The concept of the female spy permanently ruptured the polarized good/bad images of women in Anglo-American dominant cinema and television. Film noir had much to do with this, as did Hitchcock, and the short-lived sub-genre of the caper comedy provides a unique conflation of postwar cinematic influences and 1960s sexuality, further destabilizing traditional female imagery on screen. Ursula Andress’ Vesper Lynd in the multidirectional Bond spoof, Casino Royale (Val Guest et al. 1967), is no ordinary femme fatale, but arguably the most remarkable female character of the entire decade’s espionage genre, for her vast independent power and wealth. The 1967 Vesper Lynd also echoes Andress’ role in the first Bond film Dr. No (Terence Young 1962) as it intertexts with the “real” Bond series and conflates the other sexually domineering characters she previously portrayed.
Much has been written about the unfinished qualities of the 1967
Casino Royale. While it is true that Peter Sellers dropped out of the project leaving his role incomplete, and that segments from three credited screenwriters and five credited directors provided such varied narrative arcs that director Val Guest was asked by producer Charles K. Feldman to ensure continuity in the editing room, the film should be considered a classic because it embraced the feel of the era’s “Happening.” Although a spy spoof, the film’s actual sub-genre might be called “psychedelic mainstream cinema,” which was first attempted with
The Loved One (Tony Richardson 1965) and
What’s New Pussycat? (Clive Donner and Richard Talmadge 1965). As the response to the demise of studio-based cinema, these destabilizing and self-subversive social satires dared to take on aspects of life, death, identity, capitalism, the American middle class, and the British upper class in a way that was anathema to Hollywood censorship. Nevertheless, the screwball comedy-as-hallucination did not just appear but had been birthed by pushing the envelope even further on social and political farces of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The more brazen independent films of Billy Wilder such as
One, Two, Three (1961) are seminal to the mix, but so are John Boulting’s comedies with Peter Sellers, such as
Carlton-Browne of the F.O. (1959), and Stanley Kubrick’s
Lolita (1962) and
Dr. Strangelove (1964), which literally took the proverbial gloves off as to what could be shown and how. With the birth of the James Bond films in 1962, which re-visioned Hitchcock—particularly
North By Northwest (1959)—and the sub-genre of the caper films in which traditional morality was questioned, iconoclastic satire needed only a dose of “mod” cool and the visual emulation of hallucinogens to reach the zenith of
Casino Royale in 1967.
In the glut of the spy films and spoofs of the 1960s, mainstream international cinema offered only three true attempts at creating a female James Bond with all the power and sexuality that the concept entailed. Joseph Losey’s Felliniesque Modesty Blaise (1966), based on the popular French comic strip, offered a talented female spy, but unlike her morally superior male counterparts, she was a master thief and associated with the underworld. Her independence, rejection of the intelligence establishment, and nontraditional sexual mores might have developed into a strong proto-feminist series, but traditional critics and audiences rejected a liberated female as hero because of the moral ambiguity. Frank Tashlin’s slapdash Caprice (1967), with Doris Day in a title role she despised, pretends to be a female version of the male spy spoof, but is actually about corporate espionage. Day’s Caprice is a thin reworking of her career-women characters of the late 1950s, and even her flirtation with casual sex is so convoluted as to slip by without any ramifications to character or plot development (Dassanowsky, “Caper” 108).
It is Andress’ Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale that attains a memorable quality of power, wealth, and an independent lifestyle that have little to do with patriarchy. Andress’ Lynd, along with David Niven’s Sir James Bond, Joanna Pettet’s Mata Bond, and Woody Allen’s Jimmy Bond/Dr. Noah, are the only fully developed characters in the 1967 Casino Royale that provide a through-line for the episodic, fragmented narrative. Andress and Niven also returned to the film to shoot additional scenes to provide linkages for new (sub-)plot directions, and despite the intentional cameo feel to the cast, the film is anchored by their personalities and roles. It was a particular coup of the filmmakers to employ Andress as the lead female role, given her Bond film pedigree, and to some extent her character is linked with Honey Ryder in such a way as to suggest they might actually be the same person.
THE B(L)OND GIRL: TRADITION AND EXCEPTION
Andress was a difficult fit for Hollywood’s imported glamour girl phase of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Her German-Swiss accent was too heavy and she was re-voiced in her first films, including
Dr. No. Her classic, statuesque look would often connect her with Greco-Roman imagery, but her intelligent, often purposive expressiveness made her an unsuccessful match for Elvis Presley, who normally dominated his blander female co-stars on screen, in
Fun in Acapulco (Richard Thorpe 1963). In
4 For Texas (Robert Aldrich 1963), an all-star western that vacillated between cliché and spoof, Andress and her female co-star, Anita Ekberg, who became an international icon with
La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini 1960), were obviously cast to exploit their fashionable exotic starlet status. But Andress’ more enigmatic and larger than life roles in
She (Robert Day 1965),
What’s New Pussycat?, and
The Blue Max (John Guillermin 1966) revealed her to be a talented and self-aware performer especially adept in playing the icy
femme fatale. This made her somewhat of an acquired taste and certainly limited her roles. Even in period costume, or in more dramatic parts as the adulterous wife of General Count von Klugermann, who chafes at the limitations of her freedom in the World War I German flying ace saga,
The Blue Max, Andress was encouraged to exploit an inscrutable domineering quality that had quickly become her trademark. The year before, she had mocked her goddess image by descending from the sky with a parachute and demanding that a befuddled Peter O’Toole join her in bed in
What’s New Pussycat?. In the same film, Peter Sellers’ character defends himself from his wife’s accusations of infidelity with Andress in an obviously improvised response when he points out that she “is a close personal friend of James Bond!”
In the original Fleming novel
Casino Royale (1953),
1 Vesper Lynd was Bond’s passive love interest who betrays him, and in the 2006 film directed by Martin Campbell she was presented as a sensitive and conflicted double agent. In the 1967
Casino Royale, however, the character was tailored to the Amazonian-like quality that Andress had first suggested in
Dr. No and since developed in such roles as
She. In this historical fantasy, Andress delivers a commanding interpretation of Ayesha, the immortal high-priestess queen known as “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.” The blend of seduction and cruel manipulation seems like an audition for
Casino Royale, where she adapts the type to slightly more human parameters in her mythic Lynd. More than a decade and a half later, her role as Aphrodite opposite Laurence Olivier’s Zeus in
Clash of the Titans (Desmond Davis 1981) revisited the super-woman qualities she projected in
She and it became one of her notable international film appearances.
Lisa Funnell argues that the early “Bond Girls” were vulnerable sexual objects, and those with any agency were the “enemy”, unless converted by Bond like Pussy Galore in
Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton 1964). Females with true authority were masculinized and middle-aged, having no sexual attraction for Bond: Rosa Klebb in
From Russia with Love (Terence Young 1963) and Irma Bunt in Peter Hunt’s 1969 film
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (“From English” 64-6; “Negotiating” 203-4). This makes Andress’ Lynd a major rupture in the conception of the Bond myth as it applies to women and sexuality, even though the 1967
Casino Royale is not part of the official Eon series. The central subplot in the film involving Lynd, Bond, and the casino game with Le Chiffre is nevertheless rooted in Fleming’s novel. Lynd’s betrayal of Bond in that novel would have given the cinematic Bond no “good” girl to play with or convert, but Lynd, as Fleming wrote her, would also fit with the “bad” girls of the early series since their limited power is manipulated by a male authority and leads to their demise. While Andress’ Lynd does betray the Sellers’ Bond-for-a-day by killing him, she admits her motivation as she points a gun at her “boss” Sir James Bond (David Niven):
Sir James (on the phone): I want London, Whitehall double O – O7
Lynd: (pushing down the receiver hook and pointing gun at him): Too bad you won’t get it Sir James. I went through a lot of trouble to bring you here.
Sir James: Dear Vesper, the things you do for money.
Lynd: This time it’s for love, Sir James (indicating with the gun)…back to the office!
The film’s new Connery-style Bond, Cooper (Terence Cooper), interrupts her by announcing that American aid has arrived. Lynd runs for cover, but makes it to heaven with the other “good” characters after the casino explodes, because of her confession that she was motivated by love.
Sellers had taken the role in an attempt to refashion his strongly character-oriented comic image into a more romantic-comedy hero. He envisaged the transformation of the easily intimidated baccarat expert, Evelyn Tremble, into a surface imitation of a serious James Bond, albeit with an underlying comedic wit that would be more screwball Cary Grant than the grotesques he played for Kubrick (Lolita, Dr. Strangelove). But it was his success in playing the eccentric sex-mad Austrian psychoanalyst in What’s New Pussycat? opposite Andress, Capucine, and O’Toole that gave the 1967 Casino Royale producer Charles K. Feldman the ultimate concept for presenting a Bond film without Sean Connery—another mod “event” film reuniting many of the stars from Pussycat. Sellers’ dissatisfaction with his segment director Joseph McGrath, whom he had campaigned to get onto the film, and the intimidation Sellers felt from the grandstanding of Orson Welles, resulted in his departure. But in leaving, Lynd’s relationship with his character had to change as well. Sellers’ Bond had to be killed off and Feldman would bring in the other directors to build a new multidirectional film around the Sellers and Andress footage.
The experience had nevertheless changed Sellers’ idea of his own star persona and following his pairing with Andress, most of his subsequent films placed him in the role of a lover with an attractive “leading lady.” What survives of the original expanded relationship scenes between Andress’ Lynd and Seller’s Bond surfaces in a brief druggy-dream sequence and still photos. It is clear that the characters had a deeper relationship than the one-night-stand that makes up the center of the finished film, which Lynd uses to seduce him into being Bond and according to Sir James’ orders, to destroy Le Chiffre at a baccarat game at the Casino Royale. As in the novel, Lynd is kidnapped following the victory over Le Chiffre, and Sellers’ Bond goes after her and ends up being tortured by Le Chiffre. It is not the scrotum beating of the novel or the 2006 film, although as a nod to the novel Seller’s Bond discovers a chair with a hole in the seat and questions it. Instead, Le Chiffre subjects him to an LSD-influenced and electronic “torture of the mind.” Bond hallucinates his imprisonment in a Scottish castle, and a perilous collision with a battalion of threatening Scottish pipers and Lynd’s appearance to save him, which breaks through the hallucination but also takes on its qualities as well. Dressed as a Scottish piper, Lynd uses her bagpipe machine gun to eradicate the threat. Had Sellers remained with the film, Andress’ Lynd
might have been the first Bond Girl to have true agency and be on the side of “good” decades before what Funnell describes as the Action Hero Bond Girl stage of the series, where particularly “Jinx” Johnson (Halle Berry) in
Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori 2002) displays professional prowess, sexuality, and an independence equal to Bond (“From English” 77). Lynd, however, gives a final statement on the amoral nature of espionage and her own immense success in it before she also guns him down and out of the film: “Mr. Tremble…never trust a rich spy.”
PUTTING ON AND PLAYING (WITH) THE (GENDER) ROLE
Dual representations of mythic superiority essentially subvert traditional gender roles in the 1967 film. Sir James is the elite aesthete in lordly retirement, whereas Lynd is the consummate international business tycoon. Bargaining over the quantity of nuclear warheads to offer France for purchase of the Eiffel Tower, she changes her mind about buying Rockefeller Center, and moves the statue of Lord Nelson from its Trafalgar Square column to outside her living room terrace. “Isn’t he beautiful?” she comments, appreciating the idealized male figure in the way men gaze at women. Although she “saves all her energies for business,” Sir James manages to persuade her to take on the mission of creating a baccarat playing Bond by appealing to that sensibility and suggests the possibility of leniency in her case of “just over five million pounds tax arrears.” The process of Lynd’s seduction of Evelyn Tremble in order to fashion an imitation Bond is now the most appreciated aspect of a film that has never been favored by critics. “The Look of Love,” sung by Dusty Springfield, underscores Lynd’s sexual-psychological refashioning of Tremble’s shyness into confidence by showing him, beyond his belief, that he
can have her. But it is also here that symbolism and cinematic intertext allows insight into what Lynd represents in her time and in film in general—as a woman who “creates” Bond. The year 1967 is known for other transgressive flips on traditional morality and the dominant male/passive female binary in international cinema: the tragic frustrations and sexual diversion of Mrs. Robinson in
The Graduate (Mike Nichols 1967); the cannibalization of an abusive man by his bourgeois wife in Jean-Luc Godard’s
Weekend (1967); and the relative gender equality of desire and violence in
Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn 1967).
Michael Stringer’s immense and lavish set designs for Casino Royale not only outdo previous Eon Bond series films and influence those to come, but they specifically associate Lynd with empowering symbolic imagery throughout the film. Most notably, her entry door bears the large golden bas relief of a goddess face wearing a sunburst crown. Two monumental Grecian goddess caryatids, suggesting those from the Erechtheion temple dedicated to Athena (goddess of wisdom, courage, inspiration, and skill) at the Acropolis in Greece, are visible in her immense office earlier in the film, and there is a long Grecian frieze resembling a portion of the Elgin Marbles (from the Parthenon, also dedicated to Athena) that hangs over the elevator conversation pit in her apartment. She is able to dispatch the bodies of her victims via an interior shaft exposed by a sliding fake oven panel, a wry twist on the woman’s traditional role association with the kitchen and the concept of housekeeping. It is a male servant she calls on her intercom phone to remind him to empty “the deep freeze first thing in the morning.” There are also clues that she may be a version of Ryder from Dr. No, the highly independent beachcomber, perhaps converted through her adventure with Connery’s Bond to become a spy. Ryder’s capitalist impulses in selling her shells along with her physical self-awareness and instinctive mistrust of men (i.e. brandishing a dagger on Bond and relating how she killed a man that raped her) are amplified and transformed in Lynd. When Sir James claims “the whole world believes that you were eaten by a shark, Miss Lynd” she replies with ennui, “That was no shark, that was my personal submarine.”
Lynd is associated with water—the female element—which is also the “home” of Ryder who emerges from the sea foam like a modern-day Botticelli “Venus” in the iconic scene in Dr. No. In a striking tracking shot in Casino Royale, the camera shoots in slow motion through and across a wall-length aquarium in Lynd’s apartment, as she leads Tremble across the room, seemingly floating to her lair. There are elements of skin diving equipment, particularly a spear gun, displayed on a wall in her kitchen. She shoves Tremble into a shower and douses him with cold water when he is drugged by Miss Goodthighs and loses confidence in himself prior to the casino game. Lynd is “just about getting into the bath” as Sir James attempts to warn her about Tremble on Q’s “two-way television and radio wristwatch.” Above her tub hangs a large pop-art painting of a female eye peering out of blades of grass and flower petals. Whether meant to be the eye of the goddess, an emblem of the female in nature, or a symbol of spying, it is a telling visual element that signals a shift in power dynamics. With Lynd, women can also occupy the gaze that Bond has.
Vesper Lynd circa 1967 is the subject of voyeuristic pleasure for both genders in the audience that oscillates between baiting male desire as an erotic object and empowering the female gaze. Postcoitally, she films Tremble posing on a revolving bed and captures him “in a ridiculous striped outfit of no discernable category—a one-piece affair with shorts and a revealing V-neck (in the back), a sort of Matelot pajama” (Sikov 253). But as he playfully looks at her upside down from a prone position that mocks Golden Age Hollywood female sex symbol poses, the film’s wide shot of this tableau is suddenly edited upside down for several frames. Lynd’s “home movies” allow her symbolic control of the visual for a brief moment and foreshadow her ultimate control of this character, but the edit suggests it is nevertheless Tremble’s male-dominant view (upside-down) that controls the film’s simulacrum of reality. Lynd is also a still photographer with a fully stocked dark room in her mirror-lined fuchsia bedroom. The viewer becomes aware of the male performativity of dominance and its absurdity when overlaid on the Bond manqué of Tremble through her eyes and again through her lens, as she costumes him as hyper-power icons Hitler and Napoleon, but also as Toulouse-Lautrec, with Sellers on his knees and Andress towering over him with her light meter. This sequence is a metaphoric framework for her creation of a Bond imitation as it simultaneously subverts the historical myths of male superiority as a “putting on.” She destabilizes and reverses the traditional heterosexual dyad by being his educator, guide, and protector but ultimately kills him (she is in male drag at the time as a Scottish piper) when he becomes problematic to her own agenda. Along with her ambiguous amorality, Lynd’s photographing of Tremble as Hitler is evocative of Leni Riefenstahl in her visual creation of the “heroic” image of the physically unimpressive leader in
Triumph of the Will (1935).
Throughout the film, Lynd’s self-conscious exhibitionism and her own empowering female gaze that objectifies men must undermine John Berger’s limiting concept that in classic cinema “men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” (47) for the audience of the era. Mary Ann Doane’s solution to Laura Mulvey’s insistence that women must identify with the masculine gaze given the patriarchal construction of society and dominant cinema, is that a woman must “masquerade as spectator” (not as a theoretical transvestite as Mulvey would have it) to distance herself from her own male-objectified image (Femmes 26). Indeed, this is the most important aspect of the 1967 Vesper Lynd character—she is a metaphor for a gender/ spectator masquerade that allows the gaze without the loss of being gazed upon. She is a mythic feminine leader in the male world of hyper-finance, a female James Bond, and mirrors her status in the masking of Tremble, a passive man (with a feminine name) as an iconic, dominant one. There is, however, a proto-feminist impulse at work in Joseph McGrath’s empowerment of Andress’ Lynd to balance out the excess of Sellers’ self-depreciating improvisational comedy. Unlike all other Bond Girls of the era who are basically Bond’s sexual projections, Lynd interrupts the Bond mythos and the masculine gaze with a gaze wholly her own, albeit as a “superior woman” fantasy. She indicates this with her own cameras, through which she also blatantly deconstructs the very thing she is charged with “creating”—and which the audience has come to fantasize about—a powerful alpha male.
The 1967 Lynd hides from the world as her evolved female cannot co-exist in a traditionally male dominated space, but only in her own esoteric economy. At the same time, however, she mocks traditional female roles and spaces. Her character stands alone among the short-lived power-villain roles in the genre of 1960s spy film, which were actually reactionary responses to growing female liberation consciousness and manufactured to validate male guidance and authority. Yet Lynd’s sharp intellect is replaced with ill-fitting emotionalism during her last minutes on screen—it is not clear who or what she loved—and the response, which only emulates a formulaic narrative twist of betrayal, is a cinematic slap in the spectator’s face for believing that Lynd might be more than a tease.
CONCLUSION: FORGETTING THE GODDESS
In her article “‘I Know Where You Keep Your Gun’: Daniel Craig as the Bond–Bond Girl Hybrid in Casino Royale” Funnell argues that:
Bond and the Bond Girl have been merged into a single figure. The evolutionary nature of both characters renders them suitable for hybridization. The Bond–Bond Girl composite maintains the British identity and male sex of the title character. Aligned with Hollywood models of masculinity, the conflation of Craig’s contradictory body presents him as physical, heroic and thus masculine while engaged in action, and feminized through youth, spectacle and passivity to the gaze when disengaged from physical activity. (466)
Ironically, it is Craig’s re-presentation of the first significant erotic gaze in Bond film history, by emerging from the sea in the same way that Andress did in
Dr. No, which is essential in the ontology of this hybrid of Bond-Bond Girl. In the 1967
Casino Royale, Andress is first seen in her office, wearing her exotic elephant boy outfit, followed by obedient male assistants and secretaries, who hang on the nuances of every order she gives. While Connery’s Bond sees Andress from the beach, in a subjective, voyeuristic gaze the audience shares, Andress’ Lynd is spied on by Sir James, in a self-conscious statement on voyeurism and on Andress as an actress whose career is positioned as spectacle. He has gained access to her office and spies at her from behind a potted tree, parting the leaves with his fingers so that his eye gains access and becomes the central aspect of the medium close-up shot. It is a reference, of course, to Connery’s Bond seeing Andress for the first time in
Dr. No. However, the actual
erotic gaze of the “celibate” and highly moral Sir James on Lynd comes later in this film, as he attempts to sneak a peak of her getting into the bath on his television wristwatch. Lynd covers the watch face screen with her hand to block his view, and with the painting of the large female eye hanging over her bathtub and seemingly staring at the audience, the scene symbolically flips the gender control of the cinematic gaze from male to female.
Lynd manipulates Tremble and the audience by moving between a hypersexual Bond Girl image and that of the power female. She first lures Tremble to her home by telling him she is reading his baccarat study but that there are “several passes in your book that I don’t fully understand” while he is dumbstruck by her very presence. She continues by telling him she cannot remember the specific chapter, and so she would need to consult the book, which is in her bed. Her intelligence and underlying calculation adds the frisson of a slight dominatrix quality to the initial meetings with Tremble. She begins their conversation by recalling the playful disbelief James Bond exhibits upon learning a Bond Girl’s sexually suggestive name: Lynd: “I thought Evelyn was a girl’s name?” / Tremble: “No…its mine…actually.” The conversation is ended with Lynd’s challenging stare at Tremble while her gloved hand firmly grasps and strongly pulls the phallic slot machine handle (she fondled one with a bright red knob earlier) to a clattering release of coins. The message of Lynd’s sexual domination is not lost on Tremble or the audience. Even after he has been trained to be “Bond” this dynamic remains. At a moment of insecurity in the casino manager’s office prior to the game, the normally icy Lynd gives a performance of sensitive female reassurance complete with whispered voice and tender smile as she tells him, “don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.” And in the parlance of a hitwoman, she eventually does.
It is clear that the Bond-Bond Girl hybridization apparent in Craig’s characterization of the millennial Bond was attempted in reverse by the creation of Andress’ hybrid Bond Girl-Bond blend in 1967, and it fed on the tropes and clichés that began with Connery and Andress in Dr. No. Interestingly, that first meeting is recontextualized as a tribute with Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry in Die Another Day, and revisited with the gender role flip with Craig in the 2006 Casino Royale. Either as parody or as action/drama, the mix of Bond and Lynd causes some gender role destabilization in its reflection of the original Connery-Andress relationship in 1962.
Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd of 2006 recalls a bit of Andress in her initial dominant quality and the Grecian cut of her casino gowns, but the film ultimately reframes the 1967 pseudo-goddess fantasy as an officious bureaucratic figure. The impossible super-fe/male has become a politically correct authority image. Unlike the arrogant, self-assured, mythically powerful 1967 incarnation, the new Lynd is aware of her loaned power, is openly but not fetishistically sexual, and yet is obviously sophisticated beyond the neophyte Bond whom she also educates. While Fleming’s postwar Bond novel reasserts male dominance and the danger of female agency with the betrayal of Lynd, the 1967 version is a prismatic translation of the original relationship. True to the intended kaleidoscopic and necessitated patchwork quality of the film, the emphasis is on questioning perception, bending reflection, and creating destabilization. Andress’ Lynd began as reference to her previous Bond Girl in what would become a sprawling Bond satire, and was inventively swayed into a bold exercise on female authority by the production disruptions of Sellers and the need to re-anchor the narrative(s). The post-Cold War Lynd of 2006 is only nominally aligned to the values of espionage, and although she expects agency and mentors to desires that ultimately destroy her, she does so on a very human scale.
NOTE