and updating never granted to any other film property.

  The dynasty is set to continue. Whether Barbara Broccoli’s daughter Angelica
is interested in following in her mother’s footsteps is yet to be seen, but Wilson’s son Gregg has been working as an associate producer since Skyfall, his other son, David, works on ancillary rights and niece Heather is employed in publicity.

  The sealed protection granted Bond films by the status of family property will only be jeopardised when the character falls into the public domain, as has done a comparable precursor icon, Sherlock Holmes. In Canada, which unusually stuck to the Berne Convention dictates of death-plus-fifty-years, that situation came into existence at the beginning of 2015, a half-century on from Fleming’s passing. It was quickly exploited by ChiZine Publications, who in November of that year published a crowd-funded anthology of new Bond stories defiantly titled Licence Expired.

  The small amount of new copyright freedom regarding 007 is not restricted to books. Theoretically, anyone can now make a Bond movie in Canada, although it could not be distributed outside those shores except to countries with similar copyright limits. Moreover, that film would have to be strictly based on Fleming’s Bond. Any incorporation of elements of Bond exclusive to the films would be actionable. In the USA, Fleming’s Bond could be in the public domain in 2034, seventy years after Fleming’s death, although legislators in the States have a habit of stretching and making exceptions in copyright law. In Britain, it will be 2039 that third parties will be free to make even a Bond movie that sidesteps Eon hallmarks. The perilous business of avoiding litigation may even come down to making sure to call the Secret Service’s cover name Universal ‘Export’ rather than ‘Exports’.

  With Moonraker, Christopher Wood was once again asked to provide a novelisation of a Bond script on which he’d worked. The result was another book with a title carefully delineating it from its putative Fleming source: James Bond and Moonraker (1979).

  Following that book, Eon abandoned the novelisation approach. The reason possibly lay with the fact that Glidrose felt more books-of-the-film would conflict with their planned new Bond novels. If so, there is an element of injustice, for it does seem logical to conclude that it was the success of the Wood novelisations that prompted Glidrose into reviving continuation Bonds.

  John Gardner was not as illustrious a name as Arthur Calder-Marshall, Kingsley Amis or John Pearson, but with him Glidrose finally alighted on a writer able to further James Bond’s written chronicles to the long-term satisfaction of the public. (Wood has said he would have been interested in writing an original James Bond novel but wasn’t asked.) Gardner had been a successful novelist since the mid-sixties. He had proven himself adept at both Bond pastiche (while valid thrillers in their own right, his Liquidator novels were, by his own admission, ‘a complete piss-take’ of 007) and continuing a longstanding literary franchise (he had produced novels about Sherlock Holmes’s adversary Professor Moriarty). Gardner later wrote:

  What I wanted to do was take the character and bring Fleming’s Bond into the Eighties as the same man but with all he would have learned had he lived through the Sixties and Seventies … Most of all I wanted him to have operational know-how: the reality of correct tradecraft and modern gee-whiz technology.

  Gardner’s new Bond – hair flecked slightly with grey, now working directly for M after the disbandment of the double-O section, a moderate drinker, a low-tar-cigarette smoker, a Saab 900 Turbo-driver, a Walther PPK refusenik – made his first appearance in Licence Renewed in mid-1981. His adversary was Anton Murik, a disgraced nuclear physicist intent on extorting $50 billion in diamonds in exchange for returning to the custody of the authorities six hijacked nuclear power stations. The updatings were bound to irritate some aficionados, but, regardless of those, the book is curiously flat, with Gardner confused about whether it is the literary or cinematic Bond he is portraying and proffering ritualistic and perfunctory sex scenes.

  Despite this, Gardner’s take on Bond ‘took’ and he remained the official James Bond author for fifteen years. During that time, his take changed, whether it was by Bond’s switch from a Saab to a Bentley Mulsanne Turbo, the mention of ‘precautions’ as sex became more hazardous with the rise of AIDS or the creeping upwards in violence levels, which it had been agreed at the beginning would be moderate. Some changes were definitively devolution. The consensus is that Gardner’s Bonds began to steeply drop off in quality at the halfway point of his tenure, while his determination to age Bond with the times began to result in the timeline difficulties Fleming spent his last few books trying to untangle. Gardner also had Bond suffer the indignity of no fewer than three rejected marriage proposals.

  Gardner’s books sold well – especially in the US – and, if the serious reviews were thin on the ground and the reception of fandom mixed, this was no more than Gardner expected when he took on what he termed ‘a no-win situation’. He published fourteen 007 books of his own devising – the same number as did Ian Fleming (including the latter’s short-story collections). He also wrote novelisations of the films Licence to Kill and GoldenEye. He gave up the reins not because of illness, as has sometimes been reported, but because, ‘I had already had my fill of Bond …’

  Around halfway through Gardner’s run, Jonathan Cape ceased being the continuation Bond-novel publisher, with the franchise switching to Hodder & Stoughton. From what Gardner said, he would have been well advised to bail out around the point when Cape did. He told universalexports.net, ‘Should have stopped at six … The Bond books are formula writing and that doesn’t improve anyone’s technique.’

  Nonetheless, Gardner left literary Bond in a far better state than he had found it, when it had been so reduced in stature that only novelisations of bastardisations of Fleming’s work met with any public favour. He also served notice to the masses that there existed a vision of James Bond more thoughtful and nuanced than the one being purveyed in the films.

  For the next Bond movie, John Glen took over the reins from Lewis Gilbert. Although a novice director, he settled in for a record-breaking five pictures, all in succession.

  With all the Fleming Bond novel titles now exhausted, Eon turned to the short stories. The script of For Your Eyes Only is actually a conflation of ‘For Your Eyes Only’ and ‘Risico’. Mixed into that is a section of the Live and Let Die novel unused – like much of its source – by the film of that name.

  ‘We figured it was time Bond headed back in a more realistic direction,’ Michael G. Wilson told The Hollywood Reporter in 1980. The new, gritty direction for Bond was touted as a reaction to Moonraker’s timbre. Now that Bond had gone into space, the expansion of the fanciful that had been increasing exponentially ever since Q’s first gadget could go no further – Bond was hardly going to travel to the moon or Mars. Others, however, have suggested that United Artists were more concerned with ballooning budgets than realism. Certainly, Ken Adam – once lionised for his grand visions, now marginalised for his extravagance – had lately found life increasingly difficult. Moonraker was his last Bond.

  There is indeed far less technology in For Your Eyes Only – which premiered in the UK on 24 June 1981 – than had been seen in any Bond picture since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service a dozen years before. However, this is nothing like the gritty espionage proposition Wilson was suggesting. At this point in history, at least, it was not possible to put on general release a largely gadget-free, often static Bond film like From Russia with Love.

  In the pre-title sequence, Bond is picked up in a Universal Exports helicopter, but the helicopter is remotely taken over by somebody with murderous designs on 007. That person is an anonymous bald man whose face remains unseen as he strokes a white cat. Eon are pushing at the margins of the intellectual property laws to include somebody who, though not formally identified, is unmistakably Blofeld, the object being to deliver a screw-you to McClory and assert how little the franchise now needs the criminal organisation once central to it. Blofeld is these days confined to a wheelchair, an unexplained development apparently solely engineered to enable Bond to scoop him up with the ’copter’s land
ing skids and drop him down an industrial chimney to his certain death.

  The music accompanying the pre-title sequence is grisly. John Barry was originally retained but dropped out, with the reasons disputed. Bill Conti, who stepped in, sadly doesn’t provide something as glorious and transcendent as his 1976 theme music to Rocky but instead a self-conscious funky soundtrack made all the worse for its using contemporary synthesiser instrumentation, which was suffocating and weedy then and is dated now.

  Conti’s title song (lyric by Michael Leeson) is half-decent, but, though it has a sumptuous melody, it suffers from that aforementioned electropop construction, as well as the fact that it’s sung by Sheena Easton. Recruiting Easton could be described as the Nancy Sinatra Syndrome: like Sinatra, Easton was currently famous but of limited vocal range. Nonetheless, Easton’s petite beauty gained her the accolade of the first artist to be seen singing in a Bond credit sequence.

  For the first time, Bond’s briefing is not given by M. Bernard Lee, who had played him in all eleven official Bond movies so far, died during production and, as a mark of respect, Eon rested the character. Instead Bill Tanner (James Villiers) is tasked with telling 007 that a British Intelligence boat has been sunk along with its precious cargo of the Automatic Targeting Attack Communicator. As ATAC is used to communicate with Polaris submarines, it is vital that it be retrieved before the Soviets get their hands on it. The story, though, focuses not on the USSR but freelance killers hired by it, proffering dialogue about ‘détente’ along the way. The scriptwriters tasked with this half-hearted departure from the series’ disinclination to tackle the Cold War are Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum.