The Weekly Screed (#609)

A Bond too far?
by David Benjamin

PARIS — It occurred to me, while watching the latest James Bond film here, that it’s possible to determine the age and cultural roots of almost every living person today by which Bond movie they first saw in a theater.

My baptism was Goldfinger, third installment in the series. Knowing that, and knowing that James Bond is a perpetual icon of teenage boys, you can roughly guess my age and identify me as a wide-eyed relict of the pre-psychedelic Sixties.

Skyfall, Daniel Craig’s third crack at being Bond, is the 24th in the series (if you include — as does every Bond devotee — the “unauthorized” David Niven spoof of Casino Royale). Remarkably (I think), I’ve seen all but one. I’ve certainly watched enough Bond to notice, for example, that the villain of Skyfall — an embittered, disfigured former spy who turns against MI6 in a storm of vengeful mayhem — is cloned from the bad guy in an earlier Bond, Goldeneye.

This artless redundancy was my first hint, in Skyfall, that the 50-year-old franchise might have jumped the shark. Might it be time, I wondered with intimations of my own mortality, to put 007 out to pasture — along with other serial movie icons like Tarzan, Andy Hardy, Gidget, and Francis the Talking Mule?

After three tries, it’s clear that Craig’s James Bond — praised by critics for his gravitas and “realism,” and found strangely vapid by Bond fans for the very same qualities — has overstayed his reign. Ironically, Craig’s Bond is probably truer to the hardboiled cynic conceived by author Ian Fleming. But Fleming’s Bond could never have charmed filmgoers all through the Cold War and beyond.

When producer Albert Broccoli and the first Bond director, Terence Young, made Dr. No in 1962, they added to Fleming’s noir secret agent a leavening sense of humor. Even more fortuitously, they chose Sean Connery as the vessel of the dry James Bond wit that every pubescent boy since the JFK administration has, at least once in his life — especially in front of girls — labored to emulate.

Connery tended to deliver Bond’s lame one-liners with professional competence and keen timing, but also with a self-conscious smirk that drew the audience into the joke. As much as anything else in the Bond films, this momentary slippage of the mask endeared viewers to Connery and to the series.

The second great Bond, Roger Moore, dropped Bond’s dopey quips more playfully than Connery. No one enjoyed the role more than Moore, or so it seemed. Unlike other Bonds, Moore had few pretensions — and no subsequent career — as a serious actor. Hence, Moore exuded, even better than Connery, the essential boyishness, a British public-school insouciance, that defined and humbled the character of James Bond. An inescapable streak of immaturity, of unregenerate adolescent lust, has been, over the years and through most of his portrayers, Bond’s almost-fatal flaw. He is truly — transcendently — cool, but never quite as stoic as the ideal double-oh ought to be. It’s why we’ve always loved the big lug (and why we have a hard time even liking the Daniel Craig interpretation).

Timothy Dalton, with a twinkle in his eye, sustained this humorous spirit, as did Pierce Brosnan — although Brosnan delivered one-liners with a subtle grimace that suggested he was above such foolishness. Ironically, the observant Bond fan sensed this message and shared Brosnan’s air of being Bondianly grossed out.

All this changed with Craig. Not only does he disdain the mischievous wit of his forebears, he’s an actor evidently incapable of boyishness. While every previous Bond seemed younger than his calendar age, Craig reminds me of the aged Jack LaLanne. The guy’s a hunk for sure, but you’re amazed at how fit and agile he is for a man who seems to be pushing 70.

Even odder than Skyfall’s dearth of humor is its bizarre shortage of sex. This deficiency is typified by the penultimate scene. Here, after finally killing off Javier Bardem, a typical Bond-flick megalomaniac bad guy, Bond ends up with a woman in his arms. But she’s not young, naked, eager and already wet. She’s Judi Dench, the first Freudian mother-figure in the history of James Bond (yes, that rustling you hear is Ian Fleming rolling in his grave), and she’s dying. Bond girls are a staple of Bond movies, but Skyfall is weirdly thin on girls, especially the slightly scorched babe at the end who kisses Bond in a meadow full of hidden Marines, or in a life raft, or in a cabin on a cliff, or in a spaceship.

In Skyfall, inexplicably, after weeping woodenly over the dead Dench, Craig meets the new “M,” who happens to be Ralph Fiennes, whose presence throughout the film seems superfluous ‘til the end, when the viewer suddenly suspects, and feels a little cheated, that the sole purpose of this entire two hours has been to kill off Judi and put Fiennes in her place.

A Bond film without a climactic Bond girl strikes me as the biggest misstep in the whole series — even worse than the brief, forgettable career of George Lazenby. I find myself heretically reluctant to see the next Bond, especially if it involves Craig. I’ll reconsider, of course, if John (“Q”) Cleese is picked to direct.

Speaking of Bond girls, there seems to be a consensus that the best ever was Ursula Andress (Dr. No). Personally, I lean toward those who could actually act, like Diana Rigg (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) and Isabella Scorupco (Goldeneye). But my secret favorite was Jill St. John (Diamonds Are Forever), who understood instinctively that her job in the movie was to be eye candy. Blessed with that insight, no Bond girl ever flaunted herself quite so endearingly as did Jill, flouncing around Blofeld’s exploding oil rig in that teeny-weeny purple bikini.

From her first scene, Jill shared with viewers the conviction that a James Bond movie was where you go to have fun. After three Bond outings, we’re still waiting for the dour, earnest, ascetic, marble-mugged Daniel Craig to figure that out.

But maybe, as Danny Glover has often said, I’m getting too old for this crap.