James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  In keeping with a grimmer outlook is the moment when Bond kicks over a cliff a car containing a man who has killed a colleague. Yet the action also includes some underwater fisticuffs that are comical for the fact that the character attacking Bond is encased in a submersible suit that makes him look like a cross between Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet and the Michelin Man.

  There are respectable parts of For Your Eyes Only – the commando attack on Kristatos’s opium operation has a refreshing straightforwardness and even nobility – but the film falls awkwardly between the stools of fantasy and realism.

  And indeed comedy. For Your Eyes Only ends with a scene wherein impersonator Janet Brown plays British Prime Minister Thatcher as she telephones Bond to thank him for performing his duties for his country, only to get through to a parrot who subjects her to such entreaties as ‘Give us a kiss.’

  When in 1980 United Artists ran into financial difficulties with the famous flop Heaven’s Gate, not even the revenues generated by their mega-successful James Bond, Rocky and Pink Panther franchises could save them. In 1981 they were absorbed by MGM. The longtime Bond distributors subsequently decided they wanted Eon to go back to ‘spectacle’ Bonds, which they considered the more bankable kind. In acquiescing to UA, Eon abandoned the elements of grittiness they had made a virtue of incorporating into For Your Eyes Only.

  Moore, meanwhile, was, as usual, being strategically coy about returning. Eon were as usual negotiating with Moore’s agent while ostentatiously interviewing and screen-testing other actors. One of those actors was Lewis Collins, seen as SAS man Peter Skellen in 1982 action movie Who Dares Wins but most familiar as Bodie from the late-seventies/early-eighties UK television espionage drama The Professionals.

  Something about Lewis – his dark good looks, the cruel cut of his mouth, his sardonic manner, his real-life passing of SAS courses – suggested for many Bond fans the real thing. Moreover, a real thing for the modern age. Had he transported across to Bond the high, unkempt fringe and black turtlenecks he wore as Bodie, it would have made 007 a contemporary figure without sacrificing his essential nature. Additionally, the fact that Collins was in 1982 only thirty-six suggested someone who could have been credible as Bond for a decade. However, it seems that, despite two meetings with Broccoli separated by a couple of years, he never came close to landing the role. Collins recalled of the first interview that Broccoli ‘found me too aggressive … When someone walks into their office for the most popular film job in the world, a little actor is bound to put on a few airs.’ Collins arouses wistful comments among 007 aficionados such as, ‘Best Bond there never was.’

  Having spurned that opportunity, Eon agreed terms with Moore once again and James Bond resumed the process of growing old disgracefully. Times two. While Eon set about filming Octopussy with Moore – aged fifty-five upon its 6 June 1983 London premiere – production on Kevin McClory’s own new Bond picture was proceeding, with Sean Connery – aged fifty-three when it was premiered in Los Angeles on 6 October 1983 – returning as 007. For a period it seemed the two elderly agents would be going head to head at the cinemas.

  Even in 1983, the word ‘Octopussy’ sounded obscene, and perhaps it will never be entirely free of its patina of sniggering rudery. However, as with Pussy Galore, with repetition it lost some of its how-can-they-get-away-with-it? quality.

  The Octopussy film incorporates the plot of the Fleming short story only in a couple of lines of dialogue. The screenwriters rely instead on the story ‘Property of a Lady’, as well as the usual new material. George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels, wrote a first-draft script, which was then taken over by the team of Maibaum and Wilson.

  For the first time, men (other than Bond) appear in the title sequence. The title theme is a mediocre John Barry/Tim Rice pop song called ‘All Time High’, sung by Rita Coolidge. This time it’s understandable that the lyric doesn’t use the film’s title.

  The new M actor is Robert Brown, who had previously played Admiral Hargreaves in The Spy Who Loved Me. Although there was a tradition of recurrence of actors in different roles in Bond pictures, this had deliberately never been applied to Bond girls. Maud Adams, seen as Andrea in The Man with the Golden Gun, breaks that mould in being cast as Octopussy’s titular female lead.

  The latest in a flurry of tainted Fabergé eggs has come up for auction at Sotheby’s. Bond follows the trail to India (cue the novelty casting of tennis player Vijay Amritraj), where he works out that rogue Russian general Orlov (the glowering Steven Berkoff) is supplying exiled Afghan prince Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan) with the eggs and other historical Russian treasures in a convoluted plan to undermine faith in Western atomic deterrents. Orlov intends to plant a nuclear bomb in a West German US Air Force base, using the travelling Octopussy circus as his unwitting courier.

  The Octopussy circus is owned by a woman who happens to be the daughter of Major Dexter Smythe. It’s rather nice that, through her dialogue, a distillation of the excellent ‘Octopussy’ short story makes it into the screenplay, although it is completely immaterial to the film’s plot. Even the way it gives the picture a title is tenuous, not to mention warped: ‘Octopussy’ was the pet name of Smythe – a leading authority on octopi – for his daughter. (This, understandably, renders Bond speechless.)

  The plot recycles a surprising amount from the Goldfinger film. We have already seen a pre-title sequence and a golf-course scene reminiscent of that Connery flick by the time Bond defuses the bomb with seconds to spare – although the screenwriters do at least resist the temptation to stop the digital countdown at ‘007’. Dignity issues lie in other areas: sundry examples of silliness include Bond performing his heroics in a clown costume he adopts to blend in on his arrival at the Octopussy circus; neutralising the danger posed by a tiger by successfully ordering it to sit in a way deliberately redolent of TV dog-trainer Barbara Woodhouse; and swinging on vines to the aural backdrop of a Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan yodel.

  The climax at least merits its place. Bond, pursuing Khan, jumps on his private plane as it takes off. The consequent aerial photography as Khan tries to get rid of his irritant – spinning the plane and sending out a minion to battle with him – is hair-raising.

  When Bond uses one of Q’s video gadgets to zoom in on the cleavage of a female assistant, it demonstrates that what was once thrilling sexual libertarianism is, two decades after the first Bond movie, increasingly what Q describes herein as ‘adolescent antics’ and what the world would soon term political incorrectness. The antiquated ambience is not helped by the fact that the India depicted is one of snake charmers, sword swallowers, firewalkers and people who take naps on beds of nails.

  Octopussy contains the series’ first comments about Moneypenny’s vintage, itself a cheek considering Moore’s increasingly lined and leathery face. Like the fact of death having necessitated a new M, these are signs of a passing regime.

  When Never Say Never Again received its premiere exactly four months after Octopussy, it meant that for the first time since 1967 two new James Bond pictures had hit the cinemas in the same year.

  Kevin McClory – billed as executive producer – was now a background figure, having licensed to Jack Schwartzman permission to produce the remake of Thunderball. This followed several years of legal wrangling with the Ian Fleming estate, financed by Danjaq and UA. Significantly, Schwartzman had practised as a show-business lawyer. The financing he secured for the picture was deliberately diffuse – three banks and twenty-six distributors across the world – so as to make it difficult for any litigant to cut off the money supply. However, a final challenge aimed at stopping the film’s distribution was defeated only because production was so far advanced that it was deemed that it would be unfair and impracticable to halt it – a symmetrical echo of the reasons McClory had been unable in 1961 to stop the dissemination of the Thunderball novel.

  Norman Wanstall – now happily employed as a plumbing and heating engineer – was brough
t out of moviemaking retirement to work on the film. He recalls, ‘A friend of mine was the assistant to the American editor and he said, “Sean is a little bit peeved that all the people he remembers are gone. We thought perhaps if you came back at least he’d know that someone who’d won an award and been on all those early ones of his …”’ Wanstall agreed to do it as a favour to his friend.

  Wanstall recalls, ‘I never got to know Sean [before] because of the fact that [the] dialogue editor is the one that always works with the actors … He introduced himself to me. He came into my editing room and we had a chat. I thought that was great.’ It was about the only thing related to the project about which Wanstall had positive feelings. ‘It was a very unhappy film. I wish I’d never done it. The script hadn’t been thoroughly written. This guy came over from America who was the money man and he caused all sorts of disruptions … He was a really weird guy. The first night he arrived, he threw an ashtray through a window.’

  Moreover, ‘The director said, “Norman, we’re making a spoof.” I thought, “Christ, do you mind?”’ Yet the fact that Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais – a writing team notable for television comedies such as The Likely Lads and Porridge – did some script-doctoring work does suggest that the film was intended to have more than a smidgeon of comedy.

  ‘There was so much discussion, always discussion,’ Wanstall says of rough-cut screenings. ‘I remember sitting and hearing them talking at the back. Sean was on the executive as well. I wanted to turn round and say, “Why are you talking about that? There are far, far more important things you should be discussing.” It was like a bunch of amateurs. I hated it all.’

  Connery had been involved in the project from an early stage, co-writing in 1976 a script with Len Deighton and McClory. It would appear that at that point he was interested only in scriptwriting and perhaps producing the film. By the time the project went ahead, Connery had changed his mind about starring. If he was embarrassing as Bond in Diamonds Are Forever, he is now pitiful: slurry-voiced, dewlappy, creased, crinkled and waxen, with unnaturally neat grey hair. Yet all of the female characters are instantly smitten by this apparition.

  Nevertheless, the knowledge that to many only Connery was 007 prompted McClory/Schwartzman to agree to a jaw-dropping fee for the actor of $5 million plus a percentage of the profits. Frankly, they would have been better advised to sign up Lewis Collins. Not only would this have saved money and secured a more credible lead actor, but the motivational power behind both McClory and Collins wishing to extend a screw-you to Cubby Broccoli should not be underestimated.

  Despite all of that, Never Say Never Again constitutes a better 007 swansong for Connery than Diamonds Are Forever.

  The film’s title was the result of an exasperated comment from Connery’s wife Micheline about the fact that he had reneged on his vow that he was finished with Bond. It’s almost worked into the script’s final lines. It does feature in the lyric of the theme song, written by Alan and Marilyn Bergman and sung by Lani Hall. Unfortunately said theme song is an awful, soporific affair, which – like much of the rest of Michel Legrand’s jazzy, good-time soundtrack – works against the action.

  The film is directed well by Irvin Kershner, a prestigious name from his having recently directed The Empire Strikes Back. (Kershner was also the first non-Briton to direct a Bond cinematic release.) Veteran Lorenzo Semple Jr provides the screenplay.

  It might be assumed that it wouldn’t matter much who was writing the script, but Semple forcibly pushes at the margins of the original legal agreement that McClory’s Bond rights extended only as far as remaking Thunderball. The banishment of Bond to a health farm and the hijacking by SPECTRE of two nuclear warheads constitute the broad framework retained from Thunderball, but just about every other detail is changed. The depiction of Britain as a declining, cash-strapped power, however, is probably as much a nod to reality as a manifestation of a desire to differentiate the movie from its predecessor.

  Max Von Sydow is ridiculously miscast as Blofeld, managing to make the character something that none of the actors who had played him previously had: avuncular. Fortunately, he is not on screen much, with the role of central baddie given to the reasonably good Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer).

  Edward Fox plays a man who has inherited the title and job of M and has nothing but contempt for Bond. Only the crisis of the hijacked weapons causes him to reactivate the double-O section he had disbanded. Domino is played by then-newcomer Kim Basinger. Bond’s colleague Nigel, a bumbling oaf smitten by secret-agentry, is drawn overly comically by Rowan Atkinson. Half a decade later, Atkinson’s Bond spoof began appearing in credit-card commercials. The role would eventually be expanded and transferred to the big screen under the name Johnny English.

  This is a Bond film largely without gadgets, and is all the better for it. A lengthy fight at the health farm between Bond and a burly would-be assassin is well choreographed and real-looking (not least because Bond spends much of it running away). It also has a hilarious payoff: when Bond hurls a beaker of liquid into his antagonist’s eyes, it causes agony; Bond looks at the label on the beaker to find it is his own urine sample.

  There are the usual Bond-movie absurdities – for instance, a character is bumped off by SPECTRE by the method of a snake being thrown into his moving car when he could have just been discretely shot in private. Generally, though, the film is enjoyably down-to-earth, even if its climax is a little disappointing: in place of armies of battling frogmen is the undramatic sight of Bond turning off a timer.

  As well as being a better picture than the official Bond movie that year, Never Say Never Again achieved grosses of $160 million, which were only $23.7 million less than those of Octopussy. It was, though, a dead end. With his Bond rights consisting simply of endless Thunderball remakes, McClory hardly held a long-term bankable commodity, especially without the novelty and sentimentality attached to one last hurrah for Sean Connery. Not that it stopped his Bond-related efforts.

  After Never Say Never Again – if hardly as a consequence of it – Sean Connery barely looked back, becoming the hugely successful and diverse actor he had always wished to be. Highlander, The Name of the Rose, The Untouchables, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Hunt for Red October, Medicine Man, Rising Sun, The Rock and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – among others – all added to his reputation and/or his bank balance before he retired in the mid-noughties.

  In addition, of course, is the fact that for a certain generation Connery will always be the only man they can ever take fully seriously as the celluloid 007.

  The next Eon Bond movie was A View to a Kill, premiered in San Francisco on 22 May 1985.

  In collaboration with John Barry, Duran Duran provide a theme song in their usual style of pounding rhythm, shrieking slabs of synth and whined, nonsensical lyrics, and they lazily dispense the title line only in a verse. This lack of quality didn’t stop it becoming a UK No. 2 and US No. 1, an all-time chart high for Bond themes that was the ultimate fulfilment of the vision of cultural cross-fertilisation that had first motivated Eon to get such zeitgeist popsters to sing them.

  Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson’s script is nominally based, of course, on ‘From a View to a Kill’. However, it wasn’t just the title that was tweaked: there is no resemblance to Fleming’s short story in a tale that has Bond uncovering and frustrating a scheme by Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) to flood California’s Silicon Valley so as to raise higher the value of the holdings of his own Zorin Corporation.

  The villain’s female cohort is May Day, played by high-cheekboned pop chanteuse Grace Jones. She and Duran Duran are deliberate tilts for the youth market, but neither disguise the fact that the main cast creaks with age. In the early stages, Bond forms a not-exactly dynamic duo with Sir Godfrey Tibbett, played by sixty-three-year-old Patrick Macnee. It’s rumoured that a bald spot on the left of his crown had always necessitated that the makeup department augment Moore’s hair. If so, they
did a good, non-detectable job. However, little can be done about the fact that, when Moore widens his eyes in this film, it makes for an alarming sight.

  The end credits declare ‘James Bond will return’, but this time fail to say what the next film will be. This may have been down to the prosaic fact that Eon were running out of titles from the Fleming canon. However, it could also be read as symbolic.

  The film was Moore’s swansong. With it being inevitable that any replacement of Moore would be considerably younger, the age gap between the next Bond and Lois Maxwell – eight months older than Moore – would make their flirtatious banter unsustainable. Accordingly, Maxwell was informed that she would not be invited back to reprise the Moneypenny role she had owned since 1962.

  Although the $152.4 million receipts of A View to a Kill showed that Eon had not been holed below the waterline by Never Say Never Again, a new era was dawning for Bond, and, like all new eras, it was one shot through with sad farewells and hurt feelings. Whether Moore’s departure was voluntary is, as usual for the world of Eon, something on which recollections divide. Broccoli claimed in his autobiography that Moore was shocked when Eon indicated they were going to make a change. Moore’s version of events doesn’t necessarily contradict that story in terms of facts, but does suggest a different complexion. ‘I hadn’t really wanted to make A View to a Kill,’ he says. ‘I felt I was getting a little long in the tooth and would have been happy to stand aside after Octopussy, but I agreed to do one more. Afterwards, both Cubby and I agreed it was time I hung up my Walther PPK. There were no tears, no tantrums. We both realised it was the right time, that’s all.’