The Guardian view on the 25th Bond film: the future is hard to know
The critical reception for Dr No, the first James Bond film, was generally good, reports David Kynaston in On the Cusp, his masterly portrait of the late summer and autumn of 1962. The early October premiere at the London Pavilion was acclaimed in one review as “a crisp and well-tailored production”, whose characters were suitable for the “guided-missile age”. The plot, in which Bond foils an attempt to disrupt a US rocket launch from Cape Canaveral, captured the space exploration buzz of the early 1960s. The brash sex and copious violence (“amoral fantasy for a new age of eroding norms”, writes Kynaston) were confirmation that the decade was going to land in a very different place to the austere 1950s.
Almost 60 years on, the Covid-delayed No Time To Die also seeks to reflect the times and their preoccupations. A bioterror threat dreamed up in a lab certainly resonates in the wake of a worldwide pandemic. A contemporary concern with mental health looms large. And Daniel Craig’s Bond ditches amorality in favour of some camp comedy and a more tender, hearton-sleeve version of masculinity. By dint of sheer longevity, the 007 brand has also become a venerable cultural ambassador for the big-screen blockbuster experience, making this latest outing a symbolic moment in cinema’s post-pandemic recovery.
Britain has naturally transformed between the first and the latest Bond. But, as Kynaston’s brief history illustrates, continuities also stand out. On Wednesday 3 October 1962, two days before Dr No hit the screen, the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell addressed the party conference in Brighton. The subject was Europe, specifically the determination of the Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan, to take Britain into the common market. A sceptical Gaitskell told delegates the project would mean “the end of Britain as an independent nation” and “a thousand years of history”. Sir Keir Starmer’s seaside pledge that a Labour government would, unlike the Tories, “make Brexit work”, is the latest staging post on that particular tortured journey for the nation. And on 5 October, the night Dr No premiered, Kynaston records that the Rolling Stones performed in front of two people in a North Cheam pub. This week, in what became a musical celebration and commemoration of the band’s late drummer, Charlie Watts, the band filled the Dome stadium in St Louis, Missouri.
“We’re not suited to the long perspectives / Open at each instant of our lives,” wrote Philip Larkin gloomily, “They link us to our losses.” But sometimes a fleeting sense of the deep arc of time can be rewarding, putting us in touch with the long history of the present in a way that allows us to make better sense of it. Even for those of us who are not devotees, the belated opening of the 25th Bond film in the series might offer this slightly wistful pleasure.