I WAS A JAMES BOND nerd when I was a kid. I was around ten years old when the movie Dr. No was released in America, and I had read all of the Ian Fleming 007 novels that had been published by that point. My parents didn’t seem to mind that I was reading “adult” literature (and in fact, my mother accompanied me to Dr. No, the last time I can recall going to the theater with her). For the novels, I started at the beginning, with Casino Royale, and have not forgotten to this day the horrible scene where the villain, Le Chiffre, tortures 007 by whacking Bond’s testicles with a carpet beater (no less an expert than Raymond Chandler admitted that scene “still haunts me”). It didn’t stop me, though, from devouring the rest of the novels, and I jumped at the chance to see Bond on the big screen.
If only that were the extent of my James Bond obsession. But no, I didn’t stop there. I had 007 cologne (not sure why I needed this when I was a pre-teen) and a James Bond board game that at least didn’t smell bad. I even took to guarding my possessions using a trick I had picked up from a Fleming novel. Before leaving a room, Bond plucked a hair from his head and placed it across a crack in a door. When he returned and the hair was gone, he knew his room had been searched. Being a nerd and not a secret agent, I was far too afraid to pluck out a hair; I used a thread instead.
I wanted to be James Bond. I never wanted to be a villain.
This is only unusual because there have been so many great Bond villains. Auric Goldfinger set the standard for most of what followed. He even got what may still be the most famous one-liner a villain has spouted in any Bond film, when he answered Bond’s question, “Do you expect me to talk?” with, “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.” But Goldfinger wasn’t cool like Bond. A Jack Nicholson might take over a Batman movie, but no one was going to distract us from Sean Connery.
Bond villains are an integral part of what people think of as the classic 007 tradition. No Bond movie could be made without a villain, and often a henchman or two as well. And, of course, two of the first three Bond films were named after their villains. What goes unnoticed, beyond the talk about Goldfinger and Dr. No and Ernst Stavro Blofeld, is how much the villains blend together. The idea of a Bond villain is unavoidable; the reality of the villains, though, is that they are forgotten once each’s particular movie has faded into the past. Everyone has their favorite, to be sure, but beyond that, how many people remember the villain in GoldenEye? Alec Trevelyan, once known as 006. (More memorable was Xenia Onatopp, played by Famke Janssen, who killed by crushing her opponents between her thighs.) The name Aristotle Kristatos doesn’t ring much of a bell (he was the villain in For Your Eyes Only). The Living Daylights? All you need to know is that he was played by Joe Don Baker.
The point is that the category of the Bond villain has become more important than the actual villains. I would argue that there are only four Bond villains of note: Dr. No, Auric Goldfinger, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and whoever you liked enough to make number four. (There have also been memorable henchmen; besides the aforementioned Onatopp, one could add Oddjob and Jaws, along with one other I will discuss shortly.)
No particular pattern was set in the first movies. Dr. No does not even appear in his own film until less than half an hour remains. No is a megalomaniac with designs, one suspects, on taking over the world, but his particular job during the film is only to mess with the missiles of the United States for SPECTRE. But Dr. No does not stick in the mind with the lasting power of an Ursula Andress, the first of the Bond girls and in many eyes still the best. He is the first villain, he suggests the direction of future villains, but he is not the final prototype.
From Russia With Love essentially dismissed the notion of a master villain, even though it was the film that introduced Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his omnipresent cat. The real villains in this movie are underlings working for SPECTRE. Robert Shaw’s Red Grant gets into a memorable fight with Bond, and the legendary Lotte Lenya wore a famous pair of knife-wielding shoes as Rosa Klebb.
At this point, the Bond movies were following the plot of the novels with relative fidelity, and the idea of a “Bond villain” had yet to be clearly established. With the subsequent Goldfinger, new patterns were set in motion. Auric Goldfinger remains to this day the ultimate Bond villain: he is present throughout the film, he has several key scenes with Bond, and he has a plan to take over the world.
Goldfinger is the first movie villain to be working essentially on his own. He has ties to the Chinese, but the primary purpose of his “Operation Grandslam” is to make himself the richest man in the world. (At one point, Goldfinger murders pretty much every mob boss in the United States—not, like Michael Corleone, to clear the way for his own ascension, but merely because they have already served their purpose to Goldfinger.)
Goldfinger is also larger than life, not just in the physical sense (actor Gert Frobe is a big man), but in his ambitions. In the end, Dr. No was just doing SPECTRE’s bidding, but Goldfinger? He wanted to set a world record of infamy. “Man has climbed Mount Everest, gone to the bottom of the ocean. He’s fired rockets at the moon, split the atom, achieved miracles in every field of human endeavor . . . except crime!”
And throughout the film, Goldfinger and Bond play cat and mouse, alternating roles. Bond is a good opponent for Goldfinger, a way to put a finishing touch to his criminal miracles. And Goldfinger, of course, is a challenging opponent for Bond as well, and never more so than when he directs the laser toward 007’s crotch.
And then there is Blofeld. Goldfinger may be the Übervillain, but Blofeld is the most famous villain, among other things the clearest model for Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers films. Blofeld is the one supporting character to appear in multiple films. As the leader of SPECTRE, he makes brief appearances in From Russia With Love and Thunderball, before finally showing his face in You Only Live Twice. In that film, Donald Pleasence as Blofeld gave Mike Myers a lifetime supply of Evil. Blofeld’s plan, backed by the Chinese but of clear benefit to SPECTRE as well, is to start a nuclear war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. in order to wipe them off the face of the earth. This rather imaginative idea is foiled by 007, of course, but Blofeld escapes to return in several more films. Telly Savalas takes over the role for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, committing one of the truly savage acts in any Bond movie when he has Bond’s wife murdered. Charles Gray gets the acting job for Diamonds Are Forever, which begins with Bond getting his revenge by killing Blofeld, only to find that he’s killed a clone instead. Blofeld’s ultimate demise is assumed at the end of the film, but the man had as many lives as his ever-present pet cat. Finally, in the pre-credit sequence of For Your Eyes Only, Bond dispatches Blofeld for good.
Blofeld’s longevity makes him a candidate for the ultimate Bond villain, but I would argue that outside of his responsibility in killing Mrs. Bond, Blofeld is not the most interesting of bad guys. In three of his movies, he makes only brief appearances. In every case, he is played by a different actor, which detracts from whatever continuity his longevity offers. For a while in the later Sean Connery films, Blofeld seemed to be everywhere, but outside of his role in George Lazenby’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, in forty-four years he has only made one pre-credit appearance in a non-Connery Bond film. He certainly belongs in the pantheon of Bond villains; he is far from anonymous. But neither is he Goldfinger.
And so we come to my choice for the “fourth Bond villain.” But first, it’s worth stopping for a moment and imagining how 007 might have appeared to someone who had been with the series from the start. I can only speak to my own experiences. For a child in the ’60s, James Bond was a fantasy role model. For a young married adult in the ’70s, James Bond was a campy reminder of my youth. But by 1983, James Bond was an object of ridicule. Roger Moore had never been much good in the role, and his Bond films were becoming increasingly worse. Popular culture had taken some interesting turns as well. If Bond, in 1964’s Goldfinger, felt that listening to the Beatles required earmuffs, one can only guess what he would have thought of punk rock. A thirty-year-old man who had grown up on James Bond would, by 1983, have moved on. It is hard to picture anything 007 could do at that point to get the attention of those old fans.
Enter—or rather, reenter—Sean Connery.
Thanks to a complicated, even confusing, series of arguments and legal rulings over many years, Ian Fleming’s novel Thunderball was an item of contention, much of it surrounding a man named Kevin McClory, who had a hand in the writing of the novel and managed to procure the film rights to the book. The original Thunderball film was made with McClory’s participation, but under the aegis of the Broccoli and Saltzman team that had put together the first three pictures. Afterward, McClory kept the film rights, and a decade later, several years into Roger Moore’s reign as 007, McClory worked with Connery on a new Bond picture. Various legal problems prevented anything concrete until 1983, when Sean Connery returned to the role of James Bond in a “non-canonical” Bond film, Never Say Never Again—essentially a remake of Thunderball.
This movie had several things going for it, not least the return of Connery. It was directed by Irvin Kershner, who had worked with Connery in the ’60s and whose most recent film had been The Empire Strikes Back. The screenplay was by Lorenzo Semple, Jr., who had scripted such strong films as Pretty Poison and Three Days of the Condor (although more recently, he had worked on movies like the King Kong remake and the 1980 Flash Gordon). The cast included the legendary Max von Sydow as Blofeld (who wasn’t dead in this particular Bond world), lovely Bond girls Barbara Carrera and Kim Basinger, and even a black Felix Leiter in ex-football player Bernie Casey.
And while it is hardly fair to say the film flopped at the box office when it took in $160 million worldwide, nonetheless Octopussy, a Roger Moore Bond film released the same year, did better.
What Never Say Never Again had that no other 007 film could match was the Austrian actor Klaus Maria Brandauer, fresh off Mephisto, which won the Best Foreign Language Oscar in 1982. Playing Blofeld’s number two, Maximillian Largo, Brandauer became my own personal Fourth Bond villain. I am admittedly cheating here; if Blofeld is a Bond villain, wouldn’t Largo be merely a henchman? But in this film, and indeed in the original Thunderball, Blofeld serves no real purpose beyond setting Largo on his assignment.
In the original, Largo is played by Italian actor Adolfo Celi, whose voice was dubbed over. The most memorable aspect of Celi’s performance is the eyepatch he wears (Bosley Crowther’s rave review in the New York Times devoted exactly one sentence to Celi, whom he called “piratical”).
Brandauer plays against the stereotype of the Bond villain, which already makes him intriguing. He waltzes through the film like a modern European dandy. He couldn’t be further from Celi; an eyepatch would have been an abomination on Brandauer’s Largo, who drapes the sleeves of his stylish sweaters over his shoulders.
At one point, he loses a game to Bond, a game Largo himself designed called “Domination.” “My problem,” he notes, “is I’ve never yet found a worthy adversary.” Until 007, of course. The loser of the game suffers a series of shocks that come through the joysticks the players use. After Largo loses, he doesn’t go into a rage; he doesn’t order his henchmen to rough up Bond. Instead, he looks at one of his hands, still hurting from the electric volts, and blows it gently, simultaneously cooling it off and delivering Bond’s victory into fairy dust.
Nor does Brandauer’s Largo dismiss Bond, who he recognizes is indeed a worthy opponent. At one point in Goldfinger, 007 tosses off a trademark bon mot, to which Goldfinger replies, “Choose your next witticism carefully, Mr. Bond, it may be your last.” But in Never Say Never Again, when Bond says something equally witty to Largo, Brandauer says “Oh,” then laughs and finishes with “Mr. Bond!” At such times, Brandauer is closer to a Bond girl than a Bond villain (“Oh, James!” being a standard piece of Bond girl dialogue), but Brandauer doesn’t come across as effeminate, just cultured. Rather like James Bond himself.
As the film progresses, it’s hard not to imagine Brandauer in the hero’s role. Connery’s return is decent enough; he’s in great shape, and the maturity of his passing years fits well with his performance. But Brandauer is like a better, blonder Roger Moore, or even, to project forward in time, Pierce Brosnan, and his presence works off Connery’s, gives us the opportunity to simultaneously examine the original and a rather kinky alternate version, one that is just as suave and witty and worldly as Connery, but off-kilter enough to suggest new possibilities for the character of 007.
My argument isn’t that Brandauer’s Largo is just another version of Bond. The differences are ultimately too great. But over time, Bond movies have become a bit ossified. Roger Moore is more lightweight than Sean Connery, Timothy Dalton is darker, Pierce Brosnan is Connery-lite, but in the end, they’re all recognizably the same old James Bond. Even George Lazenby fills the bill. Eventually, we forget that there might have been other ways to look at Bond; Brandauer-as-Largo offers one of those other ways. (Given the rather vocal opposition to the choice of Daniel Craig, exemplified in the Web site CraigNotBond.com, I am perhaps merely expressing my own preference here for a new version of James Bond. At the least, I must doubt that such hardcore Internet Bond fans would agree with me that Brandauer’s Largo would have made an interesting 007.)
There is, of course, one major problem with Largo-as-Bond: Largo, like the vast majority of Bond villains, is insane. Even here, though, Brandauer manages to pull off a lovely urbane nuttiness, never more obvious than when Kim Basinger’s Domino calls Largo crazy and Brandauer replies by gazing oddly at her and saying, “Yeah . . . maybe. I’m crazy,” as if he hadn’t really thought about it before, but she was probably right.
There are many Bond villains with a veneer of mannered urbanity; it’s a fairly standard scene to have the villain invite Bond to dinner, where their polite conversation is filled with undertones of “I’m going to destroy the world,” “No, you are not.” Eventually, these villains always lose their cool. But Largo only loses his cool once, when he sees Bond and Domino kissing and he goes into a jealous rage. He is just as interested in causing world unrest as any villain, and he takes the Revenge aspect of SPECTRE very seriously, as he demonstrates when he leaves Domino to be sold as a slave. But even then, he kisses her off with an attitude that seems to say, “Oh, that it weren’t so.”
Most, if not all, of this is attributable to the acting of Klaus Maria Brandauer. As Roger Ebert noted at the time, Brandauer brings a human element to the film . . . he is never merely a cartoon. Nor is he slumming, the way some actors will do when they feel a role is beneath them. Brandauer isn’t camping up his Largo as a lark; he is giving Largo depth. He is, in short, treating Largo as a legitimate acting job, and applying his considerable acting skills to that job. In the process, he makes his Bond villain stand out from the ultimate facelessness of his counterparts in other 007 movies.
I’ve spent an awful lot of time making a case for Klaus Maria Brandauer’s performance of Largo, considering that I started by claiming there were only three notable Bond villains (none of them Largo), and that all of the rest, no matter how interesting they seemed at first glance, eventually fade in our memories. But one must move beyond that which is easiest. James Bond always took on the greatest villainy; if I am to honor my childhood fantasy of being like James Bond, I, too, need to reach for the more difficult task. Dr. No may have set the villainous world on its path; Ernst Stavro Blofeld may have stuck around the longest; Auric Goldfinger most certainly was the greatest Bond villain of them all (he is the “easiest” choice). But I like to think James Bond would approve of my decision to promote Brandauer’s Largo. Never Say Never Again is the forgotten stepchild of Bond movies, lumped in with the ’60s parody Casino Royale as “non-canonical,” less popular at the time than the concurrent Roger Moore release, unappreciated compared to the first batch of Connery films. As such, one might imagine the creators of Never Say Never Again started with the idea that they would make something of their outsider status. If that is true, then they failed; their movie isn’t very different from the canon, after all. As Michael G. Wilson, a Bond producer, has said, “We always start out trying to make another From Russia with Love and end up with another Thunderball” (which carries special irony given the origins of Never Say Never Again). The one thing that actually makes Never Say Never Again something different is Klaus Maria Brandauer. If I had seen that film back when I was a nerd, perhaps I would have wanted to be a villain after all.
STEVEN RUBIO teaches writing and critical thinking at American River College. He has previously written on Andy Sipowicz and King Kong for the Smart Pop series. He no longer wishes he was a character in the James Bond universe.
Crowther, Bosley. “Screen: 007’s Underwater Adventures: Connery Plays Bond in ‘Thunderball’.” New York Times. 22 Dec. 1965. <http://movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html?_r=1&title1=&title2=Thunderball%20%28Movie%29&reviewer=BOSLEY%20CROWTHER&v_id=49850&partner=Rotten%20Tomatoes&oref=slogin>.
Wilson, Michael G. “From Russia With Love.” Wikipedia. 4 Apr. 2006. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Russia_with_Love>.