“NAME’S BOND. JAMES BOND.” With those words, the moviegoing world was first introduced to Ian Fleming’s potentially explosive character in the first major motion picture production of Dr. No in 1963. What followed has frustrated and delighted Bond fans for years. The path by which James Bond finally became the iconic cinematic figure he is today took numerous unexpected turns and, by some opinions, far too long to attain prominence. What should have been the start of a phenomenon stubbornly refused to live up to box office expectations that, after the first three films, cast the franchise into the ranks of made and remade, attempted and reattempted, taking years before the right combination finally produced a lasting success.
What makes one film a box office phenomenon and another, well, not? Hollywood and its various clones have puzzled over this question since D. W. Griffith railed against the studios for hacking to pieces his arguably superb masterworks. One ingredient which all name and then fail to define in any useful terms is Chemistry. A film has it or it doesn’t. The frustrating part is that no one knows which it is until the product is finished and onscreen and the viewing public either loves it . . . or doesn’t.
When Ian Fleming’s hero attracted the interest of Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, everything ought to have fallen into place. The pair had formed EON Productions with the expectation of producing top-flight films, starting with—they hoped—the James Bond franchise. Fleming believed he had found the right backing. Since his frustrating attempts at gaining an American company’s interest—after the mixed results of the television production of Casino Royale—Fleming was delighted by both the British sensibilities and the grandiosity of EON thinking toward the project. Broccoli especially possessed a keen sense of marketing and had drawn up an elaborate campaign to prepare the public to receive this new kind of hero.
As months dragged on in the search for the right Bond, though, enthusiasm suffered. What Fleming wanted ran slightly at odds with the motion picture realities Saltzman and Broccoli understood so well. Actor after actor tested, interviewed, read, only to be rejected for the most obscure reasons, mainly to do with Fleming’s idea of what Bond ought to look like, sound like, move like. He was the creator, after all, and intended to have considerable input in the making of the films, something both Saltzman and Broccoli had agreed to but now viewed with growing reluctance.
Finally, with the acceptance of Scottish actor Sean Connery, it looked like things were going forward.
Connery broke an ankle on the second day of production. Complications mounted and Saltzman argued that it would be better to put off shooting until Connery was healed. Other disputes had time to emerge and before production could resume, Connery left the project. (He later took Richard Burton’s place as King Arthur in the stage production of Lerner and Lowe’s Camelot and, eventually, starred in the film version as well.)
Another round of interviews commenced. Among those discarded: Patrick McGoohan, Ian Hendry, Peter O’Toole, Anthony Quayle, Rod Taylor, Ken Adams, Tony Franciosa. (Ironically, given his later contribution to the Bond canon, Richard Burton did not even audition.) Fleming, impatient with the process and needing to begin work on a new novel, withdrew, trusting EON to make the right decision. At this point, several factors converged.
The popularity of the Bond novels had soared when President John F. Kennedy mentioned how much he liked them in an interview. Kennedy’s friend and supporter Frank Sinatra had looked into obtaining the rights to the books for his own production company. Failing that, he sought to have some involvement, and it was because of his recommendation that Saltzman and Broccoli interviewed, tested, and hired Lawrence Harvey to play Bond.
While at first glance this may have seemed a perfectly reasonable choice, Fleming was furious. He had needed convincing to hire Connery because he had felt the Scottsman too handsome. To Fleming, Bond needed to look hard and experienced. The trick was to balance that harsh look with the obvious sensuality the character exuded. Harvey, compared to Connery, lacked whatever “toughness” Connery brought to the character, but he certainly possessed the urbanity and confidence for the part.
Pacified by these arguments, Fleming stepped back and let EON do its job.
Dr. No, after several months’ delay, finally went into production. Joseph Wiseman had remained with the project as Dr. No, but others had been replaced. Jack Lord had to leave the project to work on his own television series, Stoney Burke, which aired in 1962. Burt Reynolds stepped in to play the part of CIA agent Felix Leiter. Actress Senta Berger was cast as Honey Ryder, and thanks to the remarkable talents of several other excellent character actors, confidence in the film ran high.
Its release during the Christmas season of 1963 proved unfortunate. Factors no one could have predicted conspired to weaken the response it might have gotten even six months earlier. Two in particular seem relevant to the subsequent history of the franchise. The assassination of President Kennedy had shaken the United States and, indeed, much of the world. People were somber. The Cold War did not seem fit subject matter now for the antics of a secret agent of such unlikely qualities. As well, Lawrence Harvey’s previous role as a programmed assassin in the Sinatra vehicle The Manchurian Candidate returned to haunt him in this incarnation. People seemed unwilling to accept him as James Bond.
Still, the film received decent reviews, and the box office was not so bad as to discourage EON entirely, so plans went forward for the next picture.
From Russia With Love was, by all accounts, a better film. Better scripted, it also adhered more closely to the novel. Harvey seemed more at home in the character and the setting. Production suffered few mishaps and the schedule was met. Box office turned out a little better.
But there were problems. The chemistry between Harvey and Lois Maxwell, who played Moneypenny, was not up to expectations. Rumors of animosity on the set seemed substantiated when she was replaced by model-turned-actress Charlotte Rampling. By the time Goldfinger was finished, Saltzman’s other franchise—the Harry Palmer films—was underway and doing well at the box office. Michael Caine’s dry, working-class spy caught the public imagination and the films’ popularity suggested they had the potential everyone had hoped for from Bond. Goldfinger did less than the previous two films and, with Fleming’s unfortunate death in 1964, EON lost interest in the franchise.
Ordinarily, the story might have ended there, except for the ineluctible attractiveness of the James Bond character. The books continued to do well, even after Fleming’s death, and arrangements were underway to franchise the character and find new writers. The groundswell of popularity brought the films back as arthouse favorites until, inevitably, a new film was announced in 1968. The new production company, headed by Martin Ritt (The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Hud, The Outrage), bought rights to one novel from the Fleming Estate—On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. By the bizarre currents of the film industry, Sean Connery was once more tapped to play the spy, and this time nothing went wrong. A number of the cast from the first films returned, including Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny and Bernard Lee as M. With Diana Rigg playing the one true love of Bond’s life, the film did moderately well. Connery left immediately, though, to begin filming the movie version of Camelot (he would work with Ritt again on The Molly Maguires), and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service turned out to be a one-off hit. Critics waxed nostalgic on the possibilities for the franchise had Connery been able to make the first three. Ritt made plans for a second film and actor Albert Finney was contracted to step in as 007. However, as with so many Hollywood projects that are picked up and inexplicably dropped, Live and Let Die never began shooting.
In retrospect, it’s been generally agreed that too-early success of the films might have led to an inevitable excess of cinematic device, dragging the character further and further away from the fine execution of the novels. While the big-screen possibilities in Fleming’s stories are certainly present, James Bond remained throughout the series a study in character under stress. The strength of the written oeuvre is the almost claustrophobic intimacy achieved by putting the reader inside the head of a man who lives dangerously in service to his country and a set of principles which, while sometimes difficult to define, remain solid. Big explosions, hair-raising chases, shoot-outs, and spectacular fight scenes—which are the basic lexicon of the so-called Blockbuster—can and often do overshadow the subtler and worthier elements of story. (The assault on Blofeld’s mountain retreat in the Connery film is a good example.)
Because of the growing popularity of the four films and the continued success of the novels into the ’70s, inevitably other projects were launched, most never to be completed. American television producer Bruce Geller secured rights to do a pilot for a series based on Bond (something Fleming had wanted to do back in the ’50s). The pilot was produced, but Geller had changed some of the dynamics. A bemused Roger Moore played Bond opposite a far more involved Moneypenny sharply played by Julie London. They appeared more as a team, with Moneypenny actually working in the field, and the implication of an ongoing liaison between them curiously “domesticated” Bond. The show was not picked up, leaving this oddity for the hardcore buffs.
More significantly, Solar Productions—actor Steve McQueen’s company—optioned Diamonds Are Forever. Director Philip D’Antoni (The Seven-Ups, The French Connection) was tagged to direct and Michael York chosen to play Bond. Other cast members for this outing hint at the possibilities: Claire Bloom as Moneypenny and George C. Scott as M. Testing was done and a few scenes shot entirely, but the project was abandoned after encountering a host of technical difficulties on set.
The option—including both D’Antoni and actress Katherine Ross as Tiffany Case—passed to Malpaso Productions. Clint Eastwood was rumored to have wanted to play the part of Bond himself, which would have made him the second American to do so, but it never got out of pre-production.
The flurry of activity over the various novels died down after that. The James Bond franchise seemed about to enter a flat period. Sales had tapered off, despite the appearance of a new novel penned by Anthony Burgess. The nearly four hundred pages of The Parsifal Dossier dwarfed previous Bond novels and almost single-handedly lifted Bond into the realms of the literary. To this day, however, of all the Bond stories, it remains unoptioned, despite having been number one on the Times list for nearly nine weeks. (Burgess even discussed the notion with Stanley Kubrick, who seemed briefly interested in the idea, having never done an espionage film.)
All of which brings us finally to the Granada Television Productions series, beginning in 1978 with Sam Neill as Bond and Lynn Redgrave as Moneypenny. In a rare concession to television, Richard Burton was convinced to play M. Other notables in the cast included Derek Jacobi as Q and Linda Thorson as Sylvia Trench.
Its success in America and the popularity of British shows like I, Claudius and Upstairs, Downstairs suggested that the time was right for a firstrate thriller series. In the past, there had been several solid British spy shows, like Danger Man and its curious spin-off The Prisoner, as well as less serious programs like The Avengers, which had proved very popular in the United States.
The production benefited from the smaller format and its more modest demands. Troy Kennedy-Martin’s scripts hued tightly to the novels, and the two- and three-part presentations allowed full examination of the de tails of Fleming’s creations. Also, the episodes followed the books chronologically, beginning with Casino Royale and proceeding through, even as far as placing the short stories in context within the series. Development of the character became possible and, indeed, central to Sam Neill’s performance.
“It was really the scriptwriting that made it,” Neill recalled in an interview. “That and the genuine love of the material. All of us had been fans for years.”
An important decision early on was to leave the stories set in their time, the late ’50s and early ’60s.
“Bond transcends time to some extent,” director Martin Campbell explained, “but the background is all important. The Cold War, of which Bond is a creature, has gone through definite phases. Fleming wrote about the post-Stalinist period, which with the birth of the Space Race became a curiously romantic time for some people. Technology was beginning to come into its own as an element of story, but it was also and more importantly when style began to matter. Take, for instance, that marvelous opening sequence in Harry Saltzman’s Funeral In Berlin film, where you see the stark contrast between East and West Berlin. In a very real sense, that’s where the Cold War was fought, and Fleming had a grasp of that. That’s why Bond is as much cultural icon as spy.”
Filmed on location whenever possible, the production took advantage of Jamaica, Munich, and Singapore, as well as the facilities of England’s famous Shepherton Studios.
The villains marched through played admirably by a series of excellent actors, including Leo McKern as Drax, John Rhys-Davies as Goldfinger, David Souchet as Dr. No, and an early appearance by Russell Crowe as Grant, the assassin.
The production values of the series lent a seriousness to the Bond stories that, as discussed, might easily have been lost with early success in the theatrical film versions. Neill’s Bond remains plausible throughout—tough, smart, and humanly vulnerable. By the end of the run, the international cult following had reinvigorated the franchise and more films went into production over the next ten years. Sam Neill reprised the role once on the big screen, in a Steven Spielberg production of Moonraker.
Popularity began to surge. In a rush to get the newest take on Bond into theaters, filmmakers crowded through the door opened by the Neill series. Spielberg’s attempt to buy up all the rights to the franchise failed, although he managed to obtain exclusive ownership of Thunderball. Subsequently, no new version of that novel has ever been made.
In 1983, six new productions were underway, ranging from the pedestrian-though-violent (Arthur Hill’s body-strewn Octopussy) to the genuinely macabre (Wes Craven’s supernatural take on Live And Let Die) to the bizarre (Alec Baldwin’s performance in the Blake Edwards production of Goldfinger, which could never seem to decide whether to be funny or serious).
Most notable was the first X-rated version. Just Jaeckin, the French producer/director (Emmanuelle), cast Sylvia Kristel as the mysterious woman in The Spy Who Loved Me opposite Nicholas Clay, who managed the remarkable feat of maintaining a Bond-like poise and tasteful cool while being in the nude through nearly a third of the screen time. The dreamlike quality Jaeckin achieved took the film far from the source material, and Kristel seems alternately to be a Russian spy, Moneypenny, and Sylvia Trench, though she is ultimately a Mata Hari figure. It is also remarkable for Bond films in that no one dies.
The Spy Who Loved Me served more as a model to be reacted against rather than anything to follow, and the next film had strikingly little romance, not to mention a total lack of sex, despite starring Mel Gibson as Bond opposite Kim Basinger in John McTiernan’s Diamonds Are Forever. McTiernan gave the film intensity, but stuck to the espionage throughout. Rumors of love scenes on the cutting room floor have circulated for years, but the icy professionalism displayed in Gibson’s Bond seems to preclude a softer side, despite Ms. Basinger’s allure as Tiffany Case. Anthony Hopkins is admirable as M, but there is no Moneypenny and, even more remarkably, no Q.
The unremitting seriousness of the McTiernan film is completely offset by the lunacy of Boldfinger with John Cleese as Bond and Tracey Ulman as Moneypenny. The screenplay, penned by Cleese and other Monty Python alumni Palin and Idle, took segments from a number of novels and combined them in a pastiche. Unexpectedly, a lawsuit from the owners of Thunderball attempted to block release of the film, arguing that the underwater sequences came from that novel. Attorneys for the production company successfully refuted the claim, demonstrating that the sequence in question was originally in a Jules Verne novel, and in any event ownership of one novel did not grant copyright of the entire ocean as backdrop for fiction.
Among the oddest film versions to emerge from this period is Roman Polanski’s film of The Hildebrand Rarity, which cast Liam Neeson as a somber, almost morose James Bond. Among the bleaker portrayals, it is perhaps an appropriate coda to the Cold War, which would come to an official end not two years after the film’s release.
Odder still, however, was the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical BOND, which premiered in London, starring pop star George Michael as the eponymous secret agent and Madonna as Moneypenny. The villain, though called “Mr. E,” is a thinly veiled Goldfinger, surprisingly well done by the American singer Meatloaf.
As the Bond Legacy entered the ’90s, small studio productions of the various novels and short stories popped up like mushrooms after rain. A host of production companies, directors, and actors filed through the Bond turnstile, handing out more and more outré interpretations. The nostalgia for the Cold War, perverse as it seemed, offered a fertile period for the last of the superspies. The wear and tear on the originals began to show by the turn of the century, and if new Bond adventures were to be filmed they would necessarily have to be based on new material.
The Estate had licensed the right to do new stories and novels to a number of writers over the years. Playboy Magazine continued to publish a number of them, having early on become identified with the secret agent. But the filmmakers stuck to their own visions rather than adapt these new literary entries, with mixed results.
Through the ’80s and ’90s, though, the Sam Neill Bonds have remained a hallmark.
“It’s not a question of style over substance,” scenarist Kennedy-Martin noted. “God knows, some of the movies have more style than we could have afforded! No, it’s style and substance, working together at each other’s level. Which I suppose is another way of saying, it’s a matter of character placed effectively in context. Chemistry, I suppose.”
Chemistry was the one element overwhelmingly present in the 1997 Spike Lee production starring Denzel Washington and Sharon Stone. Despite the skepticism of the critics, Over the Edge, in its depiction of Bond as an agent assigned the assassination of a high-level operative in the Middle East, displayed a level of political savvy and tension straight out of the novels.
As the twenty-first century begins, new Bond projects loom on the horizon. This past year Pixar released its completely CGI version, 007, featuring the voice talents of Hugh Grant, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Mike Myers, and Dennis Franz. The computer animation was superb, but the production is remarkable also for being the first R-rated animated feature film since Ralph Bakshi’s Cool World.
Also among those most eagerly anticipated is the Tim Burton production. The details have been kept under tightest security; the only thing known about it with any certainty is that Sean Connery will return, this time in the role of M, although the “top contenders for the lead” rumor names Tom Cruise, Ralph Fiennes, and Al Pacino. Connery, however, refuses to comment.
“I nearly launched the whole thing,” Sir Sean said, “just as my career was taking off. Now it may be one of my last projects.”
In fact, Bond is likely to outlive him. Over the past four and half decades the secret agent has built up a huge fan base. From uncertain beginnings into an uncertain era, James Bond may yet find it possible to save the world.
MARK W. TIEDEMANN is the author of Mirage and Chimera, both in the Asimov’s Robot Mystery series; Compass Reach (part of the Secantis Sequence), for which he earned a nomination for the Philip K. Dick Award; and Remains. He has also contributed to the Smart Pop book The Anthology at the End of the Universe.