When James Bond dies
Just about every kid I knew when I was growing up wanted to be James Bond, which really meant we wanted to be Sean Connery playing James Bond.
There are some things that aren’t a matter of taste, at least not if you have good taste—you don’t, for instance, order your rib-eye well-done and then pour ketchup over what’s left of the carcass. Or add soda to a glass of 21-year-old Balvenie.
And you also don’t question the claim that the first official Bond was the best Bond.
Connery was the best because he captured the menace, brutishness, and even cruelty lurking beneath the tuxedos and baccarat and appreciation for vodka martinis and sports cars. He “defined” Bond forever after, even for those of us who read the Ian Fleming books over and over and realized that he wasn’t entirely what the author had in mind. When you hear the words “Bond, James Bond” it is impossible to suppress the image of Connery lighting that cigarette with the half-smirk on his face.
The first five Bond Connery films, from Dr. No up through You Only Live Twice, are the five best Bond movies, in whichever order you want to put them (like favorite Beatles songs, I keep changing my mind over time).
All of which means that I’ve always also viewed his successor, Roger Moore, who passed away recently at the stately age of 89, with some ambivalence.
The Saint was one of my favorite childhood TV shows (along with the likes of Star Trek, The Wild Wild West, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.). And the guy who played Simon Templar seemed a natural successor to Connery.
And for a while he was—the first two Moore Bond films—Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun were respectable enough, still human-sized and played mostly straight, even if some of the silliness that had crept in with Diamonds Are Forever had spread.
Moore peaked with his next one, The Spy Who Loved Me, opposite perhaps the loveliest Bond girl of them all, Barbara Bach (has there ever been a luckier fellow in so many ways than Ringo Starr?). After that it was largely downhill with each successive installment, from the rest of Moore’s run through the Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan editions.
The fault, in general, wasn’t so much the actors, although, again, the shadow of Connery loomed large, as the tone. Moore increasingly played it for cornball laughs and parody—Bond was always a comic book for adults, but under Connery the spy business at least retained sufficient elements of danger and lethality adding up to a reasonable suspension of disbelief. As the fight scene on the train with Robert Shaw’s character in From Russia with Love can readily confirm.
Alas, Moore’s Bond films featured gadgets and special effects, embarrassing puns, and camp, while the Dalton versions were simply dreary and uninspiring, as if caught between the two stools of Connery and Moore. By Brosnan’s turn it was virtually all chase scenes and bigger explosions and Bond was doing things—mowing down the arch-villain’s minions with a machine gun and wheeling around in a tank in Red Square—that Bond should never do (the man was, after all, a secret agent, not Rambo the commando!).
But Roger Moore passing away still hurt. Part of the reason we wanted to be Bond was that Bond never died. Rather than simply taking out a gun and shooting the nemesis who persistently foiled their plans for world domination, Goldfinger or Blofeld or Dr. No or whomever SPECTRE or SMERSH tossed up always tried to do Bond in through some overly complex method of execution in order to prove their claims of genius.
Which meant Bond always got out of it somehow and completed his mission, with the girl in tow.
It eventually took a couple more decades after Moore for Daniel Craig to bring back some of Connery’s hard edge, but the films are now little more than amusement park rides featuring a series of chase scenes and improbable stunts pasted together by a thin tissue of convoluted plot. Such are the demands placed upon a franchise by a market increasingly dominated by 14-year-old fan boys.
The idea of a suave MI-6 agent to whom his CIA counterparts always played second fiddle was one of the two major cultural exports to buoy dreary post-war Britain (the other of course being The Beatles and the “British invasion”).
And the one thing that Connery and Moore had in common, despite their vastly different approaches to the character, was an unflappable “cool” that looked not forward to Tony Blair’s faux “cool Britannia” but back to the stoicism of Churchill, the heroism of the Battle of Britain, and the ingenuity of the code-breakers at Bletchley Park.
M, Moneypenny, Q, that wondrous Aston Martin, and the Walther PPK were some of the furniture of childhood. And among my most prized possessions were a pair of desktop statues of Bond in a white tuxedo and of Oddjob holding that deadly hat.
It was all about how it took just one good Brit with enough dash and a license to kill to save the world.