James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  Despite Craig’s seriousness as an actor, he was turned into a piece of cheesecake by his appearance in a pair of bathing trunks on a Nassau beach. The relevant scene involved his striding in surf in a manner reminiscent of Ursula Andress emerging from the water in Dr. No. ‘Ironically, it was never even thought of as that,’ says Campbell. Nonetheless, Eon and/or Sony seemed to take great delight in distributing to the press pictures from the scene in advance of the film’s release, almost as if to silence those who had questioned Craig’s beefcake credentials. ‘Well, why not?’ Campbell shrugs. ‘He looked pretty good. Daniel had done four months’ working out.’ Also going some way towards assuaging the doubts of those who felt him not Adonis-like enough was Craig’s restyled bristly hair, magnetic blue eyes and self-possessed presence.

  When we see him taking the trouble to thank waiters and croupiers, and stand up for ladies, we note that, although Craig’s 007 is blunt and unsmiling, he is good on small courtesies. The lack of finesse detected by Vesper doesn’t quite sit with the fact of Bond relishing caviar or his complicated proprietary dry-martini recipe. (The instructions Bond gives the barman for the drink that will become The Vesper come almost word-for-word from the book. Half the gamblers at the table instantly ask for one of these intriguing-sounding concoctions.)

  Le Chiffre is played brilliantly by Mads Mikkelsen. The effect of his dead, impassive face and unnerving stare is made even more powerful by the makeup department, who give him one milky eye, from which a medical condition causes blood to weep.

  Another indication of the hard reboot is the resurrection of Felix Leiter. Jeffrey Wright is not, incidentally, the first black actor to play the CIA man: Bernie Casey had been Leiter in the non-Eon Never Say Never Again. Also ringing the changes is the testicle-torture scene, and not just because Craig is shown naked. When Le Chiffre sets to work (with a knotted rope rather than a carpet beater), Craig screams and whimpers in a way that the cinematic Bond never previously has. As in Fleming’s template, Bond’s rescue comes as a by-product of a third party’s fury about Le Chiffre’s financial recklessness. In this case Le Chiffre is killed by an associate named Mr White (Jesper Christensen).

  Bond is interested in only married women. ‘It keeps things simple,’ Craig explains to Dimitrios’s wife Solange, whom he beds. Many had condemned Bond films for their immorality, but up to this point the series had steered clear of the contempt for the institution of marriage evident in some parts of the Fleming canon, with the exception of Bond reigniting a relationship with his married old flame in Tomorrow Never Dies. However, Bond does fall in love with Vesper, even if the example of personal growth is spoiled a little by the fact that it comes too quickly after their daggers-drawn scenes to be convincing. Perhaps he is confusing his feelings with a need to escape his blood-drenched job while he still has a ‘soul left to salvage’. Bond resigns by email to go aimlessly wandering the world with Vesper. When M calls him to ask why his casino winnings haven’t been deposited in the required bank account, Bond realises Vesper is in league with the enemy. She ends up killing herself in front of his eyes in a collapsing Venice building. Craig uses Fleming’s ‘bitch is dead’ line, but M points out that Vesper had evidently done a deal to spare his life on the day Le Chiffre was executed.

  In Vesper’s mobile phone, Bond finds the name of Mr White and sets off in pursuit. Bond shoots the man in the leg and, standing over him, provides for the first time the signature rendering of his name. Campbell: ‘We thought we’d never get away with that but Paul and I said, “He can’t possibly be Bond until the end of the movie, the Bond that we know and love.” He’s got to go through this learning curve and make his mistakes and his fuck-ups and everything else, and then the last line of the movie is, “The name’s Bond, James Bond.”’

  At that last line, the closing credits start to the accompaniment – finally – of ‘The James Bond Theme’, the belated introduction of which is clearly another example of Bond motifs being held back until such time as the character has formed himself into the one we know. That, for the first time, plot threads are left dangling makes the ‘James Bond Will Return’ declaration not so much presumptuous as necessary.

  Casino Royale was premiered on 14 November 2006, almost precisely four years after the release of Die Another Day. During that interregnum, not only had the Bourne films been received by some critics as a rebuke of the fantastical timbre of the Bond franchise, but a corollary of their success was that some started suggesting that the long absence of 007 was irrelevant because he was a throwback that was no longer needed.

  Some proffered similar sentiments about 24. Television had never previously been able to offer competition to the ultimate cinema spectacle that was a Bond movie, but with both adult content and high budgets now enabled by subscription-funded broadcasting, the Fox network series was giving Bond a run for his money. Eon had heard this sort of stuff before, of course, and many times. However, this time there was the additional issue of the less-than-universal praise that had greeted their choice of new Bond actor. Moreover, as with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – coincidentally, the last Bond picture wherein Bond’s lover had died – cinemas were restricted in the number of showings possible: at 144 minutes, Casino Royale was the longest Bond film yet. (Campbell says he was put under no pressure to cut the running time: ‘It was just the length it should have been.’)

  Eon were at least thrown an unexpected lifeline by the film censors. Casino Royale features violence that is brutal and vindictive rather than, as so often is the case in the series, stylish and glib. Moreover, it contains a torture scene of which Campbell admits, ‘Nothing had been seen like that in a Bond film ever before.’ He says it made him worried about the certifications, but says, ‘The irony was the British censors made me cut one tiny bit, which is where Le Chiffre walks round and he puts the rope over Daniel’s shoulder, which they took as some sort of sexual thing. It was just ridiculous. The Americans didn’t worry about it at all. I didn’t lose a frame for them.’ He admits of the classifications – ‘12A’ in the UK, ‘PG13’ in the US – ‘They are lenient, there’s no question.’

  In reality, though, the film probably didn’t need any form of providence. Bond films had a dedicated fanbase; a new instalment in history’s most successful franchise was an event by default; the studio put everything into publicising the return of their franchise; Craig enjoyed the honeymoon period/curiosity status of all new Bonds and (intentionally or not) the new Bond possessed the grim timbre made fashionable by Bourne pictures and 24. Then there was the fact that Eon’s recent determination not to offend China had been rewarded by their being granted access to their cinemas. All of these things gave rise to worldwide box-office grosses of $594.2 million. Casino Royale entered the top ten of biggest-grossing Bond films even after inflation adjustment.

  In July 2007, Ian Fleming Publications announced the name of the author they had chosen to resurrect adult James Bond continuation novels.

  Kingsley Amis excepted, Sebastian Faulks was the most prestigious writer ever asked to carry on Ian Fleming’s literary legacy. His acclaimed works, such as A Fool’s Alphabet, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, had garnered him a CBE for services to literature. A book by such a writer was certainly destined to be taken more seriously – and therefore attract more reviews in the literary pages – than the works of John Gardner or Raymond Benson. Moreover, such a writer was destined to take himself more seriously. Faulks initially turned down IFP’s overture, then agreed to it as long as he could make his effort a historical novel. That IFP acquiesced is an indication of the greater power that such name authors possess.

  Devil May Care by ‘Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming’ was published on 28 May 2008, the one hundredth anniversary of Ian Fleming’s birth. Faulks’s narrative takes place in 1967, so is effectively the successor to The Man with the Golden Gun. (He ignores Colonel Sun, as well as all the other continuation novels, something standard with new Bond writers.) Bond is tas
ked with dealing with the heroin flooding his home country courtesy of Dr Julius Gorner, a man with such a loathing for Britain that he plans a terrorist attack on Russia for which the UK will get the blame.

  Faulks skimps on sex and brand names and the tone of Bond’s exchanges with Moneypenny is from the movies, not the books. He also makes a couple of Fleming-continuity mistakes, portraying SMERSH as still operating and stating that Bond has never encountered a female SIS agent (Mary Ann Russell would hardly have been forgotten by Bond when she had saved his life in ‘From a View to a Kill’). Elsewhere, though, some of the content is so Fleming-esque while simultaneously avoiding being generic as to be uncanny, among it leisurely scene-setting, colourful supporting characters, digressions (a waffling speech by the villain about the mathematics of tennis), discretion with profanity and banter about spanking. Also Fleming-like is that his villain has both a ‘congenital deformity’ – in this case a monkey’s hand – and accidie (although Faulks confuses it with anomie).

  Faulks’s scene-setting is, in a way, actually more impressive than Fleming’s. The latter was merely writing in his time, whereas Faulks had to research details of cars, customs, political situations, etc. Anachronisms are few.

  It’s such a shame, then, that, when it comes to action sequences, Faulks’s descriptive powers prove inadequate. Some of them are pulpy, but mostly they sin by being ludicrously sketchy. Faulks says of a vehicle in which Felix Leiter is riding, ‘… the car flipped over on its side, slewing hard across the road on its doors’ and goes no further. Fleming would have made sure to describe every chaotic, cacophonous moment of the experience of the car’s passengers.

  Reviews of Devil May Care (whose title is not explained within its pages) were generally good and sales were exceptional, with only the latest Harry Potter moving more quickly. Literary Bond was back.

  After the triumph of the Casino Royale remake came the irritating letdown that was Quantum of Solace, premiered on 29 October 2008.

  Martin Campbell again declined to further the adventures of a Bond he had reinvented. ‘Now he’s back on the trail again, hunting down the villain,’ he explains. ‘The fundamentals have gone back to being the same.’

  The Purvis & Wade/Paul Haggis combination that worked so brilliantly on the previous movie was officially credited with the screenplay of the follow-up. However, a Writers’ Guild strike came into effect partway through the process, compounding the problems created by the picture being rushed into production. In February 2012, Craig told Dave Calhoun of Time Out, ‘We couldn’t employ a writer to finish it … There was me trying to rewrite scenes – and a writer I am not … Me and the director were the ones allowed to do it … We were stuffed.’ The result seems to be a decision to obviate the need for plot and dialogue by filling up the screentime with action sequences.

  Moreover, whoever the writers were, they had a harder task than last time out. As the quirky Fleming short story from which the movie takes its title would hardly have made for an enthralling adventure, the screenwriters were once again working from scratch. (In keeping with the general air of half-bakedness, although the organisation Bond has been pursuing since the last movie is revealed herein to be called Quantum, the ‘Solace’ bit is meaningless.)

  Marc Forster doesn’t help. Once again, Eon went for a director known more for arthouse pictures than action-oriented flicks, in this case the likes of Monster’s Ball and The Kite Runner. (The Swiss Forster was the first non-Commonwealth Eon Bond director.) Forster’s work here is bewildering and sometimes infuriating. His endless fast-cutting – like a parody of Peter Hunt’s get-rid-of-that-pause style – often makes it difficult to understand what’s happening. His determination to keep up the pace leads to an extraordinarily short Bond feature, at 106 minutes the briefest of all 007 movies.

  Where he isn’t being frenetic, Forster throws in the sort of arty-farty stuff never before seen in Bond. When at an Austrian opera house Bond gatecrashes a public meeting of Quantum, it leads to a pursuit that Forster juxtaposes with the graceful happenings in Tosca. He alternates the opera’s music with dead silence.

  Whether it be Forster’s or the scriptwriters’ fault, the action itself is substandard. One Bond signature that has remained constant throughout all of the series’ wild fluctuations in tone is that its violent scenes have an unforeseeable but appropriate payoff: Dr No falling into the reactor pool because his steel hands can’t grasp the girder, Oddjob being fried when reaching for his hat, Jaws being lifted by his teeth with a giant magnet and dropped into a shark pool, Renard being impaled on the plutonium rod with which he plans to commit mass murder, etc., etc. The violent scenes in Quantum of Solace suggest a lack of understanding of the Bond franchise: too often they end not in a stylish crescendo but utterly prosaically – such as in the pre-title sequence, where Bond, at the end of a car chase, picks up a machine gun from the seat beside him and lets rip.

  That pre-title sequence ends with Bond opening the boot of his car and saying to Mr White, trussed up inside, ‘It’s time to get out.’ In other words, the narrative is one that continues almost directly from the close of Casino Royale, making this a proper sequel in a way no other Bond film has been. Yet, while only hours have passed since the action in that picture, the two years that have elapsed in real life are etched into Craig’s face.

  Bond, of course, is insane with grief after what happened in Casino Royale, but that doesn’t mean he can kill people rather than take them in for questioning about Quantum, especially with so many other lives at stake. Accordingly, M suspends him, leading Bond to go rogue, something that – notwithstanding that the series has been rebooted – has happened a little too often in the franchise lately.

  Bolivian secret agent Camille Montes (Olga Kurylenko) assists Bond in his objective of crushing Quantum, an organisation so insidious that one of its agents was M’s personal bodyguard for five years. Camille is motivated by the fact that her family was murdered by main villain Medrano (Joaquín Cosío). It seems she is being set up to be 007’s love interest, but the agent’s only conquest in the film is ‘Fields’, an MI6 office worker stationed in Bolivia. His seduction method is cringeworthy: when they check into their hotel suite, Bond calls from the bedroom, ‘I can’t find the … the stationery. Will you come and help me look?’ Other throwbacks to a more flippant Bond-movie era are the fact that Bond shows himself able to pilot a plane and that he is rescued by a girl screeching up in a car.

  Bond gets revenge for Vesper. However, he does this not by killing the Quantum man who betrayed her but by handing him over to MI6. He is growing.

  It is then that we get Craig’s first formal gun-barrel sequence. It’s a little peculiar: he seems to walk too fast and appears rather hunched and almost squat. Despite the return of this tradition, albeit in an irregular place, Quantum of Solace is the first Bond film since 1967 without that famous line, ‘The name’s Bond, James Bond’ or a variation thereof.

  Capping an annoying cinema experience is the opening music. Eon tried to be trendy by commissioning Jack White of the White Stripes as composer. White is an indie rocker with no history of glossy anthems. As well as being completely inappropriate, his staccato ‘Another Way to Die’ (sung by White and Alicia Keyes in the series’ first duet) is risibly American (we are told that Bond is using his ‘slick trigger finger’ for ‘Her Majesteee’ and looking out for his ‘bruthaaa’).

  Quantum of Solace was a letdown in every area except receipts: box-office grosses were $575.4 million.

  A function of IFP’s acquiring a prestigious author for a continuation 007 novel was that it was destined to be a one-off: while Sebastian Faulks was genuinely delighted and intrigued to write a Bond tale, there was no way that such a cultured and independently successful wordsmith was going to want to work within those restrictive parameters for an extended period. Accordingly, he declined an invitation to write a follow-up.

  IFP turned instead to Jeffery Deaver. Although, unlike Faulks, a genre w
riter, Deaver is considered a class act. His award-strewn crime-writing career is marked by fearsome research, gruesome forensic detail, fast pacing and trick endings.

  In Carte Blanche, published in May 2011, Deaver went in completely the opposite direction to Faulks. In going contemporary, Deaver at least rid himself of the burden of aligning his story with Fleming’s Bond chronology.

  In a narrative that covers only a week, Bond travels from the Balkans to Dubai and then to South Africa in order to thwart a terrorist atrocity orchestrated by the decay-obsessed Severan Hydt. In a final section where twist is piled upon twist, Hydt turns out to be a secondary figure and Bond’s love interest the real baddie.

  Deaver’s exposition is stiff and his descriptive passages functional. The 400-page book is much longer than it needs to be, cluttered with the viewpoints of supporting characters. Although Deaver’s action sequences are better than Faulks’s, they are nothing special. Deaver is strongest when it comes to procedural detail, research (he purveys interesting facts about both spy technology and recycling) and travelogue (he is quite evocative on South Africa and Dubai).

  His Bond, though, feels unrelated to Fleming’s. Although the likes of M, Felix Leiter, René Mathis, Bill Tanner and Mary Goodnight all put in appearances, everything else in the 007 universe is rejigged. Bond – a former smoker – cut his chops in the war in Afghanistan. He is an employee within the 00 Section of the Operations Branch of covert British security unit the Overseas Development Group. (Their mission is to ‘protect the Realm … by any means necessary’ – the carte blanche of the title, which itself is a more modern and nuanced variant of the status Licence to Kill.)

  Bond is also painfully, pointedly upright. He declines the opportunity to seduce one woman because he adjudges her to be too vulnerable in the wake of a romantic split, and another for no comprehensible reason whatsoever. His sole conquest in the book is one Deaver deliberately does not put in those terms, talking of ‘mutual surrender, mutual victory’. Bond’s gender-biased assumption that his father was a spy is mocked by turn of events as it is revealed that the secret agent in the family was his mother. At one point, Bond upbraids himself for being impatient with a South African police officer who resents his carte blanche: ‘… hard-working law enforcers of the world were one hundred per cent right in respecting the rules. It was he who was the outlier.’