James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  From this end of history it’s possible to see Moore as a uniquely ungritty Bond. It’s a measure of the actor’s perspective on his film career that he would not consider this assessment in any way a slight, even if he doesn’t seem to quite agree with it. ‘Each actor plays to their strengths,’ Moore reasons. ‘Mine is always a light, fun style. Brosnan played it lighter than Dalton, but that’s all to do with the times, the scripts and what audiences want and expect. When Jason Bourne arrived, that changed things – audiences liked and wanted an edgier, tougher, rougher Bond … and Daniel was the perfect casting. But, had they cast a Daniel Craig type in 1995, I’m not so sure the series would still be here. Pierce had it right for his time, and so did the others.’

  One thing can’t be disputed. Moore managed to consistently please audiences across the course of a dozen years and during that time was primarily responsible for the hardly small achievement of sustaining the world’s most successful film franchise.

  A FRANCHISE IN PERIL

  In late 1985, Raymond Benson proposed to Glidrose a James Bond stage play.

  Live theatre was just about the only form of media in which 007 had not made an appearance. Perhaps because of this, Glidrose proved agreeable to the idea. It transpired that the only Fleming work that could be adapted to the play format was Casino Royale: Eon owned all other Bond-related performing rights. The fact was attended by a certain serendipity, as Casino Royale was the only existing 007 tale that lent itself to the stage.

  Benson spent two to three months turning the narrative of the novel into a nine-scene play script. ‘I was paid, and we did [a] staged reading of it off Broadway,’ he recalls. This February 1986 reading saw Ed Clark play James Bond. ‘I thought it went very well,’ says Benson, ‘although nobody from Glidrose was there to see it. Shortly after that, they just decided, “We don’t want to produce this.” I think they may have gotten pressure from Eon not to do a James Bond stage play.’

  The play will probably never have a professional performance again. Explains Benson, ‘Since then, Glidrose has sold all their Casino Royale rights to Eon and so Eon now owns my play.’

  In August 1986, Eon announced the name of the first new James Bond in fourteen years.

  Like Moore prior to him and Pierce Brosnan after him, Timothy Dalton was cast as Bond after previously not taking up the role. In his case, Dalton had level-headedly turned down the part of 007 in his mid-twenties, bemusedly pointing out to a Broccoli displaying a surprising lack of judgement that he was far too young. He had another meeting with Broccoli circa 1980 at a point where Moore actually publicly stated, ‘I won’t do another Bond.’ Dalton’s varied pre-Bond career encompassed the films Agatha and Flash Gordon, the TV series Centennial and Shakespeare stage productions.

  Dalton was a slight risk, although not because of his Cheadle background – he had the received pronunciation to be expected of an alumnus of RADA, if with a Northern tinge. Rather it was because, although certainly attractive and tall (yet again, six-foot-two), he was almost equine, almost androgynous, almost sibilant and almost forty, the last of these suggesting the potential for only a short tenure. (Possibly even over forty: his birth in North Wales was in either 1944 or 1946, according to which source you believe.) Nonetheless, Eon signed him to a three-picture deal.

  Dalton’s youth (compared with Moore) and sophisticated thespian hinterland played a large part in the decision to recalibrate the Bond series. The Living Daylights, which premiered in the UK on 29 June 1987, was a return to more thoughtful, down-to-earth Bond fare.

  The screenplay was another collaboration between Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson. (The latter’s stepsister Barbara Broccoli joined the Eon team at this point as associate producer.) That such a high-quality screenplay is the work of a pair responsible for the recent Moore travesties is quite astounding.

  Dalton’s gun-barrel walk is brisk-paced and stylish (and not just for his tuxedo), after which we have a pre-title sequence that provides a perfect introduction to the new Bond. A double-O training exercise on Gibraltar is sabotaged by an unspecified villain and ultimately leaves Bond battling with an assassin in a jeep, from which he cannily allows his parachute to drag him as it hurtles off a cliff into the sea. He steers his parachute towards a pleasure boat and surprises a bored rich woman by dropping in and demanding to use her phone. ‘Who are you?’ asks his bikini-clad host as she takes in his body. ‘Bond, James Bond,’ naturally comes the reply. Bond tells Exercise Control he will report in an hour. When the woman proffers him a glass of champagne, 007 appends into the mouthpiece, ‘Better make that two.’

  After such an exciting and likeable introductory sequence, it’s a little disappointing that we are then in the midst of an anaemic song performed and co-written by A-ha, whose synth pop stylings are hardly the stuff of Bond themes, even if they are provided assistance by John Barry.

  The Living Daylights turned out to be John Barry’s swansong. He was too ill to provide the score for the next film and would never contribute another, the result of disenchantment with his experience working with A-ha and an overarching feeling of staleness. He told his biographer, Eddi Fiegel, ‘It started to be just formula, and once that happens, the work gets really hard.’ A fitting valediction is provided by the fact that Barry secured a cameo in The Living Daylights as an orchestra conductor.

  The film incorporates much of the Fleming short story of the same name as a jumping-off point. This time, Bond’s reason for not killing the beautiful gunwoman – here named Kara Milovy (Maryam d’Abo) – is that he realises she is not a trained killer. She is the blackmailed pawn in a game by fake defector Georgi Koskov (Jeroen Krabbé), which ultimately leads via Tangiers to Afghanistan, with arms- and opium-dealing pocking the trail.

  The climax of the film contains the most gut-churningly exciting piece of Bond action in a decade or more, as the agent tussles with a villain while hanging out of the back of a mid-air plane, inside of which a bomb is ticking down to detonation.

  Bond informs a fellow agent that all Stradivarius cellos have individual names, but, other than that, the insufferable know-all persona of the Moore era is nowhere in evidence, replaced by a grim professionalism, brusqueness and rough-hewn humanity. The script features the first-ever profanity from the film Bond himself in the shape of ‘horse’s arse’. Dalton’s Bond smokes cigarettes and, for the first time since the Connery days, orders a shaken-not-stirred vodka martini.

  There is, though, no return to Bond’s rampant licentiousness. In recent years, AIDS had ensured that the promiscuity traditionally celebrated in Bond films had become not a byword for sexual enlightenment but potential death. Because of this, Eon did as much as feasible in a Bond picture to rein it in, restricting 007’s conquests to two. (Moore’s tally had been similarly low in recent years, but more likely as a function of a fear that for a man of his age such exertions appeared a little unseemly.)

  Although a standard length of just over two hours, The Living Daylights could have been shorter: an early protracted fight sequence which doesn’t even involve Bond would not have been missed. However, it’s a quality film, one that strikes a good balance between gritty espionage and larger-than-life spectacle.

  Ominously, the territory in which The Living Daylights’ performance was mildly disappointing – and made it the lowest-grossing Bond since The Man with the Golden Gun – was the United States. The rumblings of discontent in American accents were already beginning.

  Licence to Kill, the James Bond film that premiered in the UK on 13 June 1989, saw Bond turn his attention to the menace of Latin American drug cartels. Pockmarked, murderous cocaine baron Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi) served as Bond’s new nemesis.

  A Bond picture not named after a book written by Fleming was a step into the unknown. It soon, though, became unremarkable and irrelevant. Licence to Kill was a good one with which to start: it was by now an instantly recognisable shorthand for the Bond character and series. Ironically enough, the title was a
compromise dictated by the fact that the one originally preferred – Licence Revoked – was comical to Americans because it was a familiar term for a punishment for driving offences.

  Public discourse has always stated that Eon’s original contract with Fleming gave them the right to adapt his books, existing or future. The fact of using a new title means, then, that at some point the contract was renegotiated to allow Eon to place Bond in adventures unrelated to anything of Fleming’s devising. The irony of all this is that Licence to Kill is, in reality, based to a large extent on Fleming prose: more unused parts of Live and Let Die, with a pinch of ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’.

  That it took three people – Narada Michael Walden, Jeffrey Cohen and Walter Afanasieff – to write the vapid title song (sung by Gladys Knight) becomes even more risible when one learns that a cut of the publishing had to go to John Barry because it used part of the melody of ‘Goldfinger’. Michael Kamen wrote the rest of the score. The fact that he provided the music for Die Hard (1988) gave ammunition to those who claimed that this film marked a decision by Eon to tilt the Bond series towards the grimy, informal ambience of both that movie and Lethal Weapon (1987). Another apparent manifestation of this determination is that 007 is seen – unconscionably – in jeans.

  When Sanchez murders Felix Leiter (David Hedison), the authorities – for reasons legal and geopolitical – decide not to pursue him. The vengeance-minded Bond goes rogue and for the first time has to operate without Service backup. Cue a narrative in which the violence is unprecedentedly gruesome: villains variously get blown up – literally – in a depressurisation chamber, sliced in machinery and burnt alive. Also unprecedented is the profanity: ‘shit’, ‘ass’, ‘piss off’, ‘bastard’ and ‘bullshit’ all feature. The consequence was that Licence to Kill was the first Bond picture not to receive a family-viewing rating. American censors passed it ‘PG-13’. In Britain, it was given a ‘15’ certificate. This had the inevitable knock-on effect regarding its box-office takings.

  The Wilson–Maibaum story is unfortunately literally half-and-half. About an hour into the two-hour running time, Q turns up like a throwback to the type of normal Bond picture we were just beginning to forget existed. He has been dispatched by an order-bucking Moneypenny (Caroline Bliss, reprising her young, slightly irreverent and bespectacled interpretation from The Living Daylights). From this point, what has been a muscular espionage thriller becomes ridiculous. There are improbable gadgets, absurd plot twists (after being shown arduously breaking out of Sanchez’s base, Bond effects an unseen, unexplained break back in) and impossible physical stunts (the vehicle-on-one-side trick from Diamonds Are Forever is repeated, but this time with a petrol tanker). One wonders whether this division of quality is due to the fact that a Writers’ Guild strike meant that, after collaborating with Wilson on the story, Maibaum had to leave him to write the screenplay of Licence to Kill on his own.

  His vendetta takes Bond from Florida to the fictional country of Isthmus (for which Mexico stands in). No primary shooting was done in the UK, however: the Eady Plan, which Eon had long taken advantage of (and sometimes taken the piss out of) had been abolished.

  The closing credits feature an anti-smoking disclaimer. No one had doubted that Connery looked cool with a cigarette hanging from his lips when the world first saw his face in Dr. No, but the world was a more complicated place than in 1962. The fact that modified Lark cigarettes are used herein by Bond to detonate explosives because their manufacturers Philip Morris paid for the privilege raised legal issues regarding TV broadcast rules. After questions were asked in the House of Representatives, the health warning was added to prevent the loss of US television screenings.

  The box-office performance of Licence to Kill was disappointing in the mild way that of any Bond picture can be – it was only the world’s twelfth highest-grosser that year. However, this time MGM/UA’s seeming willingness to downplay success in territories outside the United States could not be dismissed: Licence to Kill had for once failed to perform in the usually loyal United Kingdom, where receipts were down by a third on the hardly spectacular ones for The Living Daylights.

  Had things been proceeding as normal in Bondland, perhaps the studio’s disgruntlement with the performance of his two films would at this point have forced Timothy Dalton out of the Bond role. We’ll never know. There followed six wasted years in which legal issues prevented Eon shooting more Bonds.

  September 1991 saw the debut transmission of James Bond Jr..

  This animated television series was made by Murakami-Wolf-Swenson, previously responsible for, among other things, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Alvin and the Chipmunks. That Michael G. Wilson was billed as one of the creators was significant: the cartoon’s producers had licensed only the right to extrapolate from the screen James Bond.

  Although back in 1967 it had been Glidrose who enabled the publication of The Adventures of James Bond Junior 0031⁄2, the similarly titled projects were not only unrelated, but the Fleming Estate were keen to distance themselves from the new endeavour. They vetoed any events or names from Fleming’s work that hadn’t been used in the films. This may or may not have had something to do with the rumour that the entire project was an attempt to undermine yet another putative McClory Bond project, this one a series of animated Bond adventures. A more plausible impetus for the project, though, was a desire by Eon to keep open the 007 revenue stream in the likely protracted absence of James Bond films. Although James Bond Jr. was fairly short-lived, merchandise was plentiful. As well as a Marvel comic, it spun off six novelisations and two video games. It also inspired board games, toy cars and action figures.

  The episodes were twenty-two minutes long, designed to run half an hour including commercials. Each featured the goings-on at Warfield Academy, an English prep school for the children of Secret Service organisations around the world. Among those resident is Q’s grandson, IQ, and Gordo Leiter, son of Felix.

  As with The Adventures of James Bond Junior 003½, the hero is, in fact, not the son but the nephew of agent 007. As a personality, Bond Jr bears little relationship to his uncle aside from his privileged background and his catchphrase (‘The name’s Bond, James Bond. [Pause.] Junior.’) It could be argued that his gelled, upright hair and big-tongued trainers were fashionable among the character’s late-teenage peer group, but so were many other things that at least had something of Bond’s traditional suaveness. Moreover, Corey Burton, who voices Bond Jr, gives the character an accent that never quite suggests Englishness. James Bond himself was not seen in the sixty-five broadcast episodes.

  In between classes, Bond Jr is constantly trying to thwart the plans of SCUM (Saboteurs and Criminals United in Mayhem), which organisation employs villains familiar from the films, including Jaws, Goldfinger, Oddjob and Dr No (the last in his lesser-known green-skinned incarnation). Like his uncle, Bond Jr gets involved with plenty of pretty girls possessed of outlandish names, but naturally there is no sex either in the double entendres (Marcie Beaucoup, Terri Firma, Haley Comet) or the relationships.

  The animation, as with many American TV cartoons of the era, is adequate but stilted. It would have been nice if the makers had raised their sights a little and aimed for the quality of TV animation classics like the intelligently scripted seventies Star Trek: The Animated Series (Filmation) and the noir-ish nineties Batman: The Animated Series (Warner Bros. Animation). But, then, fallback buck-spinners do not usually lead to great art.

  In 1992, Dark Horse took over the franchise for James Bond comics. This outfit seemed to constitute that elusive thing: a publisher who looked with proactive enthusiasm on the Bond property they had licensed.

  Over the preceding three decades, James Bond comics had remained thin on the ground. There were Bond comics in Japanese, Swedish and Spanish, but – fairly or unfairly – foreign-language material tends to be discounted in English-speaking Western countries. British hardback Christmas annuals gave rise to a few mid-sixties Bond comics
pages, but a once-a-year proposition was a world removed from a regular title.

  That in the 1980s Marvel acquired the licence to publish Bond comics was exciting – they had long overtaken DC as the premier American comic-book publisher and their 1977 adaptation of Star Wars was phenomenally successful. Deflatingly, though, the upshot was not a monthly Bond title but merely special edition, single-issue adaptations of the movies For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy. Perhaps it was because the company already had a hero in its universe who was a manqué 007: Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

  Play Value’s 1985 ‘James Bond 007 Adventure Storybooks’ – Blackclaw’s Doomsday Plot and Storm Bringer – were for a very young readership. Moreover, they seem to have been markedly unsuccessful: two further titles in the series were advertised but appear never to have been released.

  The franchise then passed to Eclipse, who issued an adaptation of Licence to Kill. Later in 1989, they delivered something of a Holy Grail: a James Bond comic that both contained original material and lasted longer than one issue. Permission to Die was published in the prestigious and newly modish graphic-novel format. Written and illustrated by Mike Grell, its first two parts at least were reasonably well received by fandom, not least because the informed Grell modelled his Bond on Hoagy Carmichael. However, issue three – which dribbled out two years later – was received as the afterthought it felt like.

  The cover-date calendar year of 1992 saw Marvel publish twelve titles of what still wasn’t quite a regular, bona fide Bond title. Instead, James Bond Jr. was a comic based on the titular TV series. It featured a combination of episode adaptations and new stories.