James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  Moreover, Horowitz contradicts facts established by Fleming, such as Bond’s having been a ‘chocolate sailor’ pre-Thunderball, gives Pussy Galore a purposeless cameo, and retro-projects modern, liberal sensibilities on the 1957 time period.

  The only time Horowitz does trump Fleming is by giving Bond a fatalism about his cigarette consumption logical in the context of his perilous job: ‘… if cancer had any fancy ideas about killing him, it would just have to take its place in the queue.’

  On 20 November 2006, Kevin McClory died in Dublin, aged eighty.

  Although McClory acquired some kudos for writing and directing the quirky 1959 film The Boy and the Bridge, that he was of limited talent seems proven by the fact that, outside Bond, he did nothing else of note cinematically.

  With Thunderball, he had a 20 per cent profit share of one of the most viewed motion pictures of all time. Yet not only did he not get off the ground any other movie projects – aside from its remake – but he did not live the lifestyle of splendour one would assume. According to Robert Sellers, in 1987 – only four years after Never Say Never Again – McClory was on the run from debtors, his palatial Bahamas property locked up and decaying, his gardener unpaid and his cheques to hotels and travel agents bouncing. Raymond Benson, who got to know McClory a little, says, ‘I respected him but he was quite colourful, to put it mildly. He was very eccentric.’

  McClory never really stopped trying to pursue what he felt were his rights to make Bond films. ‘He claimed he was the father of the cinematic James Bond,’ says Benson. ‘He kept wanting to do more James Bond. He felt like he owned it. He felt like he was the one who should have been in Broccoli and Saltzman’s shoes. He was obsessed with it. To his dying day, he was fighting it.’

  In November 2013, McClory’s heirs decided to stop the fight he had waged for decades. In selling to Danjaq and MGM the rights once held by McClory in the James Bond character, they brought to an end what Sellers termed ‘the Battle for Bond’. In so doing, they paved the way for the return in official Bond films of SPECTRE and Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

  Eon decided to make a big deal of the development even though, courtesy of constant TV screenings of classic Bonds, much of the public had no idea SPECTRE and Blofeld had ever departed from the cinematic Bond universe. In December 2014, a media conference was held on the 007 Stage in Pinewood Studios to announce the title of the new Bond picture: Spectre. (Almost predictably, that had been the proposed title of one of the endless Bond projects floated by McClory.) The gloss was somewhat taken off the film later that month by an Internet leak of its script. Also leaked were internal Sony communications, which revealed disquiet at the studio about the quality of that script. When the film shortly began shooting, it was widely believed that the screenplay was still being worked on, which was somewhat worrying in the wake of the ad hoc nature of much of Quantum of Solace.

  Another strand of the leaked communications revealed that black English actor Idris Elba was the preferred choice of Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal to play Bond at whatever point in the future Daniel Craig decided to leave the role. Elba had previously been asked by the website Reddit whether he would take the part. He replied, ‘Yes. If it was offered to me, absolutely.’ The idea of a black man playing Bond would have once been unthinkable: large-scale Afro-Caribbean immigration to the UK had begun only around five years before the first Bond book was published. Roger Moore was subsequently criticised for remarking of the Elba proposal to Paris Match, ‘Although James may have been played by a Scot, a Welshman and an Irishman, I think he should be “English-English”. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting idea, but unrealistic.’ However, black South African comedian Trevor Noah had in 2013 on UK comedy show 8 Out of 10 Cats expressed similar scepticism about a black Bond when he said, ‘You can’t blend in in Moscow when you’re black.’

  Spectre – premiered on 26 October 2015 – has a new gun-barrel sequence. In two firsts for Craig movies, it’s in the conventional place and the actor looks comfortable: loose-limbed and stylish. Unfortunately, the film deteriorates from that point on.

  Sam Smith’s ‘Writing’s on the Wall’, co-written with Jimmy Napes, continues the Craig era’s tradition of a theme song that doesn’t mention the title. It’s operatically sung but ordinary, while Thomas Newman provides a score that lazily cannibalises that of Skyfall. Daniel Kleinman’s opening titles show a bare-chested Craig being caressed by nubile lovelies while tentacles alluding to Spectre’s octopus logo dance in the background. It’s either sensual or creepy.

  Craig is by now powerful enough – and interested enough – to be co-producer. He is also, of course, primarily responsible for Sam Mendes – unusually for latter-day Bond directors – returning for an encore.

  The spectacular pre-title sequence set among the Day of the Dead festival in Mexico includes a jaw-doppingly long tracking shot. However, not even the visual splendour created by Mendes can quell the unease about the fact that Bond is extravagantly, ludicrously insubordinate from the get-go. For the fourth movie in a row – a grand slam of Craig Bonds – 007 has gone rogue. This irresponsibility inimical to secret services goes down even worse with M than it normally would: Max Denbigh, a.k.a. ‘C’ (Andrew Scott) is bent on disbanding the ‘double-O programme’ to instigate the less labour-intensive Nine Eyes, a digitally based international surveillance setup. (The phrase ‘licence to kill’ is revived, despite Casino Royale’s two-kills-to-join edict having made it contradictory.)

  Bond proceeds to go even roguer from there, ignoring his suspension from duty to continue the pursuit of baddies on which he has been set by a DVD from Judi Dench’s M that mysteriously arrived after she died. Scriptwriters Logan, Purvis & Wade and Jez Butterworth don’t bother exploring where in the timeline she would have had the premonition of death that motivated her to pop it in the post but instead concentrate on whisking us across the globe. Italy, Austria and Morocco provide spectacular landscapes in which to set Bond’s mayhem. The $300 million this all cost makes this one of the most expensive movies ever filmed. One section, incidentally, emanates from Kingsley Amis: a torture scene broadly reproduces a passage in Colonel Sun and is the first time that any part of a Bond continuation novel has been adapted to the screen.

  The fact that Spectre no longer has a comic-book meaning – it’s a name, rather than an acronym (hence the lower-case lettering) – is one of the few examples here of the Craig era’s relative realism. Another is the fact that Ralph Fiennes’s M is a civil-libertarian worried about the intrusion into personal privacy of the surveillance organisations. Otherwise, the picture is an awkward mixture of later Connery Bonds and the more knowing Craig brand. Its swaggering, pleased-with-itself tenor is reminiscent of Thunderball, while its outlandish villain’s lair – a spectacular building located in a desert crater and populated by inexplicably unquestioning staff – puts one in mind of the volcano HQ in You Only Live Twice.

  The film constitutes the origin story of Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Rather improbably, it is one that bisects with part of Bond’s origin story: after gatecrashing a Spectre meeting, Bond recognises the organisation’s chief as Franz Oberhauser (double Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz). It turns out that Oberhauser was so resentful of the way his father Hannes treated Bond as a surrogate son following the death of his own parents that he both killed Pater and dissociated himself from him by adopting a name from his mother’s Blofeld lineage. His fate as a bad man was thus sealed, and his villainous activities have always been intertwined with an obsession with his former foster brother. This is irritating on many levels: it pointlessly messes with the facts established in Fleming’s ‘Octopussy’ short story; it is psychologically unconvincing; it displays a self-indulgence on the part of Eon about the 007 mythos; and, most of all, it diminishes Bond’s cause: ‘This time it’s personal’ does not chime with a man so dedicated to Queen and country that his flat (shown here) is a soulless shell.

  An origin is also provided for the disfiguring facial scar tha
t Donald Pleasance memorably bore when providing the first image of Blofeld: Bond causes it when demolishing the villain’s desert hideout. Despite this, a Nehru suit and the brief throwing-in of a white cat, it all feels false: Waltz comes across like an accountant, not a megalomaniac.

  Spectre is revealed to be the umbrella organisation to which Quantum and its associates have been answering all along. Perhaps it’s another example of Craig-era realism that Spectre is not bent on world domination or extorting vast sums of money for the return of warheads, but the nature of its wickedness seems inchoate, even pathetic. Its plans merely revolve around organising terrorist atrocities so as to panic governments into draconian surveillance methods to which it will have access via Denbigh, who turns out to be its man on the inside of MI6. M, Q and Moneypenny race to stop Nine Eyes going live, while Bond has a showdown with Blofeld in and around the MI6 building, which for some reason the writers have decided to pretend has remained a wreck in real life following the fictional damage done to it in Skyfall. This can perhaps be excused as alternate reality, but it’s difficult to come up with a rationale for the film’s multiple discrepancies with logic, such as how Bond had a bug in the room of villain Marco Sciarra when his mission was unofficial, or how Blofeld was running the patently free agent Silva in Skyfall, or even why nobody bats an eyelid when Bond demolishes a train in a fight, leaving him free afterwards to engage in a bout of lovemaking.

  In line with their current tendency to practically apologise for Bond and what he supposedly stands for, Eon made great play of the advanced age (fifty) of Monica Bellucci, but in fact her character Lucia Sciarra is only one of the ‘Bond girls’ (as they’re increasingly not called) herein. The main one is Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), the doctor daughter of Mr White, who is reliably young. Mr White has been exiled from Spectre and consigned to death for expressing distaste at its methods – this despite his having been happy in Casino Royale to work for a group behind 9/11. No more comprehensible is why the hostile Madeleine whimpers to Bond, ‘I love you’ after one sex session. This sort of stuff is strung out over 148 minutes, the longest ever instalment in the series.

  If Eon are inclined to apologise for anything, it should be the sickening scene in which villain Hinx (Dave Bautista) sticks his steel thumbnails into a rival’s eyes.

  Blofeld is alive, if captured, at movie’s end, leaving the way open for his return. Not necessarily the case with Daniel Craig: he is shown throwing his gun away, while Q pointedly says, ‘I thought you’d gone,’ before Bond and Madeleine ride off in the old Aston Martin DB5. It all gives credence to the rumour that Spectre is Craig’s farewell. If true, it’s an unfortunate and puzzling swansong, paving the way for a successor not to make more naturalistic Bond movies like his first three but to return to Connery and Moore kitsch.

  Daniel Craig commented to journalist Bill Deskowitz of Casino Royale, ‘I wouldn’t have touched this movie if I didn’t see an element of where we saw him change.’ He told Rolling Stone in 2012, ‘I’ve been trying to get out of this from the very moment I got into it, but they won’t let me go, and I’ve agreed to do a couple more …’ He told Time Out after the completion of Spectre that he would rather ‘slash my wrists’ than do another Bond and that ‘All I want to do is move on.’

  Some might view Craig’s comments as ungrateful and graceless, notwithstanding shooting schedules that oblige him to be away from his family for eight-month stretches and the multiple operations on his body the rigours of the part have necessitated. Sony seem to think so. It was reported that he had been reprimanded by the studio after the Time Out comments.

  Nonetheless, it’s difficult to dislike Craig. Whatever his luvvie pretensions, his Scouse background has given him a candour (he cheerfully admits to accessing Internet porn), an earthy sense of humour (a joke he tells about his grandmother’s private parts and five oysters is not for the faint-hearted) and directness (when in 2011 Alex Bilmes of Esquire asked him what his new film Cowboys & Aliens was about, he responded, ‘It’s about cowboys and fucking aliens, what do you think it’s about?’).

  His directness extends to 007. Speaking about his Bond tenure to Bilmes a couple of months before Spectre’s release, he said, ‘No disrespect to what happened before but this is completely different. It’s got weight and meaning.’

  When Fleming created Bond, divorce was so difficult to obtain that marriage was for many synonymous with lifelong burden, while casual sex had a corresponding air of freedom and glamour. Now that marriages are as easy to exit as enter, making companionship less fraught with peril, middle-aged bachelorhood like Bond’s seems not so much enviable as immature. Craig seemed to be reflecting this when he opined of 007, ‘He’s very fucking lonely. There’s a great sadness. He’s fucking these beautiful women but then they leave and it’s … sad. And as a man gets older it’s not a good look. It might be a nice fantasy – that’s debatable – but the reality, after a couple of months … Hopefully, my Bond is not as sexist and misogynistic as [earlier incarnations]. The world has changed. I am certainly not that person.’ One can’t imagine any previous Bond actor coming out with such comments. They certainly have more truth than the metronomic insistence of the actresses playing Bond girls from at least the late 1980s that their character is different from all the previous ones as they unconvincingly throw around phrases such as ‘strong woman’ and ‘more than a match for …’

  After all the hoo-hah first surrounding the engagement of his services, Craig has made the Bond role his. In doing so, he has redrawn definitions of male beauty. He has also, of course, redrawn definitions of 007. Like all serving Bonds, he has a gravitas and authority by default (one that, by the same token, can be whisked away in a heartbeat upon replacement: many now can’t believe Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton were ever allowed to play Bond). Yet his aura comes from something more than incumbency. His thoughtfulness and dedication – which feed into the quality of his films – make us forget for the duration of the viewing experience that there were other, very different 007s. Such has been the overhaul to the character his tenure had brought that’s it’s difficult to imagine where the series will go once he leaves. Will it carry on the Craig films’ grim timbre and self-contained continuity or will it rewrite the rules and the facts again?

  Craig and his cohorts have confirmed that Bond can be updated and reordered almost beyond recognition while maintaining brand loyalty. His portrayal of the character bears no relation to the ding-dong! quality of the longest-serving Bond but has actually widened the profit-making abilities of what was already history’s pre-eminent movie series.

  JAMES BOND WILL RETURN

  Although much media fuss was made about the Sony Internet leak, the problems it allegedly revealed about Spectre were doubtlessly viewed by James Bond cognoscenti as an inconsequential blip destined to be forgotten as soon as the first grosses came in.

  The simple fact is that there has never been a flop James Bond movie. Eon and/or their distributors may have been slightly disappointed by the respective box-office performances of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, The Man with the Golden Gun and Licence to Kill, but all of those films took money hand over fist and were failures only when compared with the fiscal standards set by other Bond movies. Even when 007 pictures have been terrible (the 1967 Casino Royale) or quasi-illegitimate (Never Say Never Again), they have brought punters into cinemas.

  Bond’s allure remains consistent on the printed page as well. Not only are all of Ian Fleming’s works still in print, they now enjoy the status of Modern Classics. Additionally, the publishing schedules will continue to play host to writers authorised to rearrange and reinterpret the fixtures of the universe first established for Bond by Fleming more than sixty years ago.

  Whereas the respective media presences of once-prominent twentieth-century action heroes have often been reduced to zero, James Bond remains one of the most famous fictional characters in the world, despite that world having shifted and metamorphosed around
him. The reasons can be debated: Bulldog Drummond was too brutish to sustain a long-term appeal; Biggles too rooted in a precise point in history; Tarzan too limited to a specific geographical terrain; Richard Hannay too lacking in distinct characteristics; Simon Templar too freelance and piecemeal in his mission. The main reason, of course, is that James Bond was with spectacular success transplanted to the medium of the motion picture, and that that series of motion pictures – and its signature catchphrases and set pieces – have been carefully cultivated each and every outing for purposes of optimum effect and continued relevance.

  Today is possibly the most exciting of all times for Bond fans. The films have been transformed from something approaching, in the arch Roger Moore era, a joke to something in the Daniel Craig era that Academy Award winners are pleased to direct and appear in. They please the intelligentsia while packing fleapits with those of less sophisticated palates. Meanwhile, the curators of the Bond book rights have alighted on a commissioning policy that has hauled 007 back to a position where he can hold his own with his cinematic incarnation. New Bond novels are once again both events and bestsellers. Bond is even a cultural presence for those people interested in neither films nor books: he stands on equal footing with titans of video gaming like Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty and World of Warcraft.

  The most prominent manifestation of Bond will, of course, continue to be the motion-picture one. Roger Moore is impressed by the way the latest generation of Broccolis guide their birthright. ‘Michael and Barbara are very clever in that they keep one step ahead of public tastes and changes, and adapt,’ he says. ‘They lead and others follow. Jim will be around for a long time to come as a result.’