"Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film."
November 02, 2006
Note: This is an oldish piece I wrote and posted on this site a good long while ago (4 years ago, sort of). The original page it was on is no longer linked to on this site (although it may still be googled), so I've decided to post it as a blog post just so it could be more accesible. Besides, with Casino Royale in theaters in a few weeks, it's not a bad idea to see how the whole Bond phenomenon started more than 40 years ago.
“Attention, This Man… Agent 007 Carries a License to Kill”, reads the Italian blurb to this poster promoting the original release of Dr. No, a rather odd proclamation to draw attention to a supposedly secret agent. In 1962, years before James Bond became “Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and an international phenomenon, some publicists were probably at a loss on how to promote the film. Instead of images of swizzle sticks, long legs, silvery cars, the lean and long barreled pistol and Connery’s cold smirk that became pop fodder in the mid-sixties, the marketers of the first James Bond adventure, a modestly budgeted film adaptation of one of a moderately successful series of espionage thrillers, had to rely on maybe viewing the final film (most probably not, as this was not a normal procedure of the time), a few production stills, and, quite possibly, their wits and imagination.
Worldwide,
most of the posters advertising Dr. No featured Sean
Connery with a gun and Ursula
Andress in a bikini, but this Italian ad seems to be the only one
that featured Bond in a homburg. We usually think of Bond as a hatless creature,
but he always wore one during the opening gun barrel sequences during
the '60s (even George
Lazenby sported one in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,
the last one that did, actually), and Bond's tossing of his hat
on the hat rack in Moneypenny’s office is one of the miniature hallmarks
of the early films. Kids weaned on the jokey and bombastic interpretations
of Moore and Brosnan would be astounded, perhaps disappointed (if not
bored restless) by the relatively staid and lusterless action of Dr.
No, which probably seems as positively Paleolithic as Birth of a
Nation or a black and white cartoon. Coming as it did on the tail end
of that post-war golden age John Cheever celebrated as a “long-lost
world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light... when
almost everybody wore a hat,” Dr. No is a transitional
piece of sorts, a last gasp of gray flannel cool and booze soaked insouciance before the world turned day-glo and hatless heads grew their hair long and jerked
and swayed to the sounds of swinging London. The Bond of Dr. No
was the Organization
Man turned Danger
Man, a bit impetuous perhaps with a weakness for vices of which his superiors
may disapprove, but ultimately one whose primary function is to serve
the company. “When do you sleep, 007?” asks M after Bond is
summoned to his office from a wee hour casino jaunt. “Never on the
firm’s time, sir,” answers Bond, matter-of-factly.
Some
of the more unpleasant vestiges of British imperialism crack through the
movie’s cool veneer. The Jamaica of Dr. No is not the Jamaica
we recognize from The Harder They Come, but a colonial version
of white men in starched white Bermudas
and a game of bridge in the afternoon while brown-skinned men serve gin
and tonics. One of the more egregious examples of this sense of colonial
privilege is when Bond instructs Quarrel, his Cayman Island lackey, to
“fetch
my shoes”. The filmmakers themselves were not above such soft-boiled
racism, as in their portrayal of Quarrel as a superstitious native, blubbering
about “dragons” with a pop-eyed abandon not seen since Mantan
Moreland. These colonial attitudes stem from
the Ian Fleming original, which probably was as embarrassingly politically
incorrect in 1958 when it was first published as it does now (check Fleming’s
description of “Chigroes”, the half-Chinese half-black islanders
who were in league with Dr. No: "The Chigroes have all the venality
of the Chinaman and all the brutishness of the Negro.”). Dr. No’s
ethnicity was not touched upon in the movie, but in the book he’s
another example of the Yellow Peril as exemplified in Sax
Rohmer’s Fu
Manchu
stories, although, in this case, he’s half-Chinese half-German (Fleming
had a big bugaboo about miscegenation).
At
least seen in this light, the movie does seem dreadfully old-fashioned,
a time yellowed relic of a time we won’t (and probably don’t
want to) see again. But when Dr. No was released to theaters
in late ’62 –early ’63, it was something entirely exciting, brash
and new. It introduced Sean
Connery as a model for a new kind of hero, amoral, brave, yet capable
of cold-blooded brutality (“That’s a Smith & Wesson, and
you’ve already had your six”: Dent’s killing was the
single most cold-blooded act in any Bond film, never to be equaled, even
in more permissible times). We had to wait until Clint Eastwood starred
in Sergio Leone’s westerns before we would encounter a movie hero as nonplussed
about life and death. Many critics have commented on the science fiction
aspects of Dr. No, but the subplot dealing with radio beams throwing
off the gyroscopes of “Cape Canaveral rockets” (a MacGuffin
actually) is not so much science fiction but a mirror of the science fact
that figured prominently in the headlines of the day. This was, after
all, the dawn of the space age. These scientific elements were woven into
the fabric of the story in such a nonchalant and cavalier manner, that
the audience took it as a matter of fact, without needing to suspend disbelief,
a requisite in later Bond features. Indeed, one of the winning
points of Dr. No is its very nonchalance and casualness, its
easy sexiness, the effortless way Connery glides through Ken
Adam’s sets, the breezy pace of the narrative, the fast cutting
and quick action which blurred plot holes and contrivances enough so they
became inconsequential.
The
film, of course, was a worldwide success. Whatever innovations Dr.
No may have introduced, these were not preludes to more daring
filmmaking in the series to come (some may say “franchise”),
but, instead, were immovable elements in the Bond formula, from which
there can be no deviation. Although there are more than a few good Bond
movies, the first three Connery Bonds (Dr. No, From Russia
with Love, and Goldfinger) are the canonical standard, where
the formula was perfected and honed to a fine shiny edge. Bond became
a cash cow, still to this day, forty years later. Who could have predicted
this back in 1962? Who could have foreseen that this tight little thriller
would have spawned close to thirty new editions (one cannot properly call
them “sequels”)? Like the colored pushpins denoting a franchise
location in some grand corporate map, each Bond film pricks a point in
our pop culture atlas, some deeper than others perhaps, but each providing
a consistent value of entertainment, sex, and adventure, much as an order
of McDonald® fries purchased anywhere in the world provides the same
consistent value of crispiness, saltiness, and starchy caloric content.
Admittedly, this is a very simplistic analogy, as there is some artfulness
involved in the Bond movies, some of it quite brilliant (Maurice Binder’s
title
sequences, John Barry’s music, Ken Adam’s sets, Connery’s
iconic performances), but the salient point remains that even the most
artful elements of the Bond series became a crucial part of the formula,
so much so then even when these creators stopped working in the Bond films,
it seemed necessary for Danjaq,
S.A. to recreate them with artful replicators (such as David
Arnold for John Barry,
and Daniel Kleinman
for Maurice Binder).
Thus, the formula became as familiar as comfort food, and just as reassuring
for consumers. One cannot create forty years of uninterrupted box office
success with stark originality each and every time, or at least, that’s
the conventional wisdom. At least, we can see a glimpse of the time before
James Bond became a formula, back in 1962, when the company man wore a
hat.
More Info...
Red Grant's The Art of James Bond is an extraordinary compendium of visuals dealing with the Bond phenomenon, from book covers (including those cool Signet paperbacks my dad used to read and which I devoured during my adolescence), movie posters, album covers, ad mats, concept art, and a whole lot more. Dig on the 'sixties style! Groove on the Thunderball concept art! Or you can check out the concept art for A View To A Kill featuring a half naked Grace Jones. There are tons of Bond sites out there, but this one is one of the best.
Another good Bond site is Her Majesty's Secret Servant run by Paul Baack and Tom Zielinski, a couple of Bond obsessives. Of special interest is Richard Taulke-Johnson's essay exploring the semiotics of Bond (by way of Umberto Eco). Good stuff.
By the way, click on the poster for a larger image. 205K
posted by Sean on 11/02/2006 09:03:00 PM| link