A new villain, spectacular chases, suave as ever and heavily armed with double entendres – Bond is back, says Philip French
Pierce Brosnan, the screen’s fifth 007, makes his third appearance as the playboy hero of the Western world in The World Is Not Enough. He was two years old when James Bond sprang from the pages of Casino Royale five decades ago. Fittingly, Ian Fleming’s first, possibly best, novel was reviewed in Time magazine alongside Raymond Chandler’s last significant book, the elegiac The Long Goodbye. The honourable private eye going down those mean streets was giving way to the secret agent negotiating the labyrinth of the Cold War.
Only gradually did Fleming become a bestselling author, but the Bond cult grew steadily, reaching its apotheosis in the 1961 White House announcement that president John F Kennedy was a fan, and receiving scholarly validation three years later with Kingsley Amis’s The James Bond Dossier. Paralleling this was an anti-Bond movement of great ferocity. In 1957, John Raymond’s New Statesman review of From Russia with Love had saluted Fleming as a popular writer of genius. The following year in the same journal, Paul Johnson denounced Bond as a sadistic fascist; his views were widely echoed, one critic going so far as to call Bond “a blood brother to General Massu”, the liberal’s current bte noire.
This was the atmosphere into which the first Bond movie, Dr No, starring the unknown Sean Connery, was released in the autumn of 1962. Although Fleming lived for another couple of years and wrote three further novels, the film of Dr No was the point at which Commander Bond passed out of his hands into those of the producers, Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, whose daughter Barbara now manages the franchise. Fleming never achieved his ambition of matching Chandler and writing “a thriller that was also a work of literature”.
None of the movies based on his books has been as good as his favourite picture, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. But like Sherlock Holmes, Bertie Wooster and Philip Marlowe, all versions of the English gentleman created by earlier British public schoolboys, Fleming’s hero transcended his creator. Bond has taken on an identity of his own that his manipulators have carefully gauged to fit the times, a process examined in James Chapman’s Cultural History of the James Bond Films: Licence to Thrill.
Bond has endured. He has fought off imitators like Matt Helm and Derek Flint, cinematic opponents drawn from the novels of Len Deighton and John le Carr, and endless rip-offs, one of them starring Sean Connery’s brother, Neil. He has survived the disappearance of Swinging London, the decline of patriotism, the challenge of political correctness, the age of safe sex. His first superiors as MI6 chiefs, Bernard Lee and Geoffrey Keene, were both non-commissioned officers in that key Cold War movie, The Third Man; the current chief, played by Judi Dench, famous for impersonating the queens Elizabeth and Victoria, is a flirtatious and motherly feminist.
But while the Bond movies fed on Cold War angst, they dodged the actual conflict itself, preferring to engage with sybaritic megalomaniacs like Ernst Stavro Blofeld of Spectre rather than the real men from Smersh and the KGB. These sinister opponents inhabited underground kingdoms, part rocket silos, part renaissance palaces, designed by Ken Adam, whose sets and ingenious devices were central to the series. Currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery, Adam created the Bond world and his contribution to the series is arguably more important than Connery’s.
Until the Nineties, the producers employed British journeymen directors. Only in the last decade have they engaged younger men of a more independent disposition – Martin Campbell, Roger Spottiswoode and, for The World Is Not Enough, Michael Apted, not that you’d greatly notice the shift.
Bond composed haikus in You Only Live Twice and the films are as precise, formal and witty as those Japanese poems, though rather longer. We expect a rousing pre-credit sequence – and The World Is Not Enough provides not one but two. Together they last 20 minutes and probably cost the gross national product of an average Third World country. In the first, Bond (an increasingly confident Pierce Brosnan) has a lethal showdown in Bilbao with Swiss bankers whose offices are in the same street as the new Guggenheim Museum.
Two more cinematic firsts of an architectural kind follow in the second pre-credit sequence, a boat chase along the Thames from the new MI6 headquarters at Millbank (which is virtually blown apart) to the Millennium Dome at Greenwich.
This is virtuoso stuff, in which two of the movie’s strongest actors – Patrick Malahide and David Calder – are casually killed. The audience needs the credits to recover its breath and of course we’re regaled with elegant thematic graphics in the Maurice Binder-style (silhouettes of writhing girls and sexy oil pumps, orgasmic spurts of black gold), accompanied by a title song performed by the fashionable group Garbage.
Then M, from her temporary headquarters in a Scottish castle, dispatches Bond to the Middle East to pursue an insane terrorist, the former KGB agent Renard (Robert Carlyle), who is plotting to destroy the essential oil pipeline being built by Elektra, a plutocrat’s daughter (Sophie Marceau). While infiltrating Renard’s gang, Bond meets American nuclear scientist Christmas Jones (Denise Richards).
Nothing is as good as those first 20 minutes. There is some creaky plotting and the post-Cold War villain is nasty in a commonplace way and, being realistically peripatetic, has need for a subterranean palace to luxuriate in. Desmond Llewellyn’s Q prepares to bow out and, somewhat unwisely, is preparing to hand over his workshop to the neurotic John Cleese.
But M is in the field this time, pluckily putting herself at risk; the pace is that of a high-velocity bullet; a buzz-saw hanging from a helicopter, designed to clear forests, carves up buildings and Bond’s BMW as if slicing the Sunday joint. Christmas Jones, we learn, is so called in order that Bond, the double-entendre agent, can have the climactic pay-off line: “I thought Christmas came only once a year.”
The single authentic bit of Ian Fleming is to be found in the movie’s title. Though no one explains its provenance, it derives from the last book published in Fleming’s lifetime, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, in which 007 visits the College of Arms to examine his family tree and is informed that the Bond family motto is “The World Is Not Enough”.
My advice to the producers of the Bond movies is that they should now acquire the rights to Fleming’s Casino Royale, disastrously filmed by other hands in 1967, and get the 21st century off to a good start by remaking it.