What the changing face of Bond tells us about Britishness

The character made famous by Sean Connery has gone through a series of transformations, writes Dr David Sorfa

James Bond epitomises a fantasy of how men can act in the world. While Ian Fleming’s novels remain popular, it is the 007 of film who lives most vividly in our imaginations.

Each cinematic Bond incarnation, from Sean Connery through Roger Moore and up to Daniel Craig, embodies and perhaps even influences the changing values of his times as he moves through exotic locations, seduces women, makes use of the latest improbable technologies and relies on uncomfortable racial stereotypes.

In a time when Britain is haphazardly redefining what it means to be a United Kingdom, it is worth our while to look back at the way in which Bond has expressed our nation’s concerns and how the various actors who have embodied him since the 1960s have brought something new to both the franchise and to our conceptions of what it means to be British.

The choice of Sean Connery was not immediate and the role had been offered to Richard Burton, Cary Grant and James Mason among others before Connery accepted the role in Dr No (1962). Dr No was Fleming’s sixth Bond novel and while there had been an 1954 American television adaptation of his first book, Casino Royale, American film producers struggled with Bond since he was apparently “too British” as well as “too blatantly sexual”.

The brutal violence of the novels was also a problem, and this accounts for the comic tone of the first and subsequent film versions. While Fleming was himself of Scottish descent, he was initially against Connery’s casting since he thought he was too brutish, but was eventually impressed by Connery’s portrayal – so much so that he subsequently

created a Scottish back story for Bond in his 1964 novel You Only Live Twice, in which Bond’s father is revealed to have come from Glencoe. Connery’s Bond establishes the clichés associated with the character: a suave, yet cold-hearted, seducer and killer who is nevertheless loyal and, in Dr No, surprisingly neither hideously sexist nor racist, despite one or two uncomfortable moments in the film’s Jamaican setting.

Connery’s Bond is devastatingly attractive to women and his seductions are always presented as consensual and satisfying to all concerned, even when each knows that the other is using sex to gain some advantage or other. Women constantly gawp at Bond in Dr No and while this was an integral part of the masculine fantasy of 007, Connery does owe his casting to Dana Broccoli who persuaded her husband, the producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, that he would be a popular choice. Ian Fleming’s girlfriend, Blanche Blackwell, agreed.

After five films starring Sean Connery, including From Russia with Love (1963) and Goldfinger (1964), the series was so popular that it was ripe for a parody. In Columbia’s 1967 spoof Casino Royale, David Niven starred as Sir James Bond who is forced out of retirement to tackle Orson Welles’s Le Chiffre in a rather haphazard and endearingly bonkers manner. The film is perhaps most notable for extended cameos from Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Ursula Andress and even a brief appearance by Jean-paul Belmondo. Viewers in Scotland might be amused, or exasperated, by a long and farcical cèilidh in M’s Scottish castle, shot, of course, in Ireland. Niven does get the best line though: “It’s depressing that the word secret agent becomes synonymous with