Madonna, “Die Another Day” & “Find Another Way”

It was (finally!) announced this week who’ll be doing the next Bond theme: a teenager named Billie Eilish. Here’s hoping her song will be good. It got me thinking, though, about past Bond themes, including what is probably the worst one, “Die Another Day”. As terrible a reputation as this song has, I actually don’t mind it…in its own right as a Madonna single. As a Bond theme, it’s really, horribly unfitting. “Sigmund Freud, analyse this.” What?

Usually, Bond themes are co-written by the movie’s composer (in some cases, like Thunderball, Tomorrow Never Dies and Quantum of Solace, the theme the composer has in mind doesn’t end up being used, even though its melody still appears in the film’s score. Roping in Madonna to do a song entirely of her own composition (and that of her producer, pop genius Mirwais) is not entirely unprecedented, but it’s a little odd. And it makes one wonder whether “Die Another Day” was even written to be a Bond song at all. It doesn’t have the bold, brassy sound of “Goldfinger”, “Live and Let Die”, “GoldenEye” or “Skyfall”, nor is it a beautiful ballad like “Nobody Does It Better”, “All Time High” or “Writing’s On the Wall”. It sounds just like the rest of the tracks on Madonna’s American Life album. And where other Bond themes either describe the movie’s villain (“Goldfinger”, “Thunderball”, “The Man with the Golden Gun”), describe Bond himself (“Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”, “Another Way to Die”), or seem to be narrated by a character in the film (“GoldenEye”, “The World is Not Enough”) or even Bond himself (“Skyfall”, “Writing’s on the Wall”), Die Another Day just bears no thematic resemblance to anything in the movie, or any Bond movie. Its lyrics are all about pushing through, avoiding clichés, and generally Madonna trying to find another way. Find another way? Wait, you don’t think when they got the call, Madonna and Mirwais already had a track called “Find Another Way” ready to go, do you? And when they heard the movie was to be called Die Another Day, they couldn’t believe their luck? That they could just rerecord the chorus, send it off, and saves themselves all the work of writing a new song? Well, that’s what I think.

Thrilling Cities, James Bond, & Ian Fleming’s literary fiction

IF YOU HAVEN’T READ Ian Fleming’s Thrilling Cities, I reckon you probably should if you like witty, readable books. At least have a glance at a witty, readable review of it. One key passage that could do with some elaboration is this one:

Fleming was periodically weighed down by a kind of directionless, spiteful ennui, which often fired his best writing – Casino Royale, From Russia, with Love, “The Living Daylights”, “Octopussy”. Reading his novels in sequence, one is bewildered by the mood swings between, for instance, From Russia, with Love, the cynical book in which Fleming comes closest to Le Carré, and actually kills 007 at the end (obviously, it didn’t stick), and its follow-up, the dizzyingly exuberant Doctor No. Today, he’d probably be called bipolar.

It’s unsurprising, really, that Fleming in a foul mood should kill off 007. It wasn’t only his general attitude toward life that was affected by his mood swings, but also his attitude towards his most famous creation. Gleefully pulpy Bond adventures such as Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Doctor No, Goldfinger and Thunderball burst with such genretastic staples as pirate gold, disguised Nazi war criminals, Chinese evil geniuses, all-lesbian crime gangs and missing atomic weaponry. Fleming grew up reading about the exploits of John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, Sapper Morton’s Bulldog Drummond, and Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, and at his most carefree seemed delighted to be keeping alive that lineage.

At other times, he was rather more cynical about his place in the literary world and seemed, as with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, to view his creation as an albatross keeping him from achieving greater literary respect.

Of course, Fleming did have some heavyweight admirers in the literary world. Kingsley Amis was the most prominent, writing two books of analysis of the character, one serious and one tongue in cheek, as well as a continuation novel after Fleming’s death. Roald Dahl, too, counted himself as a fan and wrote the screen treatment for You Only Live Twice. Raymond Chandler thought Fleming a fine thriller-writer, and he should know. Anthony Burgess noted that he had read and enjoyed every one of the Bond novels.

What Fleming lacked, though, was any body of work outside of Bond on which to be judged, with the small exceptions of the children’s book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and two nonfiction books: the aforementioned Thrilling Cities and The Diamond Smugglers, cobbled together from leftover research for Diamonds Are Forever. That’s not to say that the Bond books are entirely without literary merit; just view the passage below from “Octopussy” for evidence:

-it’s just that the obvious limitations of the Bond format of exotic locales, dastardly villains, daring escapades, and sex and booze and food and sex and cigarettes and sex and death don’t much reward experimentation, which is likely why most of Fleming’s occasional stabs at literary fiction are in the short-story format. “Octopussy”, excerpted above, is a slow and rather melancholy rumination on guilt and probably the peak of Fleming’s ability as a writer.

In the same collection appeared “The Living Daylights”, which returns us to somewhat more familiar territory with Bond ordered to snipe a Soviet sniper in order to aid a defection. We’re thoroughly in Le Carré territory here, and treated to such stylistic flourishes as Bond’s mental description of Berlin as “a glum, inimical city dry varnished on the Western side with a brittle veneer of gimcrack polish, rather like the chromium trim on American motor-cars”.

Earlier, Fleming had taken Bond as far away from formula as he’d ever get with “Quantum of Solace”, a stylistic and thematic homage to Somerset Maugham with Bond appearing only to listen to another character whose party he’s attending tell him a story about two other figures and their broken marriage. It’s good stuff if a little pastichey, with the only really unconvincing element being the questionable necessity of having Bond himself appear at all.

Mind you, the Bond of the short-stories spent about as much time relaxing as he did going on missions. “The Hildebrand Rarity” introduces us to a truly vile American businessman, Milton Krest, and his vessel the Wavekrest. Krest has no plan more dastardly than to use somewhat unethical fishing techniques to retrieve the rare fish of the title, but he’s a more convincing portrait of evil than a whole cartoonish parade of Draxes, Goldfingers and Blofelds. We finally end up in murder-mystery territory as Krest is found murdered with two possible suspects (we as readers are allowed to know James Bond didn’t do it) and a subversive lack of solution.

Finally, there’s one Bond novel that attempts to enter literary-fiction territory (though look out for flourishes in Casino Royale and From Russia, with Love): The Spy Who Loved Me, in which a nice yet somewhat broken Canadian girl recounts her life and sexual history for two-thirds of the novel before Bond shows up and takes care of the thugs menacing her in the present. It was released to reviews ranging from indifferent to hostile, and Fleming quickly decided he was embarassed by it, leading to a film “adaptation” that used the novel’s title and very little else. Actually it’s really not that bad (aside from one cringeworthy line extolling the merits of “semi-rape”) if one’s able to accept that it’s really not much of a Bond adventure.

Still, its reception seems to have put Fleming off from doing anything other than sticking to what he knew best, and he stuck to formula for the superb On Her Majesty’s Secret Service before the rushed You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun. One wonders how he would have fared in the literary world had he not been so afraid to experiment; the presence of Bond himself in each of these stories feels like nothing more than a crutch and they’d all be the better off simply ditching the whole pretence. But I suppose albatrosses aren’t easily got rid of.

 

Quantum of Solace, Licence to Kill, & what’s in a name

WHO’S GOING TO BE the next actor to play James Bond? Well, fingers crossed Daniel Craig will sign on to do one final picture: it would mean that his run matches the original five of Sir Sean Connery, and would allow the producers to finish the arc that has run through his pictures since 2006’s Casino Royale, resolving the cliffhanger ending of Spectre and leaving things open for a relatively fresh start with 007 Number Seven. Sadly, Craig’s unlikely to sign up for another, having claimed he’d rather “slit [his] wrists”. So if not him, then who? The big four names being tossed around are Aidan Turner, Damian Lewis, Tom Hiddleston, and Idris Elba, presented there in descending order of how good a choice I think they are. Incidentally, here’s that popular shot from Poldark of Turner sans shirt, getting some scything in and unknowingly auditioning for the Bond part:

Well, that’s all well and good. But what are they going to call Bond 25, I wonder-? Most likely, they’ll come up with an original title, probably something one-word and mysterious, like Skyfall or Spectre. Hey, how about naming the movie Risico, in that case?

“Risico” was one of the short stories featured in Ian Fleming’s collection For Your Eyes Only. But how can that be? When the 16th Bond film was still in production, the producers made an announcement: they had exhausted the pool of Fleming titles, and the new picture would have an original name, Licence Revoked. The title was a probable reference to John Gardner’s continuation Bond novel Licence Renewed, but it later became Licence to Kill, following its original title’s poor testing with US audiences (the title change came at great cost to the producers, just one of the many factors in the disaster of Licence to Kill‘s production). But the producers were telling blatant fibs! Fleming wrote twelve Bond novels; eleven of those twelve formed the first eleven Eon Productions pictures, though filmed out of order compared with their source material. Even referring to the novels as source material is slightly misleading; as the series continues, the films diverge more and more from the novels whose titles they borrow. Dr. No, From Russia with Love*, Goldfinger, Thunderball and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service provide basically straightforward adaptations of their source novels, while You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun take the basic plots of the novels simply as templates, playing out in a grander, more comedic style with a number of original story additions. The film supposedly based on The Spy Who Loved Me, the one novel Fleming was embarrassed by, instead uses an original story, albeit one that borrows elements of You Only Live Twice, and was sufficiently different from the novel whose title it uses that screenwriter Christopher Wood was allowed to pen a novelisation entitled James Bond, the Spy Who Loved Me. Its follow-up, Moonraker, used the villain name, but little else, from its novel; millionaire British philanthropist and secret Nazi Sir Hugo Drax became American entrepeneur and secret eugenicist Hugo Drax; once again, the original plot was novelised by Christopher Wood, and once again, past Bond films were a partial inspiration, Drax’s scheme and motivation being a space version of the underwater vision of The Spy Who Loved Me‘s Karl Stromberg.

At that point, with no more novel titles to use (Casino Royale was legally unavailable to the producers, thanks to the 1954 television film and 1967 spoof versions), the producers turned to short stories, first fancying “For Your Eyes Only”, then “Octopussy”, “From a View to a Kill”**, and “The Living Daylights”. In fact, the end credits of The Spy Who Loved Me announce the next film as For Your Eyes Only, showing the producers intended to turn to short story titles before even exhausting the novel titles available to them (the success of Star Wars caused them to embrace the science-fiction-sounding Moonraker title, though the novel itself contains no space-travel elements). These short stories predictably proved difficult to stretch to feature length, and the films at this point became cannibalistic hybrids: For Your Eyes Only draws part of its plot from “For Your Eyes Only”, but also looks to “Risico”, From Russia with Love, and one unused sequence from the Live and Let Die novel. An updated version of the short story “Octopussy”‘s events, updating WWII to the Korean War, forms the backstory of Octopussy, being told in brief by the title character, and takes an auction scene from “The Property of a Lady” and its broad plot from Goldfinger. A View to a Kill takes from its short story only the setting of Paris, before moving on to a plot that once again draws on Goldfinger, with some original elements. The Living Daylights similarly adapts its short story for one scene in a mostly original plot.

But the producers still had literary content left to mine, in spite of their public fibbing. Licence to Kill re-uses elements from the Live and Let Die film and novel as well as The Man with the Golden Gun novel alongside elements from the short story “The Hildebrand Rarity”. Licence to Kill thus bears the same degree of similarity to that short story as FYEO, Octopussy, AVtaK and TLD do to their respective short story titles, so why isn’t it entitled The Hildebrand Rarity? The likely answer is that what was meant was that they had run out of story titles that sounded good. “Risico”‘s title comes from a phonetically-rendered pronunciation of “risk”; “The Property of a Lady” would have worked for Sir Roger Moore but not for Timothy Dalton’s harder-edged interpretation of the character; “The Hildebrand Rarity” sounds more like Sherlock Holmes than James Bond; “007 in New York” is deeply underwhelming; and “Quantum of Solace” is basically word salad.

About that. GoldenEye takes its name from Fleming’s Jamaica house and uses an original plot (with some elements of the villain drawing on the Moonraker novel); Tomorrow Never Dies was a garbled version of the in-story newspaper slogan, “Tomorrow never lies”, and used a wholly original plot; The World is Not Enough is Bond’s family motto from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and uses yet another original plot (though aspects of the finale draw on Kingsley Amis’ continuation novel Colonel Sun). Finally, Die Another Day‘s title is a fragment from a Housman poem, and draws mostly from the previously unused plot of the novel Moonraker, plus re-used elements of the Diamonds Are Forever film, and brief references to the novels The Man with the Golden Gun and Colonel Sun.

Then in 2006 came Casino Royale, the first Bond to bear a novel’s title since 1979’s Moonraker (and the first mostly straightforward adaptation of a novel since 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service). Having recovered the rights to adapt the famous first Bond novel, the producers opted to reboot the franchise entirely, discovering in the process a reverence for the Fleming source material that had been missing from the series for some time. In trying to craft a followup, the producers opted to continue with the Fleming loyalty, picking as a title Quantum of Solace, taken from an atypical short story which homaged Somserset Maugham and in which Bond was barely a character. Of course, the Quantum of Solace movie opted not to adapt that story, and instead went for something mostly original; though its very last scene does present a sort of adaptation of “007 in New York”, the bulk of its plot grows out of the last act of the Casino Royale movie (and also bears an unfortunate resemblance to Licence to Kill). Daniel Craig, for his part, claimed that the film reflected the same themes as the short story, but to date “Quantum of Solace” remains the only one of Fleming’s novels or stories not to have any part of its plot worked into a film.

The use of Quantum of Solace as a title was well-meant, but as soon as it was announced there came an enormous backlash from casual fans who were unaware that blame for the (admittedly horrendous) title lay with Fleming, not Eon. I believe that, had it not been for that backlash, Bond 23, which became Skyfall, would likely have been entitled Property of a Lady. I also believe, given the increasing concessions to the style of Roger Moore’s era evidenced in Skyfall and Spectre, that it would have been a wholly appropriate title. It’s certainly the most Bond-y feeling title of the remaining unused ones, but my hopes are high for a Bond film entitled Risico, after which, we’ll see about Property of a Lady and The Hildebrand Rarity. We’re unlikely to ever see a Bond picture entitled 007 in New York. But how about a fun little “007 in New York” short? It could be released on YouTube to build hype for the next movie, shown in cinemas before an appropriate feature, released as a DVD extra, or made to tie into a major television event, like the 2012 Olympics’ “Happy and Glorious” Bond short.

So, what’s in a name? Well, nothing really. I understand the producers’ eagerness to use a cool-sounding Bond title, and that that desire trumps a sort of historical completionism. In the meantime, little bits of innuendo towards the stories are creeping in, meaningless throwaway references such as Casino Royale‘s character of Solange, named for one in “007 in New York”, or the presence, in Spectre, of a “Hildebrand Antiques and Rarities” as well as a repurposed Hans Oberhauser (“Octopussy”), all of which are all well and good, but add up to very little.

Still, I’ll be going to see Bond 25 no matter what title it gets saddled with, and I note at this point that I disliked the generic Skyfall title even more than the outlandish Quantum of Solace one. Anyway, nothing will stop me from hoping.

*This was the first Bond to slightly adapt a title, losing the comma from the novel’s title of From Russia, with Love.

**The short story is entitled “From a View to a Kill”; the film simply A View to a Kill. This decision was obviously made after the film was in the planning stage, as the end credits of Octopussy announce the next film’s title as From a View to a Kill, becoming the second instance of the end credits making a mistake regarding the next film’s title. After A View to a Kill announced The Living Daylights, this practice was dropped entirely; otherwise, The Living Daylights would have mistakenly announced Licence Renewed, GoldenEye would have mistakenly announced Tomorrow Never Lies, The World is Not Enough might have mistakenly announced Beyond the Ice and, if I’m correct, Quantum of Solace would have mistakenly announced Property of a Lady.

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!

James Bond, Mission: Impossible, & the nonsense of spycraft

FIRSTLY, sorry for being away for so long. I’ve been busy moving city & also I’ve been spending a lot of time writing about film over on mrrumsey.com.

Secondly, in case no-one’s noticed, Spectre, the 24th – or fourth, in-continuity – Bond film, comes out in just over a month, & it’s incredibly exciting. Since rebooting the franchise with 2006’s Casino Royale, the producers have crafted an intricate & continuity-heavy universe that manages to be just credible enough to work without going full Man of Steel & sucking all the vitality from its source material.

This is in stark contrast to Bond‘s rival, Mission: Impossible. Their latest, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, released earlier this year, delivers all the spy action thrills (& leans heavily on the rebooted Bonds for inspiration; see “Recycled Script” here) in a big, preposterous package. Among its other borrowings, it takes from the new Bonds a slight inclination towards the political thriller, a sense that, rather than being a series of cool standalones like the television programme on which it is based, the film series now takes place in a real world, an organic world in which actions have consequences & overweight CIA men get stuffy at you when, despite saving the world, you can’t prevent a deactivated missile clipping a building slightly. Since Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was probably the coolest action film ever made, I’m sure fans were very happy to see it granted a continuing influence on the plot of this new, slightly more action-oriented movie. But in copping a move from Bond once again, the M:I series sink further into their own nonsensicality.

The five movies in the series each have a different director &, consequently, a totally different feel: Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible was a techno-thriller not too far removed from the TV version; John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II was an action film showcasing its director’s obsessions (slow-motion wirework, flocks of doves, dual handguns with infinite ammo, villains as near-identical Shadow Archetypes); JJ Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III benefitted from his fannish penchant for ditching a series’ silliness while retaining its cool; the best, Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol won much praise for its visual “pop” & fast-paced humour, both elements found in the director’s previous animated work. Rogue Nation, by The Usual Suspects screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, is the first without an agenda of its own. Rather, it tries to be a continuation of Ghost Protocol while also rehabilitating past entries in the series. But continuity isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a big issue here. The series, like the Alien films (Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher, Jean-Pierre Jeunet & apparently Neill Blomkamp), has benefitted rather than suffered from its tendency to be remodelled by auteurs. If you can ignore your hang-ups, you’re better off seeing each film as a new artist’s interpretation of the material, rather than a continuation of what’s gone before. It’s certainly easier than believing the bombastic M:I II is something that actually happened in the past of the characters in the later films. They probably just try not to talk about it too much.

And, of course, so few film series bother going all the way with continuity. The way science-fiction miracle tech habitually shows up in superspy movies, by your third or so installment you’d be living in an alternate timeline. Take the facemasks of Mission: Impossible; the first scene of the first film screws everything with the first time one of the highly realistic gadgets is removed. While being worn, their wearers are indistinguishable from the real deal (the third film gets hilarious, with fit Tom Cruise becoming portly Philip Seymour Hoffman simply by wearing a mask). Fine, that makes no sense but it’s part of the series’ trademark superscience. The silliness comes in during later films. In every scene – & each movie has at least one – in which a character is exposed as an impersonator, someone will grab the lower left corner of their face & pull, easily removing the mask to reveal Tom Cruise or someone else underneath it. Since the masks are so easily removeable once the characters are aware of them in-universe, why isn’t giving someone’s cheeks a good old pinching part of every standard security procedure in the world? Partly it’s to make the plots work, partly it’s to avoid looking silly, & partly it’s the fact that sequels, in general, tend not to be set in the world prior movies have established; rather, they’re generally about those established fictional characters living in our world, not their own. Example: going by GoldenEye, the Cold War apparently ended the same way in Bond’s world as our Cold War did. But in an alternate universe in which the UK is the most hypercompetent power in the world, the Soviet Union should have been militarily & economically outclassed much, much ealier.

Bond gets even sillier than M:I does with facemasks, too: in You Only Live Twice, Bond undergoes a surgical procedure to appear (unconvincingly) Japanese; in Die Another Day, a Korean villain goes through a more painful reverse version of that treatment, having his DNA replaced (???) in order to impersonate a Caucasian businessman; in Thunderball, a SPECTRE-affiliated villain has apparently spent two years’ worth of plastic surgery & acting lessons in order to become the double of a UN pilot; in Diamonds Are Forever, Ernst Stavro Blofeld undergoes plastic surgery in order to hide out in disguise as reclusive millionaire Willard White (his earlier change from Donald Pleasence into the equally bald but much taller Telly Savalas goes unremarked on). What idiots all those people were! From Russia with Love, an earlier film, opens with “James Bond” dying. Except…it’s a training exercise for villain Red Grant, & the deceased was wearing a facemask! If 100% convincing facemasks exist in this universe – & are commonplace enough to be thrown away on a training exercise in which, verisimilitude aside, they really don’t add much – why aren’t they put to use on all those later occasions? The only reason is that the old Bonds really weren’t a series, just a series of impressions, with certain archetypical features (disfigured villains, shark pits, ski sequences, fake-out deaths for Bond) repeated in slightly different order with little continuity. Mission: Impossible was even worse for this, repeating not only its own tropes (infiltration via aerial descent in four of its entries; the IMF discredited in four of its entries; the aforementioned facemask reveal in all five of them) but also square-pegging Bond tropes such as the constantly shifting love interests – Bond’s a bastard who we expect to continually ditch women, but Ethan is a thoroughly decent sort it’s hard to imagine abandoning so many loves of his life so abruptly*.

But continuity isn’t a bad thing. You can get too much of it, certainly – see the mess Doctor Who periodically becomes before a nice soft-reboot (1970, 2005, 2010) – but if you can manage to stay on top of it, your fun little movies become all the more meaningful & worth returning to. Mind you, it took Bond a complete reboot before the producers could keep their continuity straight, & even now it continually threatens to spin out of control. When it was never there in the first place, it might not be best to force it.

*Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher’s thoroughly decent Batman has the same problem, with a new love interest in each; as does, funnily enough, thoroughly decent Daniel-San in his three Karate Kid movies. His lowest moment is convincing the lovely Kumiko to leave her tiny Okinawa fishing village for America, then dropping her, broke & alone in a strange country before the third film begins.

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.