James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  Q introduces Bond to a ‘young’ man he is grooming to take over from him upon his retirement. This stripling turns out to be the sixty-year-old John Cleese, who – as might be imagined with the ex-Monty Python member – plays it for laughs. Q tells Bond, ‘I’ve always tried to teach you two things. First, never let them see you bleed.’ ‘And the second?’ asks Bond. ‘Always have an escape plan,’ responds Q, at which point he starts slowly disappearing via hydraulics into the floor. Bond watches impassively the departure of the man he had driven to distraction so many times. Desmond Llewelyn was the only actor to have played opposite every Eon Bond from Connery through to Brosnan.

  Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), the film’s chief villain, has devised a scheme to create a nuclear blast that will have the effect of increasing petroleum prices, from which she will benefit as heiress to an oil empire. She is in league with Renard, who would be an excellent villain even without Robert Carlyle’s fine acting chops. An ex-KGB man, he is both walking dead, due to a bullet slowly worming its way through his brain, and superman, consequence of the brain deterioration rendering him immune to pain.

  M is uncharacteristically right in the heart of the action. Having failed to engineer M’s death at the beginning (a revelation that comes in a twist-laden plot), Elektra tricks her into coming out to her base, where she puts her in a cell and torments her with her impending demise. M improvises an escape every bit as inspired as the ways 007 usually gets out of a fix.

  Although Brosnan’s films have reined back on the graphic violence, Bond movies are getting ever more daring in other ways, such as Moneypenny’s patent dildo allusion when Bond presents her with a cigar in an aluminium case: ‘I know exactly where to put that.’ (For the record, she throws it in the dustbin.) Meanwhile, Elektra is shown closer to (lingering) nudity than a character has ever been seen in a Bond movie.

  Die Another Day – premiered in London on 18 November 2002 – coincided with the fortieth anniversary of the Bond film series. Accordingly, it contained references to every single one of the previous Eon Bonds, making for a fascinating parlour game for 007 aficionados. Among them are Giacinta ‘Jinx’ Johnson walking out of the Cuban surf with a bikini-and-knife-belt combination redolent of Ursula Andress in Dr. No and a character jumping out of a plane with the aid of a Union Jack parachute. There is also a nice tip of the hat to both Fleming and the real James Bond: at one point, Brosnan idly examines a copy of Birds of the West Indies.

  In the gun-barrel sequence, the bullet is seen coming towards the viewer. It’s one of the few moments in the film where computer-generated imagery (CGI) – first used in a Bond film in GoldenEye – is employed adroitly.

  The pre-title sequence sees Bond infiltrate a military base in North Korea. The latter is the ‘safe’ national villain that the series has lately been looking for. Nonetheless, Colonel Tan-Sun Moon (Will Yun Lee) – who is trading arms for ‘conflict diamonds’ – is a rogue element of whose decadence his father, a general, disapproves. After the usual explosive fisticuffs, Moon disappears into a waterfall and is presumed dead, while Bond is dragged off to a North Korean prisoner-of-war camp. The title sequence for the first time actually furthers the plot: vignettes show Bond being tortured in captivity.

  As was largely becoming the norm, the rearrangement of ‘The James Bond Theme’ is overly playful and modernistic. This is carried over into the opening credits. The title song is written and performed by Madonna (who also plays the role of fencing instructor Verity). It is very techno, with much robotic voice distortion.

  Bond’s fourteen months in a cell leave him long-haired and bearded – and in fact not too dissimilar to how the newly hippiefied George Lazenby turned up for the premiere of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. When he gets back to Blighty after a prisoner exchange, Bond finds that M suspects him to be the person who betrayed the operation. Bond goes rogue to clear his name.

  When Bond shaves off his beard and cuts his tresses, a new restyling of Brosnan is revealed. His hair is both less groomed than in the previous film and noticeably greyer. While it’s admirable on one level that Brosnan doesn’t bother to dye his locks, it is unfortunately the case that in some shots he is, looks-wise, less impressive than Toby Stephens, who plays villain Gustav Graves.

  To absolutely no one’s surprise (the pre-title sequence put him on display too much for him to be so quickly dispensed with), Moon is not dead. However, it definitely is surprising that he is now Graves, an English businessman who is debonair, vastly wealthy and emphatically white. The transformation has been effected by DNA therapy involving the replacement of bone marrow. This and the fact that a side effect of said treatment is Moon’s being unable to ever sleep makes Die Another Day an outright science-fiction picture, not to mention unutterable nonsense. Other examples are the virtual-reality glasses that enable agents to be engaged in training exercises and – most notoriously – the invisible car furnished Bond by Q. Or should that be screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade? It seems to suggest that the absent Bruce Feirstein – involved in the scripts of the three other Brosnan films – was a steadying hand. The film’s fanciful tenor certainly doesn’t sit easily with the reputation of director Lee Tamahori, a New Zealander most renowned for the socially conscious, local-colour piece Once Were Warriors. Nor does Tamahori direct it well, employing self-conscious effects such as blurred slow motion normally the preserve of first-year film students.

  When Bond meets up with Moon again, he quips, ‘So you lived to die another day.’ Moon retorts, ‘I chose to model the disgusting Gustav Graves on you … That unjustifiable swagger, the crass quips, the self-defence mechanism concealing such inadequacy …’ What he fails to explain in his postmodern tirade is how he could possibly have planned his fake death when the arrival of an enemy agent was an unforeseen event. Moon has constructed the Icarus satellite, whose solar magnifying powers he intends to use to create a single Korean state run by the totalitarian North. When he and Bond end up tussling on an aeroplane in mid-air, Moon is swept into one of the jet’s engines – a grisly, convincing scene that is one of Tamahori’s better moments.

  Brosnan’s Bond breaks his no-smoking rule in this film by indulging in a cigar or two, but, as he is in Cuba, he can perhaps be excused. It is while on that Caribbean island that Bond teams up with Jinx, an employee of the National Security Agency pursuing similar leads. Halle Berry – the woman playing Jinx – is a classy proposition: she won an Oscar that year for her role in Monster’s Ball. The days of a trade-off between ski stunts and top-drawer Bond-girl actresses would appear to have died with Cubby Broccoli.

  Moneypenny doesn’t actually have a real scene with Bond, only interacting with him via the virtual-reality glasses, the second time using them to fantasise about Bond ravishing her. It’s almost as though Eon knew this would be Samantha Bond’s farewell, so were free to destroy the frosty disdain she had always shown Brosnan on screen.

  Also appearing for the last time is John Cleese as ‘Quartermaster’. (So is that what ‘Q’ meant all these years?) The comedy turn that his appearances constituted had no place in the new, severe Bond era just around the corner.

  It has to be said that – even leaving aside death threats from the more intense end of the fandom spectrum – Raymond Benson’s tenure as James Bond continuation novelist was not universally well received. Naysayers objected to his graphic violence, paucity of internal monologues, clunky insertion of research material and sex scenes that made Bond resemble less a sensualist than a horny schoolboy.

  Others praised his deep knowledge of Bond history and capacity for crafting an easy beach read. That his original contract was renewed supports Benson’s assertion that Glidrose and the publishers were ‘very happy’ with his books. However, additional comments by him indicate the reason why his contract was not renewed for a second time: ‘I inherited the marketplace from John Gardner. When John started, the first four books were bestsellers, but starting with the fifth one, the sales just se
ttle into this niche thing because they were just, “Oh, another year, another Bond book.”’

  If things had not changed at Glidrose, that niche audience might have continued to satisfy those overseeing Bond’s literary affairs. However, in 1997 Ian Fleming’s literary estate came fully back into the ownership of his family for the first time since 1964. With the purchase of Booker’s holdings, Glidrose now became Ian Fleming Publications (IFP), but the new name was only the start of the changes, one casualty of which was Benson, who says, ‘They decided they were going to stop doing the Bond novels on a yearly basis and do some other things for a while.’

  Although Benson maintains an interest in James Bond, he admits that a thing of the past is the fanboy attitude that was the impetus behind The Bedside Companion. ‘I used to collect the books and the posters and the toys and all the shit, and I don’t any more,’ he says. Because he’s seen ‘behind the curtain’? ‘I think it’s that, and I’m a bit jaded. I’ve moved on to my own stuff.’

  With the literary adult Bond put in abeyance, IFP initially decided to reinvigorate the name of the man in their company title. Benson: ‘When they stopped my books, it was right before the fiftieth anniversary of Casino Royale. The very next year, they reissued all the Flemings and really set about for the next two years exploiting the original Flemings.’

  Following that, while they mulled over what to do with the Bond continuation novels, IFP took not just one but two unusual steps in furthering Fleming’s legacy. They decided on lateral angles: a series of books about the adventures of a young James Bond and another about the escapades of Miss Moneypenny.

  Both approaches seemed counterintuitive. The idea of a young Bond had already been tried in two separate failed projects spaced a quarter-century apart. The Moneypenny idea, meanwhile, involved pitching Bond to the demographic that had seemed least susceptible to the character down the years: women. As if to compound the apparent contrariness, the projects were launched with what would appear to be unseemly confidence: the first instalments in each series appearing within seven months of each other in 2005. In both cases, however, IFP were vindicated.

  The man chosen to helm the Young Bond series was musician, author and actor Charlie Higson. His approach was not the nephew-conceit copout of the previous ‘junior’ projects, but instead chronicles from the ‘real’ James Bond’s childhood, starting at the age of thirteen. Higson stuck to the time period established by Fleming, depicting Bond’s schooldays as being in the 1930s. Although the facts established by Fleming’s novels prohibited making young James a teen agent, grounding for his future career is provided by mentor Uncle Max, an ex-spy. One thing established by Fleming, though, was worked around, namely The Times obituary’s assertion that he attended only two halves (terms) at Eton.

  In first book SilverFin (March 2005), Higson never rises to the elegance of Fleming, but his prose, dialogue and scene-setting are competent. However, his leisurely style – the books are unusually long for children’s fiction, and, unlike the Mascott book, the text is not leavened by illustrations – doesn’t work in the way that it did for Fleming: the intrigues of a school cross-country run, for instance, are essentially not that enthralling. Moreover, it has to be said that the Eton stuff can’t help but work against the series: this is stultifyingly privileged terrain.

  Sales were good enough for SilverFin to be followed by Blood Fever (2006), Double or Die (2007), Hurricane Gold (2007) and By Royal Command (2008). The fifth book was the end of a natural cycle. James was by now fifteen, leading not just to difficulties with identification among younger readers, but problems regarding the inevitable sexual feelings of a boy of that age.

  Curiously, while sex may have been banished from the picture as inappropriate for the intended demographic, the violence in the Young Bond books was quite high. In Double or Die, Higson created a literally decreasing villain: a man who came away from each fight minus a body part.

  The author of The Moneypenny Diaries was not Kate Westbrook, as the covers had it, but Samantha Weinberg, who used a conceit whereby it was suggested that Miss Moneypenny was a genuine person whose forty leather-bound diaries had been discovered after her death by her niece, Westbrook. Weinberg was an award-winning journalist and nonfiction author, but she had never written a word of fiction before. She was a fan of the Fleming books, if not an obsessive one.

  Weinberg opted for the first name Jane as a plain and commonplace juxtaposition to the unusual, polysyllabic Moneypenny. For Moneypenny’s backstory, Weinberg opted for an African colonial one like her own. Like Higson, Weinberg decided to keep within the timeframe of Fleming’s books.

  There is an overarching but slight awkwardness to the series’ concept in the fact that the Moneypenny who has become iconic to the public is, in the books, not very prominent, nor particularly important to Bond. Leaving aside that minor anomaly, Weinberg is true to her stated mission of using the Fleming, not the Eon, universe as her touchstone.

  Bond is a key, though not overwhelming, figure in the first and third of the Moneypenny Diaries series. In Guardian Angel, published in 2005, he is the shambling wreck to which he was reduced after Tracy’s death in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Moneypenny, on the other hand, is made central to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Secret Servant (2006) again revolves around a genuine historical incident, this time the scandal of the defection of Kim Philby. In Final Fling (2008), Westbrook’s contemporary attempts to uncover the reason for her aunt’s death in 1990 parallel historical chapters in which Moneypenny helps Bond try to flush out a mole in the Service. On the final page, Westbrook is told that a character she met earlier on – an elderly man living on a Scottish island with an impressive capacity for holding his liquor – is in fact the real James Bond. Weinberg also published a pair of Moneypenny short stories.

  The covers of the British editions of the Moneypenny Diaries trilogy were rather ‘chick-lit’. Moreover, the books were rendered generally unexciting by their lack of forward momentum and their passive voices, structural conceits and intrinsic inability to do anything other than fill holes in existent narratives. However, The Moneypenny Diaries was a less trashy, more Fleming-faithful and more enjoyable proposition than many had predicted.

  THE BLONDE BOMBSHELL

  In 2003, a Quentin Tarantino interview in the New York Daily News electrified parts of the James Bond fanbase. ‘Someday I’m going to get the rights to do Casino Royale, the first James Bond novel, and do it the right way,’ the film director said.

  Not too many people had bothered thinking about Casino Royale in film terms since the 1967 Charles K. Feldman adaptation had made it synonymous with failure and farce. These comments, though, reminded people that, just because Casino Royale had been made once, it didn’t mean it couldn’t be made again. It also made them realise that, in the right hands, it could be transformed. Through the likes of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Tarantino was one of the world’s most celebrated cinema stylists. Should he prevail in his intent, it might actually lead to one of the best Bond movies of all.

  In fan magazine Bondage in 1989, Michael G. Wilson said of the film rights to Casino Royale, ‘United Artists bought out Charlie Feldman’s rights and Columbia owns the rights in common, so they’re in a Mexican standoff.’ That Mexican standoff was solved by MGM, effectively the new owners of UA, triumphing in a Bond-related court case in the 1990s. Its story is tortuous and almost inevitably involves Kevin McClory, that perennial thorn in Eon’s side.

  In 1997, Sony Pictures Entertainment announced they were to start a rival Bond series predicated on the assertion of McClory that, as effectively the creator of the signatures of the cinema Bond, he held rights that extended further than remakes of Thunderball. That Sony had inherited through takeover whatever rights Columbia had to Casino Royale could be said to slightly bolster the idea of a rival franchise: that was at least two Bond films. UA/MGM and Danjaq made a legal challenge to this plan, pointedly purchasing the worldwide distribution rights
to Never Say Never Again as they did (‘We have taken this definitive action to underscore the point that the Bond franchise has one home and only one home – with the collective family of United Artists, MGM, and Danjaq’). An injunction was obtained closing down production on McClory’s latest putative Thunderball remake, Warhead, a.k.a. Warhead 2000, for which McClory had made noises about recruiting Timothy Dalton that were almost certainly news to Dalton.

  The arcane out-of-court settlement that came on 30 March 1999 involved franchise horse-trading whereby Sony dropped their Bond claims and ceded to MGM their rights in Casino Royale, but emerged with rights previously held by MGM to make Spider-Man movies. McClory was left out in the cold. The question of which studio had really won became moot in 2005, when MGM was subsumed into a consortium headed by Sony. Consequently, the new version of Casino Royale wound up being co-produced by MGM and Sony holding Columbia.

  However, the Sony–MGM settlement seems to have given MGM only distribution rights to Casino Royale. That remake rights were a separate issue is illustrated by the fact that Tarantino’s comments about wanting to do Casino Royale came after the 1999 legal settlement. Martin Campbell, who ended up directing the remake, told the Daily Express in 2002, ‘… after a long battle, the Broccolis suddenly got the film rights to the first Bond novel Casino Royale, despite Quentin Tarantino bidding against them.’ Eon seem to have won that bidding war by 2004. Tarantino then embarked on a campaign to persuade Eon to let him be the director of their version of Casino Royale, and took that campaign into the public arena. In April of that year, he revealed to Sci-Fi Wire that he had talked to Pierce Brosnan about adapting the book. Tarantino said of the notion of Eon hiring him, ‘Let’s – just this one year – go my way and do it a little differently … I won’t do anything that will ruin the series.’ Brosnan weighed in on Tarantino’s side, telling the media, ‘He’s got a cutting edge … Someone like Quentin would be magnificent.’