ONE OF THE THINGS that made Clark Gable the undisputed King of Hollywood throughout the 1930s was the fact that he was equally idolized by his male and female fans. Men wanted to be him; women wanted to be with him. His masculinity, his confidence, his strength appealed both to men who desired to possess those qualities and women who desired to be possessed by men who possessed them. The no-nonsense toughness of rubber plantation overseer Dennis Carson (Red Dust), the wisecracking cockiness of reporter Peter Warne (It Happened One Night), the heroic, underdog brashness of Fletcher Christian (Mutiny on the Bounty), the charismatic naughtiness of Barbary Coast saloon keeper Blackie Norton (San Francisco), the noble impertinence and devil-may-care bravado of Rhett Butler (Gone with the Wind): through all these roles, Gable personified a kind of dangerous male who was unafraid of life—who was, in fact, larger than life. Of course, there were many other actors who were as masculine, as confident, as strong, others who could exude his brashness and cockiness; yet none of them had that “x” factor which made Gable stand out as the reigning monarch of the screen. He had all the same things that the other great male stars had; he just had more of them. If Clara Bow was the “It” girl, then Gable was the “It” man.
Alas, the Silver Screen has never been able to produce another actor quite like Clark Gable, but it has given to the world something similar in the form not of an actor, but of a character. Since his first appearance on film in Dr. No (1962), James Bond has thrilled male and female audiences alike with his unique blend of physical strength and verbal wit, earthy machismo and worldly sophistication, debonair charm and ruthless efficiency. He is a government man with a slight touch of the vigilante, a patriot with just the faintest streak of larceny in his soul; as much the international diplomat as the naughty schoolboy, Bond embodies Gable’s ability to appeal to our love of the underdog while never losing his status as king. Whether played by Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, or Pierce Brosnan, Agent 007 has continued for over three decades to embody, simultaneously, the ultimate Man’s Man and the quintessential Lady’s Man.
There is no doubt that Bond, like Gable before him, has “It,” that he possesses to the full that elusive “x” factor which sets him apart from all the other spies and detectives and soldiers and cowboys who have graced the Silver Screen. “Nobody does it better,” sings Carly Simon in rapturous ecstasy over the opening credits of The Spy Who Loved Me, and she is exactly right. But how exactly does he do it?
Well, first of all, there are all of those wonderful gadgets. They may look to the untrained eye like regular everyday pens or watches, cigarette cases or briefcases, but they are really secret weapons, tools of the spy trade that allow our hero to extricate himself from any number of exceedingly tight spots. But, of course, the gadgets alone do not make the man. What sets the gadgetry of the Bond films apart is the subtle way in which Q’s “toys” are used within the plot. The naysayers and cynics never tire of accusing Bond films of being overly fantastic and unbelievable, but the fact of the matter is, nearly all of the gadgets featured in Bond films are facsimiles of real gadgets that either existed already or could theoretically have been constructed.
No, it is not the gadgets themselves that are fantastic, but the fact that Bond always has exactly the right gadget when he needs it. How convenient, when the villain of Thunderball throws Bond into a covered, shark-infested pool, that he should have in his pocket a miniature oxygen tank with enough air to get him safely to the open end. How serendipitous, when in Moonraker he finds himself in another pool in the Brazilian jungle with a deadly python wrapped around him, that he should just happen to have in his possession a pen with a retractable, poison-tipped stiletto. And don’t forget that exploding suitcase in From Russia with Love that (wouldn’t you know) holds inside of it a set of gold sovereigns guaranteed to seduce the villainous Robert Shaw into opening it.
Interestingly, this narrative trick of equipping the hero with just the right device for just the right danger may be traced back to one of the first heroes of Western literature, a hero whose courage, resourcefulness, and sex appeal rival those of Bond: Odysseus. In Book IX of The Odyssey, the indomitable Odysseus is able to rescue his men from the cave of a man-eating Cyclops because he just happens to have brought with him the one thing he needs to defeat the monster: a flask of tasty wine with an alcoholic content that surpasses that of Jack Daniel’s. Odysseus had no idea when he left his boat that he would actually need that particular flask of wine to save his life and those of his men, just as Bond had no idea he would specifically need his stiletto-pen when he got on the plane for Brazil. The fact that they have these unlikely weapons in their possession at the exact time they most need them does not so much stretch the credulity of the audience as enhance the mystique of the hero. These are no ordinary gadget-wielding adventurers, but creatures of fate watched over by some higher destiny. Fortune smiles on them and bestows them with the tools they will need to conquer evil and overcome the obstacles in their path.
Both the Greek sailor and the British agent are equipped to do battle in a dangerous world, but the screen spy has this advantage over the epic explorer: his high-tech toys are perfectly suited to his persona. For Bond’s gadgets (including and especially his arsenal of fully loaded cars, jets, and motorbikes) are also accessories that the well-dressed gentleman simply cannot do without. The watch that doubles as a homing device or a power saw or a plastic explosive is also a fashionable timepiece that identifies Bond as a man of refined taste and sensibility. Bond, with the help of his gadgets, will always save the day, and, it must be understood, he will always look damn good while he’s doing it.
By placing so much focus on gadgets, I may seem to be suggesting a sort of hyper-Calvinist reading of James Bond, in which the hero is predestined to succeed and can therefore take no real credit for his triumphs. Nothing could be further from the truth. Despite his gadgets, Bond ultimately survives because he knows how to think on his feet and how to outsmart the bad guys. Indeed, though Bond is an expert in every form of hand-to-hand combat, he more often uses his brains than his brawn to defeat the villains and affect his escapes.
In his how-to manual for writing award-winning tragedies, the Poetics, Aristotle argues that the plot must never be resolved by a deus ex machina, some contrivance imposed from outside the play that rescues the characters within the play from a situation they can’t resolve on their own. In many stories, novels, and films, the hero survives by just such a deus ex machina: unasked for and unexpected help arrives out of nowhere; the hero throws a desperate punch or fires a desperate shot and it saves him; the bad guy trips or blows himself up or has a change of heart. The Harry Potter films (and novels) are particularly rife with deus ex machinas—Harry is constantly being saved in the nick of time by outside forces that are generally unrelated to Harry’s own actions and strategies. (Monty Python and the Holy Grail offers a classic parody of the deus ex machina: The protagonists are miraculously saved from a rampaging cartoon monster when the animator suffers a sudden heart attack and the monster promptly disappears from the screen.)
In a similar way, most movies that feature action heroes allow them to get out of any scrape by simply throwing a harder punch (Hulk-style) or mustering a sudden burst of super-human strength. Bond, on the other hand, honestly earns his triumphs, for they rarely happen either by a chance intervention or (excepting the over-the-top Die Another Day) through a display of unbelievable physical prowess. In the best and most characteristic Bond moments, 007 survives by doing some small action that anyone in the audience could do if he had the wit or the cunning to think of it. Thus in Goldfinger, Bond defeats the essentially invincible Oddjob not with his fists but by throwing Oddjob’s steel-rimmed hat into a steel girder and then touching a live wire to the girder at the same moment Oddjob grabs the hat. In Octopussy, Bond twice saves himself from almost certain death by the simplest of actions. Bond is captured on an airfield and is being transported on the back of an open truck. Two armed men wearing parachutes sit facing him. Bond’s lady friend drives alongside them in a car and uses her sex appeal to distract the two men for a split second. In that split second, Bond simply reaches forward and pulls the ripcords on their parachutes, whereupon they are instantly sucked out of the jeep. Later in the film, Bond is pinned to the wooden door of a shack by a knife-throwing villain. Seeing that Bond has been immobilized, the bad guy pulls out another knife and rushes at Bond. But 007 simply uses his fingers (which are still free) to pull up the latch on the door. The weight of his body swings open the door just as the villain is about to stab him. The villain falls, giving Bond just enough time to free his arm and to kill the villain with the very knife he had used to pin Bond’s arm. And don’t forget the priceless moment (at the end of Licence to Kill) when Bond kills the villain (who has him at gunpoint) with a simple flick of a cigarette lighter.
No tricks here, no deus ex machinas, no impossible karate moves: just a witty and intelligent hero who is as spare and efficient with his moves as Hemingway is with his adjectives.
And that leads us to a third aspect of the Bond character that puts him in his own unique category: his unbelievable smoothness and finesse. Though it may seem strange to compare a British spy with a license to kill to a singer and dancer with a flawless sense of rhythm, James Bond and Fred Astaire actually have quite a bit in common. Whatever these two screen icons do—whether it be on a pair of skis or on a dance floor, in the cockpit of a jet or in a gazebo in the rain, in the bowels of a submarine or on the ceiling of a room—they make it look not just easy but effortless. When Bond throws his hat, it always lands on the hook by Moneypenny’s desk; when Astaire throws his cane in the air, it always comes down where he wants it to. There is a beauty, almost a poetry, to every one of their movements, and yet, despite the perfect grace of those movements, neither man ever sacrifices his masculinity or his unique sex appeal. Here, at least, are two men who have conquered the tyranny of gravity, of the stubborn, intractable resistance of matter. Even Gable himself could not inhabit a tux the way Fred did and James still does.
The lure of Bond is that of the suave, debonair man in the dinner jacket who is somehow essential for the preservation of civilization. We can rest easy at night because we know Bond is out there protecting us; yet, unlike the underpaid policemen and army grunts who actually perform this function, Bond is someone we can also imagine moving about in the highest ranks of society. What other action hero can match Bond’s fine taste in clothes, in wine, in food, in women? He is at once connoisseur and gourmet, equally knowledgeable in art, in history, and in jewelry. He even plays a mean game of baccarat. No matter the exoticism of the locale (Istanbul, Japan, Egypt, Greece, India), Bond somehow fits in: always the cosmopolitan ambassador, never the wide-eyed tourist. He always knows what to wear, what to say, how to behave; he inhabits every culture even as he rises above them all. He is the true British gentlemen, at home in every society.
And then, of course, there are those wonderful, witty lines. He nonchalantly tells the megalomaniac Dr. No that the “asylums are full of men who think they are Napoleon . . . or God”; he pauses, after flipping the thug from You Only Live Twice into a pool of piranhas, to say “Bon appetit”; when he steals a gold charm from the navel of a belly dancer (in The Man with the Golden Gun), and she cries out, “I’ve lost my charm,” he eyes her up and down and says, curtly, “Not from where I’m standing.” Just as he is never at a loss for the right gadget or the right strategy, so do words never fail him. Whether he is making a dry comment about a villain he has just disposed of or a sexy double entendre, he is always in absolute control. Indeed, as good as the lines are themselves, Bond’s steely-eyed delivery is what really makes them work. Like a millionaire throwing gold coins from his Rolls Royce, Bond tosses off his verbal bonbons as though he possesses an inexhaustible supply. There is nothing stingy about James Bond.
And yet, despite Bond’s overwhelming charisma and resourcefulness, we peons in the audience are able somehow to identify with him. Bond is not, after all, a totally free agent. He is a government employee answerable to a hierarchy of bureaucrats who are often quick to cut him down a few notches. Despite his lavish expense accounts, he is by no means an independently wealthy aristocrat. Indeed, for all his wit and charm, he is not an aristocrat at all. He is, in many ways, what Dr. No calls him in the very first Bond film: an underpaid British policeman. Especially in the early Connery films, Bond is often portrayed as something of an upstart who resists doing things by company rules. In Goldfinger, he literally has to talk himself out of engaging in a drag race with a pretty girl in a sports car. No matter how many times he saves mankind from the threat of world domination, he still has to put up with an occasional tongue-lashing from the choleric M, who won’t even spare him a few minutes for sexual repartee with Miss Moneypenny.
Yes, the great James Bond has a boss, and, as such, he wins the hearts of everyone in the audience who must suffer under a similar tyranny. Though, by the end of the film, he has usually won the adulation of both M and the prime minister, he generally spends the first half as the proverbial prophet who is without honor in his own hometown. He is, that is to say, a sophisticated man of the world who is also, paradoxically, a hero of the masses. As such, he is like good King Harry who, in Shakespeare’s Henry V, puts aside his royal robes one evening and walks in secret amongst his troops.
During the 1970s and ’80s, when Roger Moore gave us his seven-film run as 007, the relationship between Bond and M tended to be a bit less sharp and abrasive, though Bond never fully lost his edge and was not above being misunderstood by those in power. More recently, the pendulum has swung back to the more disenchanted Bond of the Connery days. In Licence to Kill, Timothy Dalton spends most of the picture as a rogue agent pursuing a private vendetta. In the four Pierce Brosnan films that followed, Bond is given a new bureaucratic counterpart: a female M (played wonderfully by Judi Dench) who knows well how to cut her hotshot agent down to size. If Roger Moore’s Bond has to learn to deal with the liberated woman, Brosnan’s has to learn to deal with the woman in authority (and Dench, who has played both Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria, knows well how to wield authority). If the working stiffs of the ’60s could identify with Connery’s rebellion against authority, the dispossessed men of the ’90s could identify with Brosnan’s struggles to assert his authority and male initiative over against M’s threat of emasculation.
Needless to say, he succeeds.
Which leads us to the fifth and final aspect of the James Bond character that has allowed him to continue his royal reign on the Silver Screen for over thirty years. Like Gable before him, Bond is the ultimate Lady’s Man. Indeed, we read his masculinity as much in his physique as we do in the eyes of the ladies who gaze on him with such desire. Whereas the typical action hero is given one main girl as his companion and love interest, Bond is always given two, the first of which is generally killed by the villain while the second survives the film and ends up making love to James in a boat as the closing credits scroll down the screen. Bond’s charm and charisma are overwhelming—almost a force of nature. He draws beautiful women to himself like the North Pole draws compass needles.
But Bond’s sexual prowess alone is not responsible for his royal status. What sets him apart is the way in which his liaisons spark a profound change in the characters of the women he seduces. The fiercely suspicious and independent Honey Ryder (Dr. No), the frigid and passionless Pussy Galore (Goldfinger), the bitter Russian agent who vows to kill Bond at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me, the angry and domineering May Day in A View to a Kill: all are literally transformed by their romantic encounters with James Bond (just as Circe the proto-feminist witch is both feminized and domesticated by Odysseus in Odyssey X). If I may be allowed such an analogy, I can only compare this process to that of a baptism. Sex with 007 is more than just a pleasurable experience; it is a purifying one, as well.
In some ways, the prevalence of this almost mystical ritual is highlighted most strongly in those few Bond films where it does not happen. Thus, in Thunderball, the very naughty Fiona, who continues to work for the bad guys even after she has slept with Bond, taunts the British agent for thinking that any woman who sleeps with him will suddenly hear heavenly choirs and return to the side of right and virtue. (No surprise that she ends up dead by the end of the picture!) Indeed, Fiona is so shocking, so outrageous, in her refusal to be transformed by Bond’s sexual baptism that she gets to do it all over again in Never Say Never Again (an unofficial Bond outing starring Connery that is actually a remake of Thunderball). Even better than Fiona is the lovely but wicked Elektra who, in The World Is Not Enough, not only proves immune to Bond’s charms but uses her own sexual gifts to lure the male villain into serving her mad ambitions. (Elektra, no surprise, also ends up dead.) But the majority are not like Fiona or Elektra. For most of the Bond women, their romantic interlude with 007 releases them to be better or freer or braver than they were before.
As Peter Warne, Gable taught spoiled rich heiress Ellie Andrews how to be real, honest, and alive; as Blackie Norton, he taught the stuffy Mary Blake how to loosen up and enjoy life; as Rhett Butler, he taught the vain and egocentric Scarlett O’Hara how to step off her high horse and accept herself for who and what she is. Bond does the same, not only for the many women who love him, but for the men who look up to him as an embodiment of what they could be if they only had the courage and the class.
Nobody does it better? You bet your life.
LOUIS MARKOS (http://fc.hbu.edu/~lmarkos) is a professor in English at Houston Baptist University, where he also teaches courses on film. He is the author of Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern & Postmodern World (Broadman & Holman) and The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis (a lecture series produced by The Teaching Company).