Tomorrow Never Dies, Police Story 3, & a hopeless spinoff

I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT that, as exciting and underrated as it is, Tomorrow Never Dies probably features a bit too much action for a Bond picture, which have always leant towards the “adventure” side of action/adventure – it’s a noticeable difference if you compare the series to such Bond competitors/derivatives as the Indiana Jones, Batman or Mission: Impossible series, or Marvel’s brand-new stab at the long-dormant “black 007” genre in Black Panther.

For a long time, though, I’d been mistakenly thinking of it as a film that’s overly keen to ape violent American films, in the manner of Licence to Kill or Quantum of Solace. After defining its own subgenre in the 60s, the series has occasionally, and rather sadly, borrowed from other genres, many of them partially derived from the Bond formula itself: blaxploitation in Live and Let Die; Kung Fu in The Man with the Golden Gun; Star Wars in Moonraker; Lethal Weapon, Die Hard and their ilk in Licence to Kill; Batman Begins in Casino Royale; Bourne in Quantum of Solace. What hadn’t struck me previously is that Tomorrow Never Dies represents the Bond series’ attempt to piggyback on Hong Kong action cinema of the sort codified by John Woo. That’s the real meaning of Bond dual-wielding a P99 and an MP5 as he mows down Carver’s henchmen, not to mention the use of pre-Matrix bullet-time showing off Wai Lin’s cartwheels and high kicks.

Wai Lin, of course, is played by the Hong Kong star Michelle Yeoh, who had already submitted an audition tape for this precise rôle with her appearance in Police Story 3: Super Cop. In that film, Yeoh plays a no-nonsense Chinese policewoman, an orthodox communist who bickers with the partner she’s assigned: Jackie Chan as a policeman from (then still-British) Hong Kong. In Tomorrow Never Dies, Yeoh plays a no-nonsense Chinese spy, an orthodox communist who bickers with the partner she’s assigned: James Bond, a spy from Britian. (An earlier draft of Tomorrow Never Dies would actually have revolved around the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, which was scrapped when a) production took too long for the issue still to be relevant, and b) the handover went very smoothly and afforded little opportunity for action set-pieces or communist-vs.-capitalist quipping.)

It isn’t only the character dynamic between Bond and Wai Lin that feels borrowed from Police Story. After about eighty minutes of standard Bond stuff, the film sends us to Asia, after which the action is nonstop for about a solid half-hour. Among the setpieces are Bond and Wai Lin rappeling down a skyscraper by clinging to an enormous and slowly-tearing poster adorning its side, and a rooftop motorcycle chase for which the pair are handcuffed to one another for the duration. The combination of eye-popping action and physical comedy comes straight from Jackie Chan, and it’s a shame that Pierce Brosnan is an actor and not a stuntman, for scenes like these work best when they’re done fully in-camera, without swapping between actors and stuntmen.

Wai Lin was apparently one of the series’ more popular Bond Girls, though I always found Yeoh a little stiff and awkward here compared to some of the wonderful performances she’s given in Chinese and HK films. Still, a spinoff was originally intended for her character who, of several Bond Girls set up as female counterparts to Bond (The Spy Who Loved Me‘s XXX, Die Another Day‘s Jinx) is the most convincing. Yeoh was already used to such spinoffs, having starred in one of her own featuring her character from Police Story 3: Super Cop. That spin-off was confusingly marketed in various territories as Supercop, Supercop 2, Police Story 3 Part 2, Supercop, Police Story IV, Project S or Once a Cop. I wonder whether the producers would even have started thinking about spinoffs if the Police Story series hadn’t gone there first.

And I wonder if the Police Story series first came to their attention with the wide release of Police Story 4: First Strike, aka Jackie Chan’s First Strike. It takes the series away from Hong Kong cop action in favour of a globetrotting plot obviously intended to launch Chan’s character as a Hong Kong alternative to Bond, and was seen by plenty of international audiences previously ignorant of the series. Once again, Bond was borrowing from its own imitators.

As for the Wai Lin spinoff, it never materialised, and the producers turned their hopes to Jinx in Die Another Day, envisioning a “Winter Olympics” scenario in which her films and Bond’s would alternate. After the rough reception given Halle Berry not only in Die Another Day but also X-Men, Swordfish and (especially) Catwoman, the spinoff idea was once again abandoned, and I have to wonder: does anyone really want or need to see Bond without Bond? If they do, they already have a rich array of alternatives from which to choose.

Licence Revoked, Licence to Kill, & bad Bond luck

IN MY LAST BLOG POST, I was chatting about how the 16th Bond film, Licence Revoked, suffered an undignified and expensive last-minute name change to Licence to Kill. That wasn’t the only thing going wrong behind the scenes on one of the least inspired, least successful entries in what is, for the most part, a reliable series.

To begin with Timothy Dalton, who had made his début in 1987’s The Living Daylights, was certainly the 007 with the rottenest luck. First approached by the producers in 1969 to replace Connery for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Dalton’s conscience or sense of purism wouldn’t allow him to accept the part, believing himself to be too young. In 1981, however, he was all set to take over in For Your Eyes Only; a condition of accepting the rôle was that the script take Bond in a darker, more gritty direction that took more cues from the Fleming novels and short stories. In the end, Dalton didn’t end up appearing in that film either, but the script intended for him supplied Moore with one of his best, and certainly his darkest, outings as Bond. By the time Dalton was finally ready, in 1987, the tables were turned, and The Living Daylights sees him awkwardly making his way through a script intended for Moore. The resultant high-camp doesn’t sit well with the character Dalton is playing, and the picture is largely confused and forgettable, with a few honourable bright spots. GoldenEye, an exceptionally sharp scipt written especially for Dalton, would eventually star Pierce Brosnan, and in the meantime Dalton was lumped with the only script written for him that he would ever actually appear in, something called Licence Revoked.

In many ways, it was to be the tentative first modern Bond, in the sense that many series mainstays were either gone or on their way out. The early entries are magnificent pictures due to their good fortune in having a wonderful production team behind them. It was time to prove that the formula could outlast its creators: it was the first film not to bear a title from Fleming, and the last for some time to use any Fleming elements in its script. It was the last to star Timothy Dalton. It was the last written by Richard Maibaum. It was the last directed by John Glen. It was the last with titles by Maurice Binder. It’s the last to depict Bond as a smoker, and the last in which the original version of Felix Leiter appears. It’s the last outing for second Moneypenny Caroline Bliss, and second M Robert Brown; it will be the last appearance of a Male M until 2012’s Skyfall. It was the last Bond production by Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, though he would be retained on GoldenEye as a consultant producer. Harry Saltzman and Peter R. Hunt had long since left the series, and it was the first film following John Barry’s departure. It was also the first to feature a photographic, rather than a painted, poster; would receive a novelisation, just like all of Brosnan’s entries, and unlike most of the previous pictures; and it was the first to subject Bond’s masculinity to scrutiny, something that has been retained in all eight subsequent films.

You have to admire Dalton, for his devotion to the Bond literature, his willingness to put artistic integrity before commerciality, and the fact that he’s a damned fine actor, not to mention that his overlooked status in the franchise makes him automatically sympathetic. But I’ve always found that Sean Connery’s ability to play high charm with a threat of violence that may explode from under the surface at any moment to more authentically capture the character of Bond than does Dalton’s portrayal, which is a perpetually ticked-off but ultimately not very dangerous type of rogue. The Licence Revoked script picks up on the worst aspects of that characterisation, stripping out even the tenderness that makes up for the many flaws of The Living Daylights.  Here, Bond is as totally cold as he ever got, going up against a bunch of drug-dealing lowlives responsible for various acts of rape, torture and murder, including putting his friend Felix Leiter in a coma. Naturally, Bond goes into a full-on white rage, murdering his way through a script full of such horrors as shark feeding frenzies, maggot tanks, viscerally exploding heads, bad guys burnt alive, crooked televangelists and huge clouds of cocaine dust. He even attacks his old friend M, going rogue without a Licence to Kill (it’s never explained why he escapes prosecution for going on a murder-spree, nor what strings could possibly have been pulled to see him reinstated by the time of GoldenEye).

A Bond script is a plastic thing, though, and surely a series of rewrites could have salvaged Licence Revoked, were it not for the unfortunate timing of the 1989 Writers’ Strike. Director John Glen was on his fifth Bond outing by this point; a former second-unit director, he made efficient, satisfying and cheap Bond pictures with none of the grandiosity of Guy Hamilton, the cool of Terence Young, or the humour of Lewis Gilbert. One of those directors might have found some hidden inner charm or flair that would give Licence to Kill an identity. Glen’s approach is workmanlike and drab, doing nothing to compensate for the lack of an engaging script.

Another sorely felt loss to the Bond formula was sex, vetoed due to AIDs. The Living Daylights reformed Bond; he’s a chaste, yet deeply romantic and tender figure. It’s one of only a handful containing a convincing romance, along with From Russia with Love, The World is Not Enough and Casino Royale. Licence to Kill doesn’t lack sex; depicted or implied sexual violence is commonplace, but its already unlikeable protagonist is made more inhuman yet by his seeming sexlessness. There are women for him in the picture, two of them in fact, but the bizarre culmination of their flirtation is that he pushes both of them into a pool, like some kind of sensually asexual psychopath able only to get his jollies through humiliation. It should be noted that he blows off Felix Leiter, the friend that all this revenge was supposedly in aid of, to do this. Not to fuck either girl, or even both at once, but to push them into a pool while a fish winks at the audience. Even the cringing nature of Moore’s romance with young-enough-to-be-his-daughter Tanya Roberts in A View to a Kill is preferable.

Something else A View to a Kill had that Licence lacks is a great theme song. “Licence to Kill” is probably the worst of the lot, histrionic, synthetic and ultimately forgettable.

Floundering to find a market and making do without classic elements and without writers able to write around that absence, the producers looked to American audiences to secure a future for Licence Revoked. The change of title was made to court American audiences, who apparently found the existing one comical, it being a phrase commonly used by the DMV, a favourite fallback target of American humour. Changing the title at this point, however, with much promotional material already printed, cost the producers not just in cash but also in marketing momentum.

The issue may not necessarily have been in changing the title partway through production, but in gearing up the marketing machine before a sensible title was settled on. There’s something dark and enticing to my ears about the Licence Revoked title, but at least Licence to Kill more clearly connects with the Bond brand. That brand was less in evidence given other tweaks to the established formula also presumably tailored to please American audiences; Licence to Kill plays out as an American action film of the 80s, an influence underlined by the hiring of Lethal Weapon and Die Hard composer Michael Kamen. There’s an anonymity to Licence to Kill‘s violent revenge fantasy, as if it could just as well be Dirty Harry, or Death Wish, or any number of similarly mean-spirited, hard-boiled flicks. It’s that approach which earned Licence to Kill a 15 certificate, further hurting its commercial potential though adequately warning kids away from the amped-up violence* of a series already more adult-oriented than its legions of kid fans would lead you to believe. The Sunday Times‘ Ian Johnstone was put off, finding that the film had eradicated “any traces of the gentleman spy” envisaged by Fleming; Bond here is “remarkably close both in deed and action to the eponymous hero of the Batman film”.

He makes an apt comparison. Either Jaws or Star Wars is usually cited as the birth of the Summer blockbuster, but in truth it’s not a phenomenon that arrived fully-formed, as evidenced by the conflicting citations of two different pictures from different Summers. Batman was huge in an unprecedented way, not a word-of-mouth success like Jaws or Star Wars but a marketing juggernaut, impossible to avoid even months in advance of the release date. You can see why Licence to Kill chose to borrow elements of its approach. But going up against it in the box-office is a decision that smacks of hubris. In fact 1989’s whole Summer season was a brutal gauntlet, with action audiences pulled in different directions not just by Batman, but also Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade**, Lethal Weapon 2 and Ghostbusters II, all of them not just better films than Licence to Kill but also healthier representatives of their respective franchise.

All told, you can’t fault audiences in 1989 for not connecting with Licence to Kill. It failed both at bringing Bond convincingly up to date and at paying tribute to the series’ well-loved roots, both tasks managed seemingly effortlessly in GoldenEye . Of course, that film would have its own painful birth, after six years of legal and financial stresses and the loss of Tim Dalton, who would even express an interest in Kevin McClory’s Warhead 2000 A.D.. Still, Bond was saved, and would never find himself in any trouble again…until Quantum of Solace appeared, an underwhelming Bond which fails to connect with the classic formula due to a rushed production schedule, a name that audiences hated, a writers’ strike, and a sad desperation to piggyback on popular action tropes. It even lacked a proper romance for Bond, and its failure meant we wouldn’t see another outing for four whole years, leaving its successor the difficult task of reinvigorating the franchise all over again. If only the producers had had an example to learn from, there…

*Milton Krest’s horrible death scene certainly lingered with me as a child, as did Benicio del Toro’s jeering rapist: “We gave her a niiiiice honeymoon!”

**Complete with meta-Bonding Sir Sean Connery

Skyfall, 007 Legends, & rehabilitating the Bond canon

ASIDE FROM THEIR RATHER UNFORTUNATE resemblance to Austin Powers in Goldmember, one thing that’s puzzling about the two most recent Daniel Craig-starring Bonds – Skyfall and Spectre – is the inconsistent way in which they attempt to revive the canon of the old Bonds.

From 1962’s Dr. No to 2002’s Die Another Day, the twenty James Bond films existed in the same loose, yet mostly consistent, continuity; the understanding was that GoldenEye‘s opening scene took place during Timothy Dalton’s tenure in 1986, and this didn’t cause any conflict since both actors were still portraying the same character. Similarly, each of George Lazenby’s successors had scenes alluding, explicitly or implicitly, to Tracy Bond, the wife he loses at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever, Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only, Timothy Dalton in Licence to Kill, and Pierce Brosnan in The World is Not Enough (potentially in GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies also). However, in 2006, someone at Eon decided to take a cue from Batman Begins and give the series a gritty reboot, modernising certain elements and retelling the character’s origin to keep him in line with the times*; thus, the four-film arc that Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall & Spectre together constitute is to be understood as a standalone timeline, that has no direct story connection with the 1962-2002 series of films.

Or not. While Casino Royale & Quantum have a hard-boiled, mostly humourless approach informed by the Bourne series, Skyfall and especially Spectre evidence a yearning for the grandiosity of the 60s Bond, even suggesting confusingly that the old continuity isn’t completely uncanonical, referencing Goldfinger‘s DB5 and GoldenEye‘s exploding pen. Possibly the world depicted in the old films is canonical to the new ones, i.e. spycraft really was sillier back in the day, but their specific stories clearly are not, since we know that neither Bond, nor Moneypenny, nor Felix Leiter nor Blofeld were around back then. A main thematic strand of Skyfall/Spectre, similarly to GoldenEye, has to do with whether Bond, an old agent with old ideals, is still relevant in the modern world. This is hard to take when Casino & Quantum‘s main thematic strand is that Bond is a hotheaded rookie, not yet made cynical by years of experience. Following The Dark Knight Trilogy (&, coincidentally, the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, in which all but the first & final battles of the Clone Wars take place offscreen between the 2nd & 3rd entries), we seem to have missed out on seeing our hero in his Golden Age of heroism, when he was hampered by neither inexperience nor age.

Those who are dissatisfied with The Dark Knight or Star Wars can rectify the problem with some quite excellent animations (For The Dark Knight, Batman: Gotham Knight; for Star Wars, Star Wars: Clone Wars and the similarly-named Star Wars: The Clone Wars), and Bond fans, if they please, can treat the videogames as canon. Four games have been made during the Daniel Craig era: 007: Quantum of Solace is a mostly straightforward adaptation of that film which also includes flashback levels covering the plot of Casino Royale; James Bond 007: Blood Stone has an original story by Bruce Feirstein, who wrote Tomorrow Never Dies and co-wrote GoldenEye and The World is Not Enough; GoldenEye 007: Reloaded is a remake of the Nintendo 64 classic GoldenEye 007, with its story updated to Craig’s reboot era; finally, 007 Legends presents one adventure each from Craig’s five predecessors, remade to star Daniel Craig and told in the style of his films: Goldfinger, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Licence to Kill, Die Another Day, and Moonraker**.

The gameplay of these four, unlike past classics such as GoldenEye 007 or 007: Everything or Nothing ranges from average (007: Quantum of Solace) to terrible (007 Legends), but they are recommended to truly hardcore fans on the sole basis that they fix the apparent gap between Quantum of Solace and Skyfall. James Bond 007: Blood Stone, the best-written one, features a James Bond who is transitioning from the angry young man of Craig’s first two films to a character with more of the smoothness associated with the classical Connery/Moore/Brosnan depictions. After that, with GoldenEye 007: Reloaded, we get to see the modern James Bond living out a properly classic adventure and then, in 007 Legends, five more!

If James Bond lived out seven full-scale adventures between Quantum of Solace and Skyfall, then it easily accounts for him being presented as a haggard old warhorse in the latter. Remember, other action heroes have been presented as past-it old men when they’ve had only three on-screen adventures to their name (John McClane in Live Free or Die Hard; John Rambo in Rambo; Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), or in poor old Batman’s case, only two in The Dark Knight Rises. Aside from patching plot holes, treating these games as canon also makes Skyfall ring much truer in a thematic sense. If GoldenEye, Goldfinger and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, especially, “happened” to Craig’s Bond then the bombastic feel that Skyfall tries to recapture already has some historical presence in this new universe; it contains, or used to contain, more than just the drab cynicism of Casino/Quantum.

However, while James Bond 007: Blood Stone & GoldenEye 007: Reloaded present no conflict with what’s shown in the actual films, 007 Legends is a little trickier. While it correctly uses the likeness of Daniel Craig’s Bond, Judi Dench’s M, Naomie Harris’ Moneypenny and Rory Kinnear’s Tanner in those rôles, someone seems to have forgotten that Jeffrey Wright appeared in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace as Felix Leiter, as the Goldfinger missions use a character model based on Cec Linder – this is typical of the laziness with which 007 Legends is put together. Even taking into account that videogame models don’t always capture perfectly the features of the people they’re based on – try to work out who’s meant to be Connery, Moore, Dalton or Brosnan in this screenshot from GoldenEye 007! – and that the Bond series is renowned for changing the actors of almost all its recurring rôles, it’s still hard to square Linder’s whiteness with Wright’s blackness, and clearly the films take precedence here in determining what Felix truly looks like.

There are also other problems: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service features an encounter with Ernst Stavro Blofeld, which was absolutely fine and actually quite cool until Spectre came out, confirming that such a meeting was impossible. Until the Blofeld rights mess was disentangled in 2013, this would have been the only way such a meeting could have been possible. In any case the character model used here, a rather pleasing compromise between the Donald Pleasance and Telly Savalas portrayals, nicely closes the plot hole of his missing facial scar from You Only Live Twice, while opening a plot hole regarding whether he looks like Telly Pleasance, or Christoph Waltz, and whether or not he’s bald). Also, if Bond lost his wife in the events of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, you’d think that tragedy would be greater than, or at least equal to, his losing Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale, yet it is never mentioned in Spectre. One suspects, in any case, that Madeleine Swann is being set up as a new version of Tracy Bond; her only decent chance of surviving Bond 25 will be if the producers completely ignore the previous story.

Well, it’d be nice to think that 007 Legends added something decent to the Bond canon. Its version of Licence to Kill skips the part where Bond punches M and continues his adventure as a rogue agent; in real life this behaviour would likely have seen Bond spend the rest of his life in Guantanamo Bay, and he certainly wouldn’t have been reinstated as a 00. So in some ways it actually improves on the films on which it’s based. Perhaps there is a place for it in canon; its set-up, borrowed from Hitman: Contracts, sees Bond flashing back to previous adventures while he lingers in the grey area between life and death, at the start of Skyfall when he’s shot and in the water. So maybe his delirious mind for some reason misremembered the real face of Felix, but Blofeld still presents a probably intractable problem. This is a shame as, before the release of Spectre, it really did enrich Skyfall as a viewing experience.

I’m sure many would say that we oughtn’t to be taking something as ephemeral as continuity in Bond, of all places, so seriously. But where’s the fun in that?

*Uncoincidentally, both Batman Begins and Casino Royale follow a film so hideously camp that a complete reboot of the franchise was deemed to be necessary damage control: Batman & Robin and Die Another Day, respectively.

**Skyfall was made available as DLC after its release; Spectre still lacks a videogame adaptation. Unless this situation is rectified ten years down the line, as 007 Legends did for Die Another Day, it will be the first Bond film since 1983’s Octopussy to lack a videogame adaptation.

James Bond, Madlibs, & the 007 drinking game

IT WASN’T NECESSARY for me to rewatch the entire Bond series, in order, with my girlfriend, to recognise that the series is heavily reliant on an established formula, but it didn’t stop me. Indeed, what’s remarkable is not how formulaic the films are, but how successfully a 54-years-24-films-long series has been built where other, equally formulaic, series seem to have stalled (for reference, see the Carry Ons, the Rockys, the Karate Kids, the Friday the 13ths, the Nightmare on Elm Streets, the Halloweens or, really, any other film franchise at all). Another, perhaps related, peculiarity of the Bonds is that no-one really tends to see them as a series, with the possible exception of the more continuity-heavy post-reboot films; they’re more like this year’s model than sequels, which can be tracked in the trends they embrace: blaxploitation in 1973’s Live and Let Die; Kung Fu in 1974’s The Man with the Golden Gun; disco in 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me; Star Wars in 1979’s Moonraker.

So successful & so enduring is the Bond formula that, aside from its imitations in many other works, even within the franchise it has frequently proven possible to deconstruct & reconstruct it however the creators see fit. Like a game of Madlibs, the same elements show up in new combinations across the series, & what that’s given rise to in my household at least, is the 007 drinking game: take a sip of vodka martini each time one of these elements show up.

1. Film ends with Bond & Bond girl on raft

Appears in: Dr. No; From Russia with Love; Goldfinger (a parachute is the aerial version of a raft); Thunderball; You Only Live Twice; Diamonds Are Forever (a yacht is just a really fancy raft); The Man with the Golden Gun (a junk is just a big raft); The Spy Who Loved Me (a miniature submarine is the…well, submarine version of a raft); Moonraker (an escape pod is the space version of a raft); For Your Eyes Only (again, a yacht is a fancy raft); Octopussy; Tomorrow Never Dies

Drink twice if: Bond is actively avoiding a rescue effort in order to get off with the Bond girl (Dr. No, Goldfinger, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, Tomorrow Never Dies)

2. Film ends with Bond & Bond girl hilariously interrupted mid-coitus by an attempt at rescue or communication

His superiors will act shocked at his promiscuity, every time. Appears in: The Spy Who Loved Me; Moonraker; For Your Eyes Only; A View to a Kill; GoldenEye; The World is Not Enough

Drink twice if: Bond is on some sort of raft or other craft when it occurs (see above).

3. Shark tanks!

Appears in: Thunderball; You Only Live Twice (a piranha tank is just a modest version of a shark tank); Live and Let Die (which features a functionally similar alligator farm in addition to the real deal); The Spy Who Loved Me; Licence to Kill (which also features a revolting maggot tank)

4. Assassination attempt by deadly (sometimes, not-so-deadly) animal

Due to the prevalence of tanks full of sharks or other aquatic creatures, they’ve been given their own section. Appears in: Dr. No (tarantula); Live and Let Die (snake); Moonraker (another snake); Skyfall (komodo dragon)

5. Villain wears a Nehru jacket

Appearances: Dr. No in Dr. No; Ernst Stavro Blofeld in You Only Live Twice; Ernst Stavro Blofeld in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever; Hugo Drax in Moonraker; Ernst Stavro Blofeld in For Your Eyes Only; Kamal Khan in Octopussy; Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies; Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Spectre

6. Villain bearing some sort of physical deformity or disfigurement

Appearances: Dr. No in Dr. No (metal hands); Emilio Largo in Thunderball (missing left eye); Ernst Stavro Blofeld in You Only Live Twice (baldness; scar over right eye); Ernst Stavro Blofeld in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (baldness); Tee Hee in Live and Let Die (missing right hand, replaced with hook); Whisper in Live and Let Die (obesity); Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun (superfluous third nipple); Nick Nack in The Man with the Golden Gun (dwarfism); Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me (acromegaly; metal teeth); Jaws in Moonraker (acromegaly; metal teeth); Ernst Stavro Blofeld in For Your Eyes Only (baldness; paralysis); Alec Trevelyan 006 in GoldenEye (burns across right side of face); Valentin Zukovsky in GoldenEye (limp due to bullet wound in knee); Renard in The World is Not Enough (baldness; forehead scar from bullet wound, also causing inability to feel pain); Elektra King in The World is Not Enough (missing lobe of right ear); Mister Bullion in The World is Not Enough (gold teeth); Zao in Die Another Day (diamonds embedded in face due to explosion; later, bald, blue-eyed & pale while retaining Asiatic facial structure due to interrupted Caucasiplasty); Le Chiffre in Casino Royale (scar over left eye; cries blood); Adolph Gettler in Casino Royale (missing right eye); Raoul Silva in Skyfall (deformed jaw due to cyanide incident); Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Spectre (scar over right eye due to an explosion, also causing blindness in right eye)

Drink twice if: they bear their disfigurement as a direct result of Bond’s actions (Ernst Stavro Blofeld in For Your Eyes Only; Alec Trevelyan 006 in GoldenEye; Valentin Zukovsky in GoldenEye; Zao in Die Another Day (twice over!); Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Spectre)

8. Villain hoist with his own petard

This might be a physical feature, a personality quirk, some sort of weapon or item, or a feature of the villain’s plan, just as long as it causes his downfall. Appearances: Dr. No in Dr. No (unable to climb slippery pole due to own metal hands); Oddjob in Goldfinger (electrocuted via own razor bowler hat); Mr. Kidd in Diamonds Are Forever (set alight with own burning shishkabob); Mr. Wint in Diamonds Are Forever (blown up with own bomb); Mr. Big in Live and Let Die (shot with own compressed-air pistol); Tee Hee in Live and Let Die (wrenched out of train due to inability to free own hook-hand); Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun (fooled by own mannequin of Bond); Karl Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me (shot through own gun-pipe in table); Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me (attracted to electromagnet via own metal teeth); Dr. Carl Mortner in A View to a Kill (blown up by own dynamite); Brad Whitaker in The Living Daylights (crushed by own Waterloo diorama); Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies (killed by own sea drill); Colonel Tan-Sun Moon in Die Another Day (sucked into jet intake by own parachute; also electrocuted by own power suit)

9. A villain the audience had forgotten about appears to attack Bond & Bond girl aboard moving vehicle

A final, post-climactic action scene particularly beloved by director Guy Hamilton, who used it in each of his Bond films: Auric Goldfinger in Goldfinger (aboard aeroplane); Mr. Wint & Mr. Kidd in Diamonds Are Forever (aboard yacht); Tee Hee in Live and Let Die (aboard train); Nick Nack in The Man with the Golden Gun (aboard junk)

10. Bond challenges the villain, early on in his investigation, in a sport or game

He always wins, too. Appears in: Goldfinger (golf); Thunderball (clay pigeon shooting); Moonraker (pheasant shooting); Octopussy (backgammon); A View to a Kill (steeplechase); GoldenEye (impromptu motor racing; Baccarat) Die Another Day (fencing). This also supplies about half of the plot of Casino Royale (Texas Hold ’em poker).

Drink twice if: the villain cheats, but Bond wins anyway (Goldfinger, Moonraker, Octopussy, A View to a Kill, arguably Die Another Day)

11. Henchman with a bizarre method of assassination

Appearances: Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love (concealed blade in shoe); Oddjob in Goldfinger (razor bowler hat); Bambi & Thumper in Diamonds Are Forever (tag-team gymnastics); Francisco Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun (firing golden bullets from Golden Gun); Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me (biting with metal teeth); Jaws in Moonraker (biting with metal teeth); Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye (crushing with thighs); Mr. Hinx in Spectre (pushing thumbs through eyeballs)

Drink twice if: the henchman is hoist with his own petard (see above)

12. Ski scene

The best ones are choreographed by Willy Bogner. Appears in: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; The Spy Who Loved Me; For Your Eyes Only; A View to a Kill; The Living Daylights (Bond on toboggan; enemies on skis); The World is Not Enough; Spectre

13. Diving scene

Naturally enough, Ian Fleming had a passion for marine biology. Appears in: Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, Tomorrow Never Dies

14. Gadget car

There is something of a misconception that Bond receives a new one in each film; in fact, this is only true of the Brosnan era. James Bond’s gadget cars are: an Aston Martin DB5 (Goldfinger; Thunderball; GoldenEye; Tomorrow Never Dies; The World is Not Enough; Skyfall; Spectre); an Aston Martin DBS (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; Diamonds Are Forever); a Lotus Esprit S1 (The Spy Who Loved Me); a Lotus Esprit Turbo (For Your Eyes Only); an Aston Martin V8 Vantage Volante (The Living Daylights); a BMW Z3 (GoldenEye); a BMW 750iL (Tomorrow Never Dies); a BMW Z8 (The World is Not Enough); an Aston Martin V12 Vanquish (Die Another Day); an Aston Martin DBS V12 (Casino Royale; Quantum of Solace); an Aston Martin DB10 (Spectre). Villainous gadget cars are Francisco Scaramanga’s AMC Matador/light aircraft in The Man with the Golden Gun, & Zao’s Jaguar XKR in Die Another Day.

15. Gadget watch

Again, these are only a regular feature of the Brosnan films, though Q’s line in Die Another Day, “Your new watch. Your twentieth, I believe-?” wrongly implies they are a feature of every film. James Bond’s gadget watches are: a Breitling Top Time with inbuilt Geiger counter (Thunderball); Rolex Submariner with inbuilt electromagnet & buzzsaw (Live and Let Die); Seiko 0674 with inbuilt teleprinter (The Spy Who Loved Me); Seiko M354-5019M with inbuilt explosives (Moonraker); Seiko Duo-Time H357 with inbuilt communicator (For Your Eyes Only); Seiko G757-5020 with inbuilt surveillance equipment (Octopussy); Omega Seamaster 2541.80 with inbuilt laser beam & remote detonator (GoldenEye); Omega Seamaster 2531. 80 with inbuilt explosives (Tomorrow Never Dies); Omega Seamaster 2531.80 with grappling hook (The World is Not Enough); Omega Seamaster 2531.80 with inbuilt explosive detonaor & laser beam (Die Another Day); Omega Seamaster with inbuilt explosives (Spectre)

Happy drinking!

Daniel Craig, Idris Elba, & the “many-Bonds” theory

IF YOU’RE NOT REALLY a Bond fan, then you might have encountered the notion that suave, handsome British actor Idris Elba ought to play suave, handsome British spy James Bond once Daniel Craig’s had his fun in Spectre & its followup. The elephant in the room, of course, is that Elba is a black actor – well so what? It’s the 21st Century, why shouldn’t Bond be black? Are we still really that hung up on race? Is Sir Roger Moore just a massive racist? Well. Quite what is supposed to be progressive about taking a character who is a thug, a very definite child of privilege &, on several occasions, a potential rapist of women, & making that character black, is left as an exercise for the reader.

More practically, for those who like to at least pretend to take Bond continuity seriously, one wonders why anyone would advocate a character undergoing a Race Lift during an ongoing series. When Harvey Dent somehow changed from black Billy Dee Williams in Batman to white Tommy Lee Jones in Batman Forever, that was presumably the result of carelessness, & it’s irritating to viewers that, even if Billy Dee Williams was unavailable, the producers couldn’t have made at least some effort to cast an actor who bore a resemblance. Would the new Bond undergo a race-changing process? Last time Bond did that, this was the result:

Presumably, though, the majority of black-Bond advocates are not unaware that Fleming’s character is white (see, for instance, Live and Let Die, in which his investigation of a black criminal gang operating out of Harlem, Louisiana & the Caribbean is hamstrung by his being, well, a “honky”) & that the current incarnation of the character is white, but rather have a vague notion that maybe “James Bond” is a codename-? Maybe that’s why his appearance periodically changes? Maybe that’s why when he visits an independent Hong Kong in 2002 he seems no older than he did complaining about The Beatles in 1964? Maybe Mi6 gives the honourable “James Bond” codename to its best agents, such as the darkly handsome one with the very slight Scottish twang, or the tall thin one who was always smirking & raising his eyebrow? Maybe that’s why we actually see the initiation of a new “James Bond” in Casino Royale?

Presented like that, the evidence seems persuasive; but then, selectively presented evidence usually does. Casino Royale is a reboot, like Batman Begins; & if, from Skyfall onward, the producers are reintegrating elements of the old continuity then that does not undo the rebooting, it’s just Broad Strokes or Mythology Gag. The fact is that the producers have always been keen to reinforce that Bond is a single agent, right from the very start, & given the cavalier approach to continuity in the series generally, this must be very significant. When Sir Sean Connery returned as Bond in Diamonds Are Forever, he began with a Roaring Rampage of Revenge for his dead wife Tracy, who married George Lazenby in the previous film. Sir Roger Moore mourned Tracy in the opening scene of For Your Eyes Only, a scene written specifically to reinforce the continuity of Bond actors in the event of recasting. Pierce Brosnan was given much dialogue playing on the tragedy of his wife’s murder.

Daniel Craig’s Bond, of course, has yet to undergo that particular tragedy, but, since his films have, in a series first, explored the character’s past, we know for a fact “James Bond” is not his codename: Bond is his name before he obtains his 00-status, it is the name on his parents’ grave in Skyfall, & it is the name of his aunt in the Spectre trailer.

But never mind all of that solid evidence, what about common sense? We know that, in both the old & the reboot continuities, Bond uses the name Bond at all times, business or pleasure. If you use a name to identify yourself specifically at all times, no matter what, then it isn’t a codename, it’s just a name. “007” is a codename. “007” is the position that an Idris Elba character could actually take up, were James Bond to retire or die.

We also know, if we’re sensible, that film is limited as a medium, & occasionally it’s necessary to recast actors. I’ve already mentioned Tim Burton & Joel Schumacher’s 1989-1997 Batman film series, & it’s a useful comparison: we saw three Batmans in four films, but fans aren’t suggesting wild theories to “explain” these changes. The three actors were close enough in looks that we could accept it. Actors are sometimes recast. In the reboot Dark Knight trilogy, Rachel Dawes went from Katie Holmes to Maggie Gyllenhaal, & while some fans rejoiced, the characters didn’t comment on it any more than they would on the film’s score, or how an attack that doesn’t connect knocks someone out. Film is representation, not presentation. Why, 1995’s GoldenEye opened with a scene set nine years earlier than the main plot of the film: it’s 1986, the Cold War is ongoing, & Pierce Brosnan plays Bond in a scene that presumably takes place between 1985’s A View to a Kill (starring Sir Roger Moore) and 1987’s The Living Daylights (starring Timothy Dalton). He’s not playing “Moore’s Bond” or “Dalton’s Bond”, he’s playing Bond.

Then why is the “Bond is many people” theory so popular? Well, for one thing, fans like having fan theories, though this one isn’t exactly a fan theory as only a casual viewer could be taken in by it. Additionally, I think there is some lingering confusion caused by the dire 1967 spoof Casino Royale, in which Mi6 changes the names of all of their operatives to “James Bond” in order to confuse the enemy & to protect the real James Bond, David Niven. The ’67 Royale isn’t very good, & it hasn’t been seen by many people, but presumably it had enough of an impact on the collective subconscious to give viewers a vague sense that somehow, you couldn’t trust someone was telling the truth when they told you their name was Bond, James Bond.

Spectre, Thunderball, & the convoluted history of Kevin McClory

IT SEEMS INCREDIBLE but aside from a comparison made in a Sherlock review, this blog has yet to treat the subject of James Bond, whether the character, the series of novels, or the series of films; all this despite the incredibly exciting announcement made in December about the upcoming film, Spectre, which sees the return of Skyfall director Sam Mendes, boasts an impressive cast list, a ridiculously cool poster, & a title which blatantly announces the return of SPECTRE*, the original evil organisation which served as the villains in six films from 1962 to 1971, & provided the inspiration for Marvel’s HYDRA, G.I. Joe‘s Cobra, DC’s H.I.V.E., The Man from U.N.C.L.E.‘s THRUSH, Get Smart‘s KAOS, & any other acronymic NGO whose political alignment of “evil” handily allows them to play the villains in fantasy espionage plots without real-world political controversy. But SPECTRE, led first by the metal-handed Dr. No, then later the utterly iconic Blofeld, are still the best, with their volcano lairs & spaceship-swallowing spaceships, & to have them back as the baddies is thrilling – even as it causes one to wonder what will become of Quantum, the obvious SPECTRE stand-in created for Quantum of Solace. The need for Eon to use a stand-in for their own favourite villains came about as a result of perhaps the longest legal battle in film history.

In the late 1950s Ian Fleming, with screenwriter Kevin McClory, began work on a screenplay intended to kick off a James Bond film franchise, several years before Eon Productions’ Dr. No. Fleming & McClory together went through a variety of ideas for the story then provisionally known as Longitude 78 West, with McClory also bringing in a third-party collaborator of his own, Jack Whittingham. Fleming, apparently satisfied for the most part with McClory & Whittingham’s script, gave the nascent project the new, more dynamic title Thunderball &, after some light rewriting, began shopping it to studios, without any success. This process of submission seems to have wearied Fleming, as, apparently cynical about Thunderball‘s chances of ever being put into production, he decided instead to rework the script’s plot into a novel, the ninth entry in his series. That novel, published in 1961, stuck closely to the unproduced screenplay, but nowhere credited McClory or Whittingham.

McClory vs Fleming was the first lawsuit of many, with McClory & Whittingham fighting for recognition for their uncredited work. The screenwriters sought not a co-authorship credit, but for the novel’s copyright page to contain an acknowledgement to their screenplay. In 1963, with Eon’s Dr. No & From Russia with Love having already been released to critical & commercial success, McClory & Whittingham won their acknowledgement. As part of the settlement, Fleming was allowed to retain full rights to his Thunderball novel, but McClory – & not, for some reason, Whittingham – retained the rights to any film production of Thunderball, whether that production was based directly on his screenplay, or indirectly on it via Fleming’s novel.

With Eon’s third James Bond film, Goldfinger, already in production, producers Harry Saltzman & Albert R. Broccoli contacted McClory to consider co-producing Thunderball as the fourth film in the series. There was no need, from an artistic perspective, for Thunderball to come next; but from a business perspective, Saltzman & Broccoli feared that McClory might produce his own Thunderball film & release it in competition with the official series, which they would have had no legal means to prevent, & so sought instead to subsume his Thunderball rights into their overall James Bond rights. From McClory’s perspective, moreover, developing a Thunderball film that was an entry in the already popular, big-budget series, starring the popular Sean Connery rather than having to cast a new Bond, must have looked like a safe investment. Eon, therefore, negotiated to lease the Thunderball rights from McClory for ten years. One speculates that Eon must have tried to secure McClory’s film rights in perpetuity; but equally, McClory would have been aware that the rights were by far his greatest asset, & so haggled them down to just a decade’s ownership.

Opening in 1965, Saltzman/Broccoli/McClory’s Thunderball became the most successful Bond film to date, building on the success of the blockbuster formula which had coalesced in 1964’s Goldfinger. Following the film’s success &, more generally, the franchise’s dominance in the 60s & 70s, McClory made various attempts to capitalise on his little piece of Bond, arguing that various elements of the franchise originated in Thunderball & thus could not be used by Eon – or anyone else save the estate of the now-deceased Fleming – without his permission, including SPECTRE & its iconic leader Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Although the film series had, by this point, already included SPECTRE six times – with Bond killing their original leader, Dr. No, in Dr. No, in 1962, then facing underlings of No’s replacement, Blofeld, in 1963’s From Russia with Love & 1965’s Thunderball, & facing off against Blofeld himself in 1967’s You Only Live Twice, 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service & 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever – McClory won his suit, blocking Eon from any further use of SPECTRE or Blofeld in their films.

Eon clearly intended to return Blofeld after Diamonds Are Forever, with him escaping by personal submarine at that film’s conclusion, and indeed, Eon intended at one point to use Blofeld as the villain in The Spy Who Loved Me, a film which, despite using the title of one of Fleming’s novels, featured an original plot. And Blofeld would have been appropriate as the villain, since the plot about a supertanker eating tankers recalls the spaceship-eating-spaceship from You Only Live Twice. But after discovering that McClory intended to sue if Blofeld was used, Eon instead created a new villain in Karl Stromberg, one of the more forgettable foes in the series.

At this point, if we’re taking the notion of continuity in the Bond canon at all seriously, we must allow an element of fan speculation to creep in: Blofeld’s villainous plans seem to decay in ambition through his three consecutive appearances as antagonist: in You Only Live Twice he brings the United States & USSR to the brink of nuclear destruction; in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service he wishes to ransom the UN into pardoning him, in order to then go legitimate; by Diamonds Are Forever he is hiding in Las Vegas, having stolen the identity of reclusive millionaire Willard White. Presumably the unimaginably immense resources required for a crime syndicate to maintain a space programme not just competitive with, but vastly superior to, those of both the USA & USSR, all the while remaining secret, were more than SPECTRE could afford to lose when Bond foiled their plan, & the organisation seems to have shrunk to the size of a mere personal entourage for Blofeld. By his final appearance in 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, the worst Blofeld can do is to annoy Bond then get unceremoniously killed before the opening credits. With Blofeld underground in Bond’s world from 1971 to 1981, SPECTRE must have collapsed without leadership, leaving revenge on Bond Blofeld’s last recourse.

Of course, the unnamed, uncredited bald, cat-stroking supervillain who appears in For Your Eyes Only is, for legal reasons, “not” Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Unofficially, it’s clear to fans that Eon sought to finally kill Blofeld, partly to provide closure after Diamonds Are Forever‘s frustratingly open ending, partly to allow Bond some emotional catharsis after SPECTRE’s murder of his wife in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, partly to provide a reassuring continuity link between Connery’s Bond, Lazenby’s Bond, Connery’s Bond again, & Moore’s Bond – the sequence had originally been intended to open Moore’s début, Live and Let Die, but was held off presumably for legal reasons – but mostly to delegitimise the Thunderball remake that producers were aware, by this point, that McClory had managed to get into production, with the Thunderball rights having reverted to him in 1975, per his agreement with Eon in ’65.

Again, McClory must have known that Thunderball was his greatest asset but, having already filmed it once, & not having the legal right to create any Bond films that weren’t Thunderball, his only option was a remake outside of Eon’s continuity: clearly Saltzman & Broccoli would not want to make Thunderball again, but at the same time, the producers probably expected that neither would there be any public or investor interest in an unofficial Bond film that would have to compete with their twelve-films-&-counting juggernaut of a franchise. In all probability, there genuinely wasn’t any public interest in that prospect: Never Say Never Again doesn’t advertise itself as a remake, instead using the return of Connery to the rôle as its big selling point.

Released in 1983 in competition with the official entry Octopussy, Never Say Never Again doggedly copies the successful formula, but without the gun-barrel opening or theme tune it feels a lot like an economy version. Still, Never Say Never Again was competitive at the box office, only narrowly losing to Octopussy, no doubt helped by the asset of definitive 007 Sean Connery, against a tired Roger Moore in Octopussy. In truth, Connery seems equally bored in Never Say Never Again, lured in by filthy lucre & wearing the most expensive wig in film history to hide his age.

At this point, prior to the advent of home video – the current release, incidentally, looks just like the DVDs/Blu-Rays for the official films – McClory lacked the ability to further cash in on the relative success of Never Say Never Again: he legally couldn’t make a sequel, unless it had exactly the same story – & Broccoli, by this point unpartnered from Saltzman, now regarded McClory with hostility, & certainly wouldn’t have let him anywhere near the Eon Productions franchise. Undaunted, McClory put a second remake into production with Sony in 1989. This version was entitled Warhead 2000 A.D., with the intention being to modernise Bond with a dark, realistic tone: unfortunately for McClory, the producers of the official series had already had the same idea that year with Licence to Kill. McClory persisted, and sought as Bond first Pierce Brosnan, who had missed out on replacing Moore in 1987 due to Remington Steele commitments, then in the 1990s, still trying to get the project off the ground, Timothy Dalton, who was still keen on playing the rôle despite Eon’s reluctance to continue with him in the official series. Nothing ever came of the Warhead 2000 A.D. project, though McClory seemed not entirely to have abandoned the idea prior to his death in 2006.

The fifty years of legal conflict finally came to an end in the 2010s after the bankruptcy of Eon’s parent company, MGM. One of the parties in MGM’s subsequent buyout was Sony, & after a brief new round of legal wrangles, Eon Productions was able to acquire all Bond-related elements in 2013, by which point Ian Fleming, Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, Harry Saltzman & Albert R. Broccoli were all too dead to care. Still, the happy conclusion to all of this is the appearance, this coming November, of Spectre, returning Bond‘s best baddies to their proper place in the official series. Skyfall may have been the series’ big 50th birthday celebration but, with a legal history going all the way back to 1965’s Thunderball, you could well say that it’s Spectre that’s been 50 years in the making.

*For the record: the SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion. The acronym is forced; the films avoid bringing it up.