Tag: James Bond

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The best of the Bonds (Part 2)

 

© Penguin Books

 

Continuing my look at On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, both the best James Bond novel (published in 1963) and best Bond film (released in 1969).  We rejoin the book and film at the moment in their plots when Bond attempts to infiltrate the headquarters of his arch-enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld, high in the Swiss Alps…

 

Bond duly goes to the Piz Gloria, pretending to be Sir Hilary Bray – and here the film glaringly contradicts the continuity established by its predecessor.  At the climax of You Only Live Twice-the-movie Bond and Blofeld have a face-to-face confrontation, but in OHMSS Blofeld doesn’t recognise Bond at all.  Actually, Bond might be forgiven for not recognising Blofeld either, for the filmmakers decided to recast the role of Blofeld too.  Not only do we have Sean Connery replaced by George Lazenby in OHMSS, but we have the goblin-like Donald Pleasence replaced by the bigger and more physical Telly Savalas.  To be honest, Savalas is a shade too thuggish-looking for the role, but he’s believable when doing the strenuous things required by the script, such as leading a group on skis in pursuit of Bond and wrestling with him during a breakneck bobsleigh ride.  Much as I like Donald Pleasence, I couldn’t imagine the sinister English character actor bouncing about on a bobsleigh.

 

What’s officially going on in Blofeld’s clinic, Bond learns, is that a group of young female patients are receiving treatment for food allergies.  What’s unofficially happening is that Blofeld is brainwashing them whilst simultaneously developing various destructive bacteriological agents in his laboratories.  The brainwashed ladies are to become his ‘angels of death’ and, when they return home, they’ll release those agents to decimate whole species of livestock and crops.  Blofeld finds out who Bond really is but the secret agent manages to grab a pair of skis and stages an epic night-time escape from Piz Gloria.  Blofeld’s henchmen pursue, but Tracy turns up in time to rescue him.  Afterwards, he links up with Draco again and persuades him to launch an audacious attack on Piz Gloria using helicopters and his Unione Corse men.  Blofeld’s plans go up in smoke, although Blofeld himself escapes – despite Bond’s best efforts – using a bobsleigh.  Mission accomplished, Bond proceeds to marry Tracy, and things hurry to their tragic conclusion with Blofeld making an unexpected appearance during their honeymoon.

 

Both the book and film proceed along similar lines here, although it’s interesting to see how certain aspects of the 1969 film are expanded from what Fleming put in his 1963 book.  In 1963, Blofeld was content to wage bacteriological warfare against Britain and Ireland, devastating their wheat, chickens, beef, potatoes, etc.  By 1969, Blofeld has widened his horizons – it’s the whole world’s food supply he wants to decimate.  Accordingly, the ‘angels of death’ undergo an upgrade too.  In the novel they’re a prim, middle-class, goody-two-shoes bunch, all from the British Isles.  Rather disdainfully, Bond reflects: “The girls all seemed to share a certain basic girl guidish simplicity of manners and language, the sort of girls who, in an English pub, you would find sitting demurely with a boyfriend sipping a Babysham, puffing rather clumsily at a cigarette and occasionally saying, ‘Pardon’.  Good girls who, if you made a pass at them, would say, ‘Please don’t spoil it all’, ‘Men only want one thing’, or, huffily, ‘Please take your hand away’.”  One of them even takes umbrage when Bond jokingly compares them to the girls in the St Trinian’s films: “Those awful girls!  How could you ever say such a thing!”

 

From wikipedia.org / © ETH-Bibliothek

 

In the film, the angels come from all over the world and they’re way more glamorous.  Indeed, a good number of the actresses went on to brighten up my adolescence during the 1970s with appearances in various cult films and TV shows.  There’s Angela Scoular, who also starred in an ‘unofficial’ Bond movie, the dreadful, zany, swinging-1960s comedy Casino Royale (1967); Catherine Schell, who’d be a regular in Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi series Space: 1999 (1975-77); Norwegian actress Julie Ege, who appeared in the kung-fu horror movie Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974), a co-production between legendary Hong Kong studio Shaw Brothers and legendary British studio Hammer Films; Jenny Hanley and Anouska Hempel, both of whom appeared in Hammer’s ultra-tacky Scars of Dracula (1970); and the impeccable Joanna Lumley.  In the late 1970s, of course, Lumley would play Purdey in the revival of The Avengers (1961-69), The New Avengers (1976-77).  In fact, you could argue that OHMSS-the-move features three Avengers actresses.  In addition to Diana Rigg and Joanna Lumley, the face of Honor Blackman – who played Cathy Gale in The Avengers and Pussy Galore in 1964’s Goldfinger – is shown fleetingly during the credits sequence.

 

Nobly, mindful of Bond’s relationship with Tracy, Fleming has his hero seduce just one of the girls – something he does purely in the line of duty.  The filmmakers are less inhibited and for a little while on Piz Gloria Lazenby behaves like a fox in a chicken coup, shagging left, right and centre.  The movie also plays up the humour of the situation.  Sir Hilary Bray is supposed to be Scottish, so Bond dons full Highland dress before going to dinner with his hosts and their supposed patients.  Yes, after having a Scotsman play Bond for five films, producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman wait until he’s played by an Australian before they pop him into a kilt.  This enables the Angela Scoular character to use her lipstick to write her room number on the inside of Bond’s thigh, under the table, which prompts the following exchange: “Anything the matter, Sir Hilary?” “A momentary stiffness… caused by the altitude, no doubt.”  If the dialogue for this Bond movie sounds sharper than usual, it’s probably because Simon Raven, the famously dissolute English author, was hired to polish it.

 

When Bond escapes from Piz Gloria, Peter Hunt and his crew predictably pump up the action scenes beyond what was in the book, but I’m not complaining.  Even 45 years later, the scenes where Lazenby skis, runs, drives and fights for his life are very impressive and Hunt makes good use of his experience as a film editor – the action has a frenetic quality that, viewed now after the Bourne movies (2002-16), seems far ahead of its time.  Similarly ramped up is the climactic assault on Piz Gloria mounted by Bond, Draco and his gang.  In the book it comes across as a brief ‘smash-and-grab’ raid but in the film it’s a full-on battle, complete with grenades, flame-throwers and flying bottles of acid.  Rarely does the pulse quicken as much as it does here when Monty Berman’s James Bond Theme kicks in in the midst of the mayhem.

 

One change the filmmakers made to the plot that I think improves on the book is Tracy being captured by Blofeld.  In Fleming’s original, after Tracy come to Bond’s aid, she disappears into the background again.  In the movie, Blofeld triggers an avalanche that leaves Tracy unconscious and at his mercy, and Bond missing, presumed dead.  When Bond, who of course isn’t dead at all, goes to Draco for help, the Corsican mafia boss has a very real reason for giving him help – his daughter’s life is at stake.  It also allows Peter Hunt to show Savalas flirting, with an obviously menacing undercurrent, with Rigg at his mountaintop HQ.  Again, I don’t think poor old Donald Pleasance would have done the flirting bit very convincingly.

 

Fleming depicts Bond and Tracy’s wedding as brief and low-key, but again the film makes it a big, opulent affair.  M, Q and Miss Moneypenny (who’s tearful, for obvious reasons) are in attendance, as are Draco’s henchmen, many of whom spent the early part of the film getting the shit beaten of them by Bond.  However, both the book and the film converge for the ending, which is as melancholy and understated as it is shocking.  There hasn’t ever been an ending to a Bond film like this one – well, not until 2021’s No Time to Die.

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

 

Indeed, it’s annoying that the filmmakers saw fit to follow this with 1971’s Diamonds are Forever, which gets Bond’s revenge on Blofeld out of the way in the first ten minutes, and then becomes a big, lazy, jokey and ludicrous Bond epic that would be the blueprint for Bond films later in the 1970s after Roger Moore had inherited the role.  For a proper, spiritual sequel to OHMSS, I think you have to look to the gritty Timothy Dalton Bond movie Licensed to Kill in 1989.

 

OHMSS-the-film received some unfavourable reviews and made less money than its predecessors, and for years it was regarded as the runt of the litter for the 1960s Bond-films.  Much of the animosity towards the film was because George Lazenby played Bond in it for the first and only time.  (By Diamonds are Forever, Broccoli had managed to patch things up with the truculent Connery and got him back into the role.)  Lazenby certainly isn’t a great actor, but I would argue that because this is a different sort of Bond movie, one where its hero appears vulnerable and wounded, the awkward and uncertain Lazenby actually fits the film.  He’s believable in terms of what the character has to endure.  I couldn’t imagine ‘Big Sean’ breenging through the movie in his usual manner and having the same emotional impact.

 

Happily, though, OHMSS has been re-evaluated and today is regarded as one of the best of the series.  In fact, when 007 Magazine ran a poll in 2012, it was voted the greatest James Bond film ever.  Cubby Broccoli’s daughter Barbara and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, who were running the Bond franchise in 2021, were so aware of OHMSS’s improved reputation that they tried grafting bits of it onto No Time to Die.  Both films share, for example, a figure grasping a trident in their credits sequences, Louis Armstrong singing We Have All the Time in the World on their soundtracks and, obviously, downbeat endings.  Though I feel No Time to Die’s nods to OHMSS only highlight the fact that it’s the lesser of the two movies.

 

A happier tribute to OHMSS occurs in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010).  When Leonardo DiCaprio, Elliot Page, Tom Hardy and co. hit the ‘third level’ and find themselves on a snowy mountaintop battling opponents on skis, it’s obvious what film is being referenced.  Indeed, Nolan has more-or-less said that OHMSS is his favourite Bond movie.  (He’s also named Dalton as his favourite Bond actor, so he’s clearly a 007 fan after my own heart.)

 

And much of the film’s greatness is due to the fact that, no matter what innovations were brought to the table by the talented Peter Hunt and his crew, it owes a lot to the original Ian Fleming novel – which, for me at least, is the best of the Bond books too.

 

From wikipedia.org / © ETH-Bibliothek

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The best of the Bonds (Part 1)

 

© Jonathan Cape

 

Today, I’ve learned, is James Bond Day – even though it’s a bit hard to celebrate the occasion when (1) the franchise now belongs to Jeff Bezos, who, with his vast fortune, private space programme and bald head, would make a good Bond villain, and (2) we currently have no idea who the next James Bond will be.

 

However, to celebrate the occasion, here is the first half of a lengthy treatise I’ve written about On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: both the 1963 novel by Ian Fleming, which I think is possibly the best of the books, and the 1969 movie, which I think is definitely the best of the films.  For simplicity’s sake, I’ll abbreviate the title to OHMSS.  Oh, and if you aren’t familiar with the storylines of the book and film, be warned that his entry will be chock-full of spoilers.

 

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the tenth of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels.  He wrote it in early 1962 at Goldeneye, his estate in Jamaica.  Nearby, meanwhile, Jamaican locations were being used for the filming of the very first James Bond film, Dr No.  Thus, James Bond was undergoing a metamorphosis – from a literary phenomenon into something bigger, a franchise incorporating large-scale moviemaking and merchandising and whose central character would soon be an icon of 1960s pop culture.  Though the novels were refined examples of pulp fiction, Fleming – who was methodical about his research – at least tried to give them a veneer of believability.  With each successive film, however, Bond seemed to drift further from the realm of possibility and into that of outright fantasy.

 

OHMSS-the-novel feels different from its literary predecessors, but not because Fleming tries to take it in the direction the films were going.  He does the opposite.  It makes Bond more believable as a character, not less.  It’s ostensibly about the first face-to-face encounter between Bond and his archenemy Ernst Stavros Blofeld, who is head of the secretive and deadly crime syndicate SPECTRE.  But OHMSS also explores Bond’s emotional side and highlights his vulnerability.

 

Key to this is OHMSS’s sub-plot about the romance between Bond and Contessa Theresa ‘Tracy’ di Vicenzo, a woman whose father, Marc-Ange Draco, runs a crime syndicate too, the Unione Corse of Corsica.  At the novel’s end, with Blofeld seemingly vanquished, Bond and Tracy get married – only for Blofeld to suddenly reappear in the final pages, spray their bridal car with bullets, kill Tracy and leave Bond as a babbling wreck.  As a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement noted at the time, this Bond was “somehow gentler, more sentimental, less dirty.”

 

When Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman got around to filming OHMSS six years later, five Bond books had been turned into movies and, already, the continuities of the books and films were hopelessly at odds.  In the books, Blofeld had made a ‘backstage’ appearance in OHMSS’s immediate predecessor, Thunderball.  In OHMSS’s successor, You Only Live Twice, Bond and he have a second and final meeting.  It’s the grim tale of the traumatised Bond hunting down and getting his revenge on Blofeld, much of it taking place on a bizarre ‘island of death’ off the Japanese mainland, whose deadly fauna and volcanic discharges attract a steady stream of visitors wanting to commit suicide.

 

In the Bond movie-world, though, Blofeld had featured in the backgrounds of From Russia with Love (1963) and Thunderball (1966) and then played a leading role in the film immediately before OHMSS, 1967’s You Only Live Twice – yes, the title that came after it in the book series.  As a result, there isn’t much grimness in You Only Live Twice-the-movie.  It’s a jolly science-fictional romp involving stolen spaceships, a secret base disguised as a Japanese volcano and Donald Pleasence playing Blofeld with a white jumpsuit, severe facial scar and fluffy white cat.  The film is a cartoonish thing compared with the book because, as far as the films are concerned, the murder of Bond’s wife hasn’t happened yet.

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

 

When OHMSS began filming, the filmmakers – Broccoli and Saltzman, scriptwriter Richard Maibaum and director Peter Hunt, who’d worked as a film editor and second-unit director on the previous five movies – made the brave decision to follow Fleming’s book closely, right up to the tragic denouement.  So keen was Hunt to be faithful to the book that supposedly he carried a copy of it with him around the set, its pages marked with his own annotations.

 

At the start of OHMSS-the-book, it seems like business as usual for Bond.  As with the previous novels, he’s a sophisticated, money-is-no-object consumer of the sort of food, drink, cigars, clothes and cars that most of Fleming’s post-war, austerity-Britain readers could only dream about.  Although Fleming writes early on that “James Bond was not a gourmet.  In England he lived on grilled soles, oeufs cocotte and cold roast beef with potato salad,” a page later we hear him bitching about the quality of a meal he’s just had in a French eatery, about “…the fly-walk of the Paté Maison (sent back for a new slice) and a Poularde à la crème that was the only genuine antique in the place.  Bond had moodily washed down this sleazy provender with a bottle of instant Pouilly Fuissé and was finally insulted the next morning by a bill for the meal in excess of five pounds.”

 

However, the tone soon changes.  Bond is in France at the tail end of a mission to locate Blofeld, an interminable and fruitless mission that’s pissed him off to the point where he’s ready to hand in his resignation to M.  Then he crosses paths with the troubled but imperious Tracy.  In a pricey hotel-cum-casino she commands him: “Take off those clothes.  Make love to me.  You are handsome and strong.  I want to remember what it can be like.  Do anything you like.  And tell me what you like and what you would like from me.  Be rough with me.  Treat me like the lowest whore in creation.  Forget everything else.  No questions.  Take me.”

 

Later, on the coast, Bond intervenes to prevent Tracy from committing suicide and the two of them fall into the clutches of some heavies who turn out to be working for Tracy’s father, Draco, godfather of the Unione Corse.  Draco is delighted with Bond taking a protective interest in his daughter and urges him to marry her – offering a one-million-pound dowry as a sweetener.  Bond declines the marriage offer but agrees to continue romancing Tracy, if it’ll help her mental state.  He also manages to coax some information out of his would-be father-in-law regarding Blofeld’s whereabouts.  The super-villain, it transpires, is hiding in Switzerland.

 

The same events occur in the film version, although in a different order.  First, Bond saves Tracy from drowning herself, then he gets to know her intimately.  Also, the action takes place not in France, but in Portugal – Peter Hunt felt that by this time cinemagoers were overly familiar with the French coast.  Just before the credits kick in (and we get to hear John Barry’s instrumental OHMSS theme, regarded by many as the best Bond tune of the lot), there’s also some breaking of the fourth wall as Bond turns towards the camera and quips, “This never happened to the other fellow.”  For yes, this movie features a brand new James Bond.  Gone is the slurring Edinburgh brogue, hairy Caledonian brawn and insouciant Scottish scowl of Sean Connery – who by then, apparently, couldn’t even bring himself to exchange words with Cubby Broccoli – and in his place is the inexperienced Australian actor George Lazenby.

 

Actually, such a novice was Lazenby at the time that the only thing he was known for was appearing in a TV commercial for Fry’s Chocolate Cream.  I’ve heard a story that Broccoli saw him a barber’s shop, liked the ‘cut of his jib’ and picked him on the spot.  However, interviewed on the making-of documentary that accompanies my DVD copy of OHMSS, Lazenby claims that he already had an audition for Bond lined up.  He went to that barber’s because he knew that Connery had used it in the past and he thought it was his best bet for getting a ‘Bondian’ haircut.  The establishment was used by other people associated with the Bond movies and Broccoli happened to be there when Lazenby walked in.

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

 

In contrast with the inexperienced Lazenby, the actress playing Tracy in the movie was already a star – Diana Rigg, who’d made a name for herself playing Emma Peel in the gloriously baroque 1960s TV show The Avengers (1961-69).  Fascinatingly, for a film series that’s often accused of de-humanising the books and emphasising big, dumb spectacle at the expense of characterisation, Tracy is a more fleshed-out character in the film than in Fleming’s novel.  She’s given more to do and, played by Rigg, she has a sparkle that’s missing in the rather aloof, ambiguous character that Fleming sketches.  Tales about how Lazenby and Rigg didn’t get on during the shoot are legion – most notably about Rigg munching garlic prior to the filming of scenes where Bond and Tracy kiss.  Director Hunt has disputed these claims, although I’ve seen at least one interview with Rigg where her comments about Lazenby are uncomplimentary.

 

Both the book and film show Bond getting an unexpected lead about where to find Blofeld in Switzerland – the College of Arms in London has had dealings with his adversary, who wants them to prove he is heir to the aristocratic title of ‘Compte Balthazar de Bleuchamp’.  This allows Bond to adopt the guise of Sir Hilary Bray, a College of Arms genealogist, and travel to Blofeld’s hideout, a mysterious medical clinic perched on top of the Piz Gloria in the Swiss Alps, where he promises to do some research in support of Blofeld’s claim to the title.

 

In the novel Fleming devotes a lot of time to the College of Arms, whose work clearly interests him.  It also allows him to explore the theme of snobbery.  As Sable Basilisk, a genealogy expert interviewed by Bond, comments: “I’ve seen hundreds of smart people from the City, industry, politics – famous people I’ve been quite frightened to meet when they walked into the room.  But when it comes to snobbery, to buying respectability so to speak, whether it’s the title they’re going to choose or just a coat of arms to hang over their fireplaces in Surbiton, they dwindle and dwindle in front of you… until they’re no more than homunculi.”  It’s satisfying that Blofeld’s snobbery is the weakness that allows Bond to ensnare him.  Mind you, some would say this is rich coming from Fleming.  His Bond novels, with their suave, sophisticated, well-travelled and well-heeled hero, have often been accused of snobbery themselves.

 

It’s also during this stage of the book we learn about Bond’s family.  For example, he’s informed by the College of Arms that his family motto – and coincidentally a title for a Pierce Brosnan Bond movie 30 year later – is ‘The world is not enough’, of which he says, “It is an excellent motto which I shall certainly adopt.”  And we learn that his father was a Scotsman who “came from the Highlands, from near Glencoe” (a detail honoured by the 2012 Daniel Craig Bond movie Skyfall), while his mother was Swiss.

 

Not that Fleming is complimentary about his parents’ nationalities.  Another genealogist, Griffin Or, says of the Scots in olden times: “In those days, I am forced to admit that our cousins across the border were little more than savages…  Very pleasant savages, of course, very brave and all that…  More useful with the sword than with the pen.”  Of his mum’s homeland, meanwhile, Bond snorts, ”(m)oney is the religion of Switzerland.”  M replies to this: “I don’t need a lecture on the qualities of the Swiss, thank you, 007.  At least they keep their trains clean and cope with the beatnik problem…”  (If M reckoned there was a problem with the beatniks, God knows how he felt in the late 1960s when the hippies appeared.)

 

Fleming gave Bond a partly Scottish parentage because, it’s said, he was impressed with the job Connery did of portraying his super-spy when filming of Dr No took place in Jamaica in 1962.  Dr No-the-film’s influence is detectable elsewhere.  In Blofeld’s Alpine base, which in the book is a ski resort as well as a clinic – in the film it’s only the latter – a character points out to Bond a certain lady among the fashionable skiers: “And that beautiful girl with the long fair hair at the big table, that is Ursula Andress, the film star.”  Andress, of course, was Connery’s co-star in Dr No and has a place in cinematic history as the first major Bond girl.

 

To be continued…

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

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It could have happened here

 

© Triad Granada

 

Recently, I’ve read a couple of ‘alternative history’ novels that imagine different realities in the 1930s and 1940s: wherein Britain and the USA were taken over by fascism just as Germany and Italy were.  What could have induced me, in 2025, to read novels about Britain and the USA succumbing to fascism?  I really can’t imagine.  Here are my thoughts on one of those books, Len Deighton’s SS-GB (1978).

 

Deighton is best known as the author of The IPCRESS File (1962), the book that introduced the world to Harry Palmer, a down-at-heels spy whose humdrum experiences are a corrective to the glamorous espionage fantasy-world inhabited by Ian Fleming’s James Bond.

 

Actually, that description does both Deighton and Fleming a disservice.  Harry Palmer isn’t even the name of the protagonist in The IPCRESS File.  Deighton keeps its first-person narrator anonymous.  The name was only devised for the character in 1965 when the book was made into a film with the non-capitalised title The Ipcress File, directed by Sidney J. Furie and starring Michael Caine.  Also, while the film version is determinedly unexotic and, possibly for budgetary reasons, restricts its action to a non-swinging 1960s London, Deighton’s novel is more expansive.  It allows its hero to do some properly exciting, Bondian things, such as participate in a rescue mission in Beirut and visit an American neutron-bomb test site in the Pacific Ocean.

 

Meanwhile, Fleming’s novels certainly featured exotic locations (the Caribbean, the Swiss Alps, the French coast), exotic activities (scuba diving, skiing, gambling in casinos) and exotic food and drink (caviar, stone crabs, Dom Pérignon champagne), which no doubt tantalised his readers, many of whom were living in drab, austere, post-war Britain and eating such rationing-era fare as pig’s trotters, spam and lardy cake.  But he invested at least some of those novels with a little grit and realism too.  However, just as the medium of film made Harry Palmer more lowkey than the literary original, so a series of over-the-top movies unanchored the character of Bond and floated him off into the realms of total fantasy.  Ironically, the Harry Palmer movies and the first nine Bond movies shared the same producer, Harry Saltzman.

 

© Lowndes Productions / Rank Film Distributors

 

I was reminded of this dichotomy when reading SS-GB because, while its hero inhabits a grey, downbeat world, where dealing with even the simplest details of everyday life can be exhausting, some big, almost Bondian things hove into view and require his attention.  These, though, hardly make his existence any more glamorous.  Rather, they make it a lot harder for him than it was already.

 

In Deighton’s imagined alternative universe, SS-GB begins in November 1941.  Nine months earlier, in February, Britain surrendered to Germany.  February 1941 was four months before, in real history, Hitler turned against Stalin and ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, an event that in in SS-GB evidently didn’t happen because the novel depicts Germany and the Soviet Union as, still, firm allies.  Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, which drew the USA into the war against the Axis powers, occurred at the end of 1941 and hasn’t happened yet.  One wonders if, here, it will happen, given the alterations elsewhere on the timeline.  The USA remains neutral in SS-GB, whilst peering across the Atlantic at a fully Nazi-controlled Europe with wariness and trepidation.  Incidentally, Deighton provides almost no exposition about what has gone on and it’s left to the reader to infer.

 

SS-GB’s hero, Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer, is a policeman at Scotland Yard who finds himself having to do his police-work under the supervision of the German occupiers.  His immediate superior is General – ‘or, more accurately in SS parlance, Gruppenführer’ – Fritz Kellerman: “a genial-looking man in his late fifties… of medium height but his enthusiasm for food and drink provided a rubicund complexion and a slight plumpness…”  Obviously, it was never put to the test, but Kellerman represents a good guess on Deighton’s part about how many German officials would have behaved if they had been posted to a defeated Britain and put in power there.   They’d have behaved like amiable Anglophiles, dressing in tweed suits, going hunting and fishing on country estates, playing golf, guzzling Scotch whisky and stocking their rooms with British antiques.  (Deighton has fun developing that last idea.  He depicts a bunch of 1940s British spivs running an illicit trade in British heirlooms, aimed at the German occupiers.)

 

Archer fits neatly into those Germans’ image of Britain because he represents another cosy and much-loved British cliché: the famous sleuthing detective.  Recognising him, one occupier exclaims, “You’re Archer of the Yard… You’re the detective who solved the Bethnal Green Poisonings and caught ‘the Rottingdean Ripper’ back before the war.”  Later in the book, Archer plays up his fame among the Germans – at least, the ones who enjoy true-life crime stories – to his advantage.

 

Behind the bonhomie of the likes of Kellerman, however, lurks the despotic ruthlessness of Nazi Germany.  Early on, Kellerman warns Archer about what may be coming.  Of Scotland Yard, he says, “Neither of us want political advisors in this building, Superintendent.  Inevitably, the outcome would be that your police force is used against British Resistance groups, uncaptured soldiers, political fugitives, Jews, gypsies and other undesirable elements.”

 

The story begins with Archer assigned to what looks like a straightforward murder case, a shooting in a rundown neighbourhood called Shepherd Market.  The murder scene is a flat “crammed with whisky, coffee, tea and so on, and Luftwaffe petrol coupons lying around on the table.  The victim is a well-dressed man, probably a black-marketeer.”  Of course, Archer gradually realises there’s more to the case than initially meets the eye.  And, as he grapples with the increasingly serious implications of what he’s investigating, he encounters a variety of characters who may be on his side or may be out to get him.

 

These include an officer in the SS’s intelligence service, an intense and driven man called Oskar Huth, who’s flown in from Berlin and put in charge of Archer and his investigation, and who’s the antithesis of the jocular Kellerman.  When Archer meets him off his Lufthansa plane and inquires where his bags are, he snaps, “Shotguns, golf-clubs and fishing tackle, you mean?  I’ve no time for that sort of nonsense.”  Constituting the one glamorous element that enters Archer’s life during the book is Barbara Barqa, a foxy American journalist who’s been allowed into London by the press attaché of the German Embassy in Washington.  She unexpectedly turns up at the murder scene and, predictably, isn’t all that she seems.  Meanwhile, additional tension comes from Archer’s elderly sergeant, and mentor, Harry Woods.  He’s a man ‘who fought and won in the filth of Flanders’ and ‘would never come to terms with defeat.’  It’s whispered that he has connections with the British Resistance movement, which makes Archer’s position very precarious.

 

As Archer’s investigation continues, I was, initially, a little disappointed by two of the main plot devices that Deighton uses.  These devices seemed to me slightly obvious ones for an alternative-history / World War II novel set in early-1940s London.  One is the race by various countries to develop a game-changing weapon – guess which weapon that is.  Indeed, when Archer learns that the murder-victim was suffering from radiation poisoning, I was reminded of Troy Kennedy Martin’s masterly TV miniseries Edge of Darkness (1985), which had a policeman investigating a killing and finding himself embroiled in a huge conspiracy involving the nuclear industry.  The other plot device is an operation to rescue an important personage whom the Germans have imprisoned in the Tower of London.  If the rescue is successful, it’ll be a boost for Britain’s battered morale and a propaganda win for the British Resistance.  Again, guess who that personage is.

 

To be fair, Deighton keeps both plot devices grounded. They’re wrapped in believably authentic realpolitik involving the neutral Americans, different elements in the British Resistance, and competing factions among the occupying Germans.  And the way one of them is resolved, near the end, caused me genuine surprise.  Also, there’s a subplot involving Karl Marx – whose remains are buried at London’s Highgate Cemetery – that I thought Deighton handled ingeniously.

 

But what really makes SS-GB a pleasure are Deighton’s descriptions of everyday life in occupied London – and what the ordinary population, war-weary, demoralised and living near the breadline, have to put up with.  There’s ‘the green, sooty fog’ with its ‘ugly smell’, which doesn’t quite hide ‘advertisement hoardings, upon which appeals for volunteers to work in German factories, announcements about rationings and a freshly pasted German-Soviet Friendship Week poster shone rain-wet.’  There’s Archer’s landlady, whose soldier-husband is in ‘a POW camp near Bremen, with no promised date of release.’  She serves her policeman lodger eggs she got from a neighbour as payment for an ‘old grey sweater to unravel for the wool’, and a cube of margarine, ‘the printed wrapper of which declared it to be a token of friendship from German workers.’

 

And there’s a rather desperate-sounding gala evening at the Metropolitan Music Hall.  This ends with the cast trying to cheer up the dejected London audience by ‘throwing paper streamers, wearing funny hats and popping balloons that descended from a great wire basket suspended from the ceiling’ – leaving the theatre ‘in a chaos of litter that had to be salvaged for re-use.’  The line-up for the evening includes Gracie Fields and Flanagan and Allen.  No George Formby, though.  Probably he’s in a prison camp, as a punishment for punching Hitler in his 1940 movie Let George Do It! 

 

And there are the ruins and wreckage left both by the Blitz and by Deighton’s imagined German invasion.  It’s a grey, wet, cold, blasted place, full of dejected and frustrated people, and it isn’t difficult to envision the London of George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) being a little further along the road.  Deighton, who’s still with us at the venerable age of 96, was ten years old when World War II broke out, and he came from the Marylebone area of London.  Presumably, he had images of the city in wartime seared into his memory and didn’t have to stretch his imagination too much to describe SS-GB’s version of it.

 

Thus, SS-GB’s crowning achievement is a depiction of Nazi-controlled London, and Britain, that you can practically see, hear, feel, smell and taste.  Though of course, you really wouldn’t have wanted to.

 

© Harper Collins Publishers

 

Apparently, in 2017, the BBC turned SS-GB into a five-episode TV miniseries, starring Sam Riley, Rainer Bock, Lars Eidinger, Kate Bosworth and James Cosmo.  I haven’t seen it, but let’s hope the BBC made a good job of it.  

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James Bond Island

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

 

A while ago, my partner and I holidayed in the town of Khao Lak, 60 kilometres from the southeastern Thai resort of Phuket.  We saw a brochure for a boat tour in the nearby Ao Phang Nga National Park, which encompasses a large, island-strewn bay in the Andaman Sea.  Among the islands visited by the tour was Khao Phing Kan, a location used during the filming of the 1974 James Bond film, The Man with the Golden Gun.  It’s now popularly known as ‘James Bond Island’.

 

Regular readers of this blog will know I’m a connoisseur of all things Bond-related, especially the movies and the original books written by Ian Fleming.  So, could I resist an opportunity to visit James Bond island?  Of course not.

 

Not, I should add, that I’m a fan of The Man with the Golden Gun.  I think it’s one of the worst films in the Bond franchise.  It has Roger Moore in the main role, in only his second outing as 007 but already looking tired – you’re already waiting impatiently for him to regenerate into Timothy Dalton.  It has Britt Ekland, required to fill out a bikini but not to do any acting.  It has Hervé Villechaize as diminutive henchman Nick Nack (“Dom Perignon soixante-quatre…”) – according to Moore, Villechaize was a lecherous wee pain-in-the-neck in real life.  It has Clifton James as redneck comedy-relief American policeman Sheriff Pepper, who happens to be holidaying in Asia when he bumps into Bond – he refuses to have his picture taken with a local elephant, telling Mrs. Pepper: “We’re Demy-crats, Maybelle!”  Democrats?  That’s a surprise.  And it has Lulu hollering the inuendo-riddled theme song: “He’s got a powerful weapon / He charges a million a shot!”

 

In fact, there are only two good things in The Man with the Golden Gun.  One is its villain, the impeccable Christopher Lee as the super-hitman Francisco Scaramanga: “Come, come, Mr. Bond. You disappoint me.  You get as much fulfilment out of killing as I do, so why don’t you admit it?”  The other is the spectacular scenery.  Scaramanga’s island hideaway is supposed to be in waters belonging to ‘Red China’, but the sequence where Bond approaches it in a seaplane was filmed in Ao Phang Nga National Park, with Khao Phing Kan standing in for Scaramanga HQ.

 

 

Even if I had hated James Bond Island, the boat trip out to it, which first involved traversing a warren of creeks with mangrove trees cramming their sides, and then passing some of the bay’s islands – giant, towering rocks, their summits and all but their steepest slopes cloaked tightly in trees – was enough to make the day worthwhile.  Those islands, which’d looked pretty spectacular during The Man with the Golden Gun’s airborne scenes, with the cameras tracking Bond’s seaplane, seemed absolutely awesome when I was looking up at them from sea-level.  Among the things I compared the fantastic shapes of these islands to in my notebook entries that day were: ‘fangs’, ‘ruined, vegetation-shrouded fortresses’, ‘herds of grazing prehistoric beasts’, ‘monstrous haystacks’, ‘mossy tombstones’ and ‘giant standing stones’.  We passed one vaguely curved island with curious round protuberances on either side, like ears.  Our guide said it was nicknamed ‘The Dog’.

 

 

As it turned out, we spent just 25 minutes on James Bond Island, which felt an adequate length of time.  It was very busy with tourists.  We guessed as much when we approached it and saw the great number of long boats, with varnished hulls and club-shaped bows, lined along its landing area.  If Scaramanga was around today, he’d be erecting angry signs saying GET OFF MY LAND in response to the hordes of visitors.  Maybe even firing volleys of his legendary golden bullets at the trespassers.

 

Despite the crowds, I was delighted to see Ko Ta Pu, the 20-foot-high, precarious-looking limestone rock that stands off the island’s shore and is shaped like an extracted tooth.  In The Man with the Golden Gun, Scaramanga – who, unconvincingly, is depicted as a pioneer of green energy as well as a deadly hitman – has solar panels extend up from the top of Ko Ta Pu and collect enough sun’s energy to power an energy-beam gun, with which he destroys Bond’s seaplane.  Getting a photo of this remarkable stub of rock was difficult, with so many people posing for selfies in front of it.  But I managed in the end.

 

 

The island’s other striking feature is a huge, triangular opening behind the main beach, caused by seismic action. A giant slab of rock apparently broke free and ended up tilting steeply against the rest of the rock-mass there. Beneath it, looking up at its bulk and angles, you have a lurking fear it could topple the rest of the way and pulverize everything below, you included.  It was here that we incurred the wrath of a large, bikinied and ignorant Western woman who’d been posing lasciviously for multiple photos in front of the formation and didn’t appreciate us strolling into her camera-frame.

 

 

As well as being infested with tourists, the island’s main beach was infested with stalls selling tourist tat.  I was disappointed that no 007-themed merchandise was on sale – not even replicas of Christopher Lee’s golden gun.  I guess then-Bond-producers Cubby Broccoli and Albert Saltzman refused to license the Bond brand to the Thai tourist authorities and the vendors here could sell only generic, er, nick-nacks…  Weirdly, one Western-movie item that was on sale were figurines of Groot, the tree-like creature that features in the Guardians of the Galaxy (2014-23) movies.  That’s because if you look at Ko Ta Pu long enough, you begin to see its resemblance to the head of Groot.

 

In fact, Khao Phing Kan, James Bond Island, wasn’t the only movie-connected island we visited in the Andaman Sea.  A few days later, we went on a second boat trip, this time to the Phi-Phi-Phi Islands south of Ao Phang Nga National Park.  One of the stops we made there was at Ko Phi Phi Lee, home to the now-famous Maya Bay.

 

© Figment Films / 20th Century Fox

 

This was where in 2000 Danny Boyle filmed The Beach, based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Alex Garland.  This movie was troubled in a couple of different ways.  Originally, Ewan McGregor was lined up to star in it but, to his disgust, he was ultimately passed over in favour of Leonardo DiCaprio, then seen as a much more bankable actor because he’d played the hero in James Cameron’s world-beating Titanic (1998).  This led to McGregor falling out with Boyle and the pair didn’t talk to each other for many years afterwards.  More seriously, it was alleged that during production the filmmakers caused serious damage to Maya Beach’s ecosystems by ‘landscaping’ – i.e., bulldozering – part of it to make it more ‘paradise-like’.

 

We arrived at the northern side of Ko Phi Phi Lee and disembarked onto a precariously swaying, floating quay.  Then, filing along a slightly elevated wooden walkway – no doubt there to prevent the sand, soil, rocks and plants being pulverized under the feet of countless visitors – we made our way into the island’s interior.  The walkway was divided into two narrow lanes, with tourists streaming along in both directions.   It arrived at a wider wooden platform in the middle of the island, where there were facilities such as toilets, souvenir stalls and eateries and where you could step down onto the surrounding ground.  Two further walkways bifurcated off on its far side, both leading to the bay.  We followed the slightly less busy one.

 

 

Maya Bay itself was certainly picturesque, its white sand and turquoise water encircled by high cliffs and crags.  But it swarmed with the inevitable tourists, taking the inevitable photos and selfies.  Our guide told us we should visit it at the time of Chinese New Year.  Then, apparently, it gets really busy.

 

Although The Beach received middling reviews, it was reasonably successful – enough for it to cause the heavy tourist traffic to Ko Phi Phi Lee and Maya Beach.  Things got so bad that in 2018 the Thai government banned all tourists from it, so that work could be done to restore its now-shattered environment.  It wasn’t reopened to visitors until 2022, at the tail-end of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Tour groups, like ours, are allowed only an hour on the island, and it also gets a two-month, tourist-free breather every year, from August 1st to October 1st.

 

This makes me wonder what would have happened if Danny Boyle had made The Beach with Ewan McGregor, rather less of a draw than Leonardo DiCaprio.  (Sorry, Ewan.)  It would have meant: (1) a less successful film, seen by fewer people; (2) fewer tourists flocking to Maya Bay, which would have put it under less environmental strain; and (3) Trainspotting 2 (2017) being made years earlier than it was, because Boyle and McGregor would never have fallen out and then needed ages to make up.  Win-win all round, I’d say.

 

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The Boss versus the dross

 

From wikipedia.org / © Ralph_PH

 

I have another reason to loathe Donald Trump, the 45th and also, alas, 47th president of the United States of America.  He’s made me like Bruce Springsteen.

 

On May 14th, at Manchester’s Co-op Live Arena, on the opening night of his Land of Hope and Dreams tour, Springsteen – the famously sideburned, famously plaid-shirt-wearing singer-songwriter-guitarist from New Jersey – kicked off proceedings by making a speech.  He declared: “…my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.  Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!”  Later on, he described the head of that ‘corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration’, i.e., Trump, as an ‘unfit president’ and proclaimed, “The America l’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people.  So we’ll survive this moment.”

 

Needless to say, it wasn’t long before Trump’s overworked posting-thumb was busy knocking out a retort on his Truth Social platform.  He called Springsteen ‘as dumb as a rock’ and added: “This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare’. Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

 

Also joining in was Trump’s number-one music-industry sycophant Kid Rock, now a not-so-kiddish 54 years old.  It’s telling that the only song I’ve heard by him was the 2008 hit All Summer Long – a Kid Rock number whose best bits weren’t actually written by Kid Rock.  They come from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama (1974) and Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London (1978).  “Just another person with TDS (Trump derangement syndrome) at the highest levels,” Kid Rock said of Springsteen.  “To be in Europe talking junk about our president who gets up and works his ass off for this country, every day, and his administration is doing such great things…  Thank God for him.  But to do that in Europe… what a punk move.”  Kid Rock, please note.  To me and many folk my age, calling Bruce Springsteen a ‘punk’ is amusing.  But it’s not the insult you think it is.

 

Since Kid Rock believes Trump’s administration is ‘doing such great things’ for the USA, he’s surely a big fan of Trump’s vicious anti-immigrant policies.  Incidentally, the restaurant he’s licensed in Nashville, the not-at-all-stupidly-titled Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse, lately and mysteriously sent kitchen-staff home during a weekend when Trump’s brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency were conducting operations in the city.  I’m sure the reason for this wasn’t anything dodgy.  Not because, say, the restaurant was employing people who were immigrants lacking permanent legal status and might get dragged off and incarcerated.

 

I first encountered the musical oeuvre of Bruce Springsteen, or ‘Loose Windscreen’ as I liked to call him, while I was a fifth-year pupil at Peebles High School in the early 1980s.  Fifth and sixth-years pupils, the senior members of the student body known as the ‘Upper School’, were entitled to their own common room, where there was an elderly record-player and speakers you could play music on during the morning, lunchtime and afternoon breaks.  This was normally monopolised by the Upper School’s sizeable heavy-metal contingent and it blasted out a lot of AC/DC, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin, Motorhead, Rainbow, the Scorpions, Thin Lizzy and Whitesnake.

 

© Columbia Records

 

However, once in a while, somebody would manage to get past the phalanx of heavy-metal fans surrounding the record player and slap something a little different on it.  One such record was Springsteen’s 1975 breakthrough album, Born to Run.  Hearing it, I thought it was all right and, at the time, the title track seemed a stormer.  (Nowadays,  having heard it a zillion times, I’m less keen on it.)  So, Mr Windscreen’s, sorry, Mr Springsteen’s music seemed perfectly fine to me.  But it wasn’t anything I’d go out of my way to listen to.

 

Incidentally, a few years earlier, my favourite band had been the Boomtown Rats, the new wave outfit fronted by Bob Geldof.  Last week, I listened to Rat Trap, the Boomtown Rats song that topped the UK charts in 1978, for the first time in decades.  And I was surprised by how, well, Springsteen-esque it sounds now.

 

By the mid-1980s I was a student at Aberdeen University.  I quickly discovered that a number of my fellow-students were seriously into Bruce Springsteen.  They were so into him they apparently knew everything about every second of music he’d ever committed to vinyl – that, say, if you played the third of the nine tracks on the Belgian version of the 1973 LP Greetings from Ashbury Park N.J. backwards, you’d hear him break wind in the studio.  Yes, stuff like that.

 

These Bruce-fans – whom some unkindly referred to as ‘Bruce-bores’ – were, without exception, male.  Actually, a good proportion of them seemed to be engineering students and had names like ‘Morris’.  Also, they never called their hero ‘Bruce’, but used the annoying moniker ‘The Boss’.  This struck me as paradoxical since they were always going on about what a man of the people he was.  Surely, then, a blue-collar, working-class guy like him would be against the bosses?

 

© Columbia Records

 

This was a bad time if, like me, you were surrounded by Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans, and you didn’t believe as they did that Springsteen was the greatest thing to have happened to music since Mrs Beethoven gave birth to little Ludwig van.  For, in 1984, he released Born in the USA, an album that sold over 30 million copies worldwide and spawned no fewer than seven singles.  As with most of Springsteen’s output, it struck me as perfectly decent, but not remarkable, journeyman rock music.  But it subsequently became annoying because people around me never seemed to stop playing it.

 

The Born in the USA singles received heavy rotation in the place where I worked part-time during my second year as a student, Ritzy’s Nightclub.  At Ritzy’s I was a member of the floor-staff – meaning I spent most of my time collecting empty glasses and loaded ashtrays from the punters’ tables, cleaning them, and returning the glasses to the bar-shelves and the ashtrays to the tables.

 

I’ve said before on this blog that of the many jobs I’ve had in my life, I hated the Ritzy’s one most.  I had to work until 2.00 AM every Friday and Saturday night while my mates were out partying.  The glasses I collected were often phenomenally grotty with cigarette ends and even puke floating around in them.  Many of the punters were workers in Aberdeen’s then-flourishing oil industry, who made tons of money and believed their hefty earnings allowed them to behave like knob-heads at all times, especially towards serfs like myself.  And the music spewing out of the nightclub’s speakers was gruesome – all the vacuous New Romantic stuff like Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Wham that dominated the UK charts during 1984-85.  In that company, Springsteen’s songs didn’t seem so bad.  But having to hear them repeatedly in that environment quickly made me sick of them too.

 

The first Born in the USA single out of the blocks was Dancing in the Dark, which I came to associate with a mid-week gig I had at Ritzy’s.  This was a regular evening the nightclub held for the over-30s, which was known in local parlance as ‘Grab-a-Granny Night’.  It featured a live band who performed cover versions of songs currently in the charts and Dancing in the Dark seemed a particular favourite of the band’s frontman, a bloke called Stan.  The sound of Stan warbling his way through the song, and the sight of him simultaneously attempting some Boss-like dancing onstage whilst apparently in possession of two left feet, are burned into my memory.

 

In the summer of 1985, I developed a fully-fledged aversion to Bruce Windscreen, sorry, Springsteen.  The summer was going badly for me for various financial, personal and health reasons, and my mood wasn’t helped by the fact that every single day that July and August saw rain piss down relentlessly on Aberdeen, turning the grey granite the city was built with oppressively black.  At one point I found myself sharing a flat with a good friend, one Andrew J. MacRury, who was also having a bad summer.  And yes, Andy was an avid Bruce-bore, sorry, Bruce-fan.  I worked night-shifts and, a dozen times each day, while I was in bed trying to snatch some sleep, I’d be rudely awoken by my friend playing the title track of Born in the USA in the next room, at full blast, in a desperate attempt to cheer himself up.  Repeatedly, every day, I was practically blasted out of bed by the sideburned one hollering: “Booooorn… in the US-Aaaa!  I wuz booooorn… in the US-Aaaa!”

 

Thereafter, if anyone show signs of talking enthusiastically about Bruce Springsteen, let alone play some music by him, I’d run for the hills.  In March 1992, when to great fanfare he released two albums on the same day (Human Touch and Lucky Town), I think I went into hiding.

 

© Columbia Records

 

Now any Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans reading this will no doubt be shocked by my attitude towards their hero and accuse me of being deficient in musical taste.  To that I would reply I wasn’t the only person on the planet unswayed by the charms of Mr Springsteen.  The legendary radio DJ John Peel, for example, once said of Springsteen’s appeal: “It utterly mystifies me.  I can’t see it at all.  I mean, when he first started out… it sounded to me like sub-Dylan stuff.  And it just doesn’t ring true.”  Indeed, the John Peel Wiki notes that Peel “almost never played any of Springsteen’s material on his show and scarcely missed an opportunity to compare him unfavourably with other artists such as Half Man Half Biscuit.”

 

Certain musicians have been less than enthralled by him too.  The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, while describing Springsteen as ‘a nice guy, a sweet guy’, has been scathing about his musical ability.  He wrote in his 2010 biography Life, “If there was anything better around, he’d still be working the bars of New Jersey.”  Meanwhile, Irish folk-rock troubadour Van Morrison once grumped about what he saw as Springsteen’s lack of originality.  As far as Van Morrison was concerned, he’d nicked all his ideas from, er, Van Morrison.  “For years people have been saying to me, ‘Have heard this guy Springsteen?  You should really check him out!’  I just ignored it.  Then four or five months ago I was in Amsterdam, and a friend of mine put on a video.  Springsteen came on the video, and that was the first time I ever saw him, and he’s definitely ripped me off.”

 

However, in times of great adversity, you have to take sides – even the sides of folk whom, until now, you’ve regarded as your enemies.  For instance, the cops had to join forces with the prisoners in John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) when faced with an onslaught by the murderous gang Street Thunder.  And James Bond (Roger Moore) had to team up with Jaws (Richard Kiel) in Lewis Gilbert’s Moonraker (1979) to overcome the genocidal plans of Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale).  I feel the same way about Bruce Springsteen.  I’ve found much of his music stodgy, and at times his fans have driven me up the walls, but I’ll back him all the way in his struggle against Trump, who’s busy turning Springsteen’s homeland into an authoritarian state run by white supremacists, loopy evangelical Christians, billionaire tech-bros and environment-wrecking oil barons.

 

Indeed, if Springsteen can do anything to get Trump out of office – arrange, say, for a million Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans to storm the White House – I’ll happily grow sideburns, and wear a plaid shirt for the rest of my life, and listen to Born in the USA a dozen times a day.  Hail to the Boss!

 

Also, while I don’t have much regard for Springsteen’s music, I still think it’s light-years better than that Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll shite peddled by Kid Rock.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Carl Lender

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The literary Bond revisited: The Spy Who Loved Me

 

© Vintage Books

 

First published in 1962, The Spy Who Loved Me is the ninth of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and holds several records in the Bond literary canon.  It clocks in at 198 pages, making it the shortest Bond book.  It was also the last book to appear in a world that knew Bond as a literary and not a cinematic character, because its publication came just six months before the release of Dr No, the first Bond movie produced by Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman.  And it was the worst-received of the books.  The Daily Telegraph reacted to it with a despairing “Oh Dear Oh Dear Oh Dear!”, the Listener dismissed it as ‘unremittingly’ and ‘grindingly boring’ and the Observer demanded, “why can’t this cunning author write up a bit instead of down?”

 

Once the critics had stuck in their knives, Fleming himself disowned the book.  He asked his publisher not to print a paperback edition of it, a request honoured until two years after his death.  He also stipulated that any movie version of The Spy Who Loved Me could never use the book’s plot, only its title.

 

I’m sure that 15 years later when Cubby Broccoli got around to filming The Spy Who Loved Me, he was distraught about this.  “You mean,” lamented the cigar-puffing mogul, “I can’t follow what happens in the book?  I have to put other stuff in my movie instead?  Like cars that travel underwater?  Giant oil-tankers that swallow nuclear submarines?  Roger Moore skiing over a clifftop and saving himself with a Union Jack parachute?  No!  NO!”

 

© Eon Productions

 

Well, I’ve finally read the original, much-maligned The Spy Who Loved Me.  My initial reaction was Ian Fleming at least deserved credit for venturing off the beaten track.  Fans of his previous eight books were surely surprised when they started reading it in 1962 and discovered they were hearing a first-person narrative voice rather than Fleming’s usual, authoritative, third-person one.  “I was running away,” it begins.  “I was running away from England, from my childhood, from the winter, from a sequence of untidy, unattractive love-affairs, from the few sticks of furniture and jumble of overworn clothes that my London life had collected around me; and I was running away from the drabness, fustiness, snobbery and claustrophobia of close horizons and from my inability, though I am quite an attractive rat, to make headway in the rat-race.  In fact, I was running away from almost everything except the law.”

 

The first-person voice is that of Viv Michel, a young French-Canadian woman who’s been left in charge of a closed-for-the-winter motel called The Dreamy Pines Motor Court in the mountains of northern New York State.  After a first chapter where Viv doesn’t cope well with a thunderstorm raging above the motel’s empty cabins, playground, swimming pool and golf range – she stupidly pulls an electrical switch at the same moment that a bolt of lightning lets rip, and the resultant electrical shock knocks her unconscious – she spends the next eighty pages explaining how she’s ended up in this situation.

 

She describes her early life in Canada; being sent to a finishing school in England where she “was made to suffer agonies” for her accent, for her table manners “which were considered uncouth”, for her “total lack of savoir-faire and, in general, for being a Canadian”; and finding work in London while suffering the afore-mentioned “sequence of untidy, unattractive love affairs”.  After the last affair results in her having an abortion in Switzerland, she returns to North America, where she resolves to search for adventure and self-discovery and shake off the memories of the men who’ve used and abused her.  So she purchases a Vespa 150cc Gran Sport and sets off on a road trip.  It’s on the road that she comes across the Dreamy Pines Motor Court, where she gets offered employment; first as an end-of-season receptionist and then, when it closes for the winter, as a caretaker minding the premises until its owner, one Mr Sanguinetti, arrives to take possession of the keys.

 

Viv’s position at the Dreamy Pines feels slightly like that of Jack Torrance at the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) and things soon go as badly for her as they did for the ill-fated Jack.  Two hoodlums with the nicknames Sluggsy and Horror show up at the motel in the middle of the night and take her prisoner.  It transpires that Sanguinetti is a gangster and the pair are henchmen tasked with burning the place to the ground as part of an insurance scam.  Viv, the only witness, looks likely to be torched along with the motel.

 

It’s here that we encounter the single detail of the book that makes it into the 1977 film ‘adaptation’ with Roger Moore.  Looking at Horror’s face, she notices “a glint of grey silvery metal from his front teeth,” indicating that “they had been cheaply capped with steel.”  Sound familiar?

 

© Eon Productions

 

By now we’re more than halfway into the book.  Back in 1962 at this point, readers must have been panicking: where the hell is Bond?  Well, he appears at The Dreamy Pines later that same night – Viv’s first impression of him is that he’s “good-looking in a dark, rather cruel way” with a scar that “showed whitely down his left cheek” – and he explains that his car has suffered a flat tyre on the road nearby and he’d like to get a room.  He soon wises up to the situation and joins forces with Viv.  The next seventy pages play more like a Mickey Spillane novel than a Fleming / Bond one, with considerable running, hiding and shooting before Sanguinetti’s scheme is thwarted and Sluggsy and Horror end up dead at the bottom of the local lake.  Then Viv and Bond indulge in some love-making and then, as abruptly and enigmatically as he arrived, Bond slips off again.  In the final pages, Viv muses: “He was just a man who had turned up at the right time and then gone on his way.”

 

Though The Spy Who Loved Me wins kudos for bravely departing from the usual Bond formula, there are moments when seemingly Fleming remembers it’s still a Bond novel and is forced to compromise, with awkward results.   He wants Viv to be more believable than the average Bond girl, which is why we see her depicted as a working Londoner.  But on the other hand, as a Bond girl, she can’t be too ordinary so she also gets a French-Canadian back-story to make her appear more exotic – the overall effect of which feels contrived.  Also, while Fleming wants her to be feisty and independent, he needs her to have a vulnerable side too – to be a credible damsel-in-distress, for whom Bond rides to the rescue as a knight in shining armour.  That may explain the opening chapter where she panics during the storm and, frankly, comes across as a dolt.

 

And to make up for Bond’s late entrance into the plot, Fleming feels obliged to bring his readers up to speed on what Bond’s been doing in the meantime; so we get the telling of a previous Bond adventure.  In a twelve-page chapter entitled Bedtime Story, Bond explains to Viv in detail how he ended up on the road that night.  He was driving south after an operation in Toronto wherein he and the Canadian Mounties prevented the assassination of a Russian defector by the KGB and SPECTRE.  By this point, Bond and Viv know the extreme danger posed by Sluggsy and Horror, so you’d think they’d have other things to focus on besides telling stories.

 

One thing I found surprisingly impressive about The Spy Who Loved Me is Viv’s account of her love-life in London.  It’s as far removed as possible from the fantasy romance / sex scenes associated with the Bond novels.  Just out of school, she gets involved with a youth called Derek Mallaby, whose posh, confident veneer hides, temporarily, the fact that (a) he’s desperate for sex and (b) he’s clueless about how to have sex.  What follows is a painful tale set in the England of “drabness, fustiness, snobbery and claustrophobia” that existed before the 1960s started swinging and the permissive era arrived.  The only privacy Viv and Derek can find for making love is in a small balcony-box at a cinema, “a meagre-looking place, showing two westerns, a cartoon and so-called ‘News’ that consisted of what the Queen had been doing a month ago.”  Their attempted lovemaking, on the floor with Derek on top “in a dreadful clumsy embrace”, is anything but sensual and ends abruptly when a furious cinema manager bursts in on them: “Filthy little brats…!  I’ve a damned good mind to call the police.  Indecent exposure.  Disturbing the peace.”

 

Barely articulate about what they’re trying to do, relying on strained expressions like ‘doing it’ and ‘being a sport’, and not even knowing what a condom is called and having to describe it to a shop assistant as “one of those things for not having babies”, Viv and Derek are products of a repressed, joyless, monochrome Britain that the Bond novels, with their exotic glamour and glitzy hedonism, were supposed to give readers of the era an escape from.  No wonder The Spy Who Loved Me pissed so many of those readers off.

 

Once Viv and Derek have properly ‘done it’ a few times, Derek proves to be a cad and dumps her.  She then gets into a second relationship with a German man called Kurt, which culminates in her getting pregnant, having an abortion and being dumped a second time.  Kurt “had inherited strong views about mixed blood… and when he married, it would be into the Teutonic strain.”  Fleming’s well-known dislike of Germans is on full display here.

 

This part of the book is so interesting because it suggests Fleming, a writer not noted for his empathy with women, is trying for once to think outside his normal male-chauvinist box and identify with a female character having a hard time in a world populated with predatory, shitty men.

 

Alas, this is rendered null and void later when Bond, hardly un-predatory and un-shitty himself, turns up and Viv promptly goes doe-eyed and weak-kneed at the sight of him; implying that Viv’s problem wasn’t men, it was just the absence of a fully-fledged alpha male like Bond to satisfy / tame her.

 

And, late on, Fleming truly sabotages his cause when Viv comes out with this jaw-dropping assertion: “All women love semi-rape.  They love to be taken.”  These ten words have rightly earned Fleming and The Spy Who Loved Me much opprobrium and they undo whatever good work he did with his depiction of Viv earlier in the book.  I’d like to say they show an attitude towards women that’s wildly and rightly out-of-date nowadays – but of course in these Trumpian times, the era of Andrew Tate and Conor McGregor, there’s probably loads of male influencer-wankers out there in the so-called ‘manosphere’ who’d agree with Fleming’s sentiment.

 

In the end, I have no reason to disagree with the many people who label The Spy Who Loves Me the weakest of the Bond novels.  The contradiction at its heart, that it’s a Bond story and yet wants to be something other than a Bond story, makes it uneven and inconsistent.  And it’s all over the place in its sexual politics and, at worst, those politics are unspeakable.

 

But it deserves a little respect for attempting to do something out-of-the-ordinary, and thanks to Fleming’s always-amenable prose it’s an easy-enough read.  And, in parts, hints of a better book glimmer through.  It’s The Spy Who Tried Something Different.

 

© Penguin Books

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Cinematic heroes 5: Richard Johnson

 

© Variety Film / Variety Distribution

 

Richard Johnson, who died in 2015 at the age of 87, was a busy and much-admired theatrical actor whose stage CV included Pericles Prince of Tyre, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Cymbeline, Twelfth Night and Antony and Cleopatra and who could boast that he’d worked with stage directors as distinguished as Tony Richardson and Peter Hall.

 

From the 1970s on, he was also a popular guest star on TV shows on both sides of the Atlantic, so that, for instance, he appeared in Hart to Hart (1979), Magnum P.I. (1981 & 83) and Murder, She Wrote (1987) in the USA and in Tales of the Unexpected (1980, 81 & 82), Dempsey and Makepeace (1986) and the inevitable Midsomer Murders (1999 & 2007) in the UK.  Indeed, it was on television that I first saw Johnson, guest-starring in a 1975 episode of Gerry Anderson’s silly but stylish science-fiction show Space: 1999.  He played the astronaut husband of series regular Dr Helena Russell (Barbara Bain), who’s been transformed into anti-matter.  Even back then, at 10 years old, I found Bain’s character so dull and humourless that this didn’t surprise me.  Being married to her would transform anyone into anti-matter.

 

However, it’s for his film work that I’ll remember him – never more so than for his performance as the main male character, Dr John Markway, in Robert Wise’s spooky-house classic The Haunting (1963).  I think The Haunting is one of the scariest films ever made.  In fact, both Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese are on record as saying that it’s the scariest film ever made.  The fact that The Haunting is based on a terrific novel, 1959’s The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, doesn’t do it any harm, either.

 

The initially smooth and charming Dr Markway investigates strange phenomena in an old, rambling and supposedly haunted house with a group of helpers – the young man who’s inheriting the place (Russ Tamblyn), a psychic (Claire Bloom) and a lonely oddball called Eleanor Vance (Julie Harris), in whom the house’s supernatural forces start taking an interest.  Markway’s wife – Lois Maxwell, who was Miss Moneypenny in the first 14 James Bond movies – also turns up at the premises when things are getting properly scary, which the now-unnerved doctor isn’t happy about.

 

© Argyle Enterprises / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

 

Director Robert Wise understood that the most frightening things are things we don’t see and are left to our imaginations; because what we are capable of imagining in our mind’s-eye is far worse than anything a special-effects or make-up artist can conjure up onscreen.  So, in The Haunting, we hear rather than see.  The film’s characters find themselves reacting to all manner of weird and disturbing noises made by mysterious somethings off screen.  Wise’s sound editors played these noises aloud while Johnson and his co-stars were filming their scenes, which added to the rattled authenticity of their performances.

 

In addition, Johnson’s Markway gets to utter the iconic line: “Look, I know the supernatural is something that isn’t supposed to happen, but it does happen.”  These words impressed Rob Zombie so  much that he and his band White Zombie sampled them on the 1995 song Super–Charger Heaven.  (The song also features Christopher Lee from 1976’s To the Devil a Daughter snarling, “It is not heresy and I will not recant!”)

 

Needless to say, when Hollywood got around to remaking The Haunting in 1999 with action-movie director Jan de Bont at the helm, the result was dire.  It abandoned Robert Wise’s ultra-creepy, suggest-don’t-show approach and relied instead on a crass welter of computer-generated special effects.  I hate it even more than I hate the 2006 remake of The Wicker Man with Nicholas Cage.

 

Elsewhere, Richard Johnson’s film biography contains an interesting what-if.  In the early 1960s, when Sean Connery was known only as a bit-part actor, former body builder and former Edinburgh milkman, Johnson turned down the opportunity to play James Bond.  Terence Young, who was lined up to direct the first Bond movie, 1962’s Dr No, approached him, but Johnson didn’t like the idea of being stuck playing the same character in a long contract.

 

However, later, Johnson played Bulldog Drummond, a British literary action-hero who’d inspired Ian Fleming when he started writing the Bond novels in the early 1950s.  He was Drummond in two movies, Deadlier than the Male (1967) and Some Girls Do (1969), both directed by Ralph Thomas.  Ironically, the films are far more influenced by James Bond’s cinematic franchise, massively popular by then, than they are by the original Bulldog Drummond books, which were written from 1920 to 1937 by H.C. McNeile (‘Sapper’) and from 1938 to 1954 by Gerald Fairlie.  The books portrayed Drummond as an English gent with combat experience from World War I and, frankly, some very racist views of foreigners, having adventures in an upper-crust world of country houses, servants and vintage motorcars.

 

© Greater Films Ltd / Rank Film Distributors

 

I’ve seen Deadlier than the Male and, because I read a few Bulldog Drummond books in my boyhood, I find it fascinatingly peculiar if nothing else.  It transfers Drummond to a glamorous Swinging Sixties setting populated with luxurious islands, private jets, yachts, speedboats, brassy music, bikinis, dolly-birds and gadgets (like giant, computer-controlled chessmen).  At least, that’s ‘glamorous’ as far as its less-than-Bond-sized budget allows.  Its chief gimmick is Elke Sommer and Sylvia Koscina as a pair of voluptuous, presumably sapphic assassins who go about their deadly work with a kooky cheerfulness.  “Goodbye, Mr Bridgenorth!” they cry as they tip a victim (played by future 1970s British sitcom-star Leonard Rossiter) off a high building.  Mr Kidd and Mr Wint did this schtick more amusingly in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever.  Johnson is serviceable as Drummond, but seems bemused by the proceedings.  It’s not among his most memorable performances.

 

Incidentally, in 1951, Johnson’s second-ever film appearance had been an uncredited one as a ‘Control Tower Operator’ in an old-school Bulldog Drummond movie.  This was Calling Bulldog Drummond, featuring Walter Pidgeon in the title role.

 

Johnson’s other 1960s movies include Michael Anderson’s Operation Crossbow (1964), a surprisingly downbeat World War II action-adventure movie in which he plays the British minister who sends George Peppard, Tom Courteney and Jeremy Kemp on a suicide mission to sabotage the Nazis’ V1 / V2 rocket project; and Basil Dearden’s epic costume-drama Khartoum (1966), where he’s an aide to Charlton Heston’s General Charles Gordon, locked in conflict with Laurence Olivier’s Muhammad Ahmed in 1880s Sudan.

 

For me, his most interesting 1960s role (apart from The Haunting) is 1966’s La Strega in Amore, or The Witch in Love, a black-and-white Italian movie in which he plays a young man hired by a wealthy, elderly woman (Sarah Ferrati) to catalogue her huge library.  The manner of Johnson’s recruitment is sinister.  First the woman stalks him, then she places in a newspaper a job advertisement that’s so oddly detailed he’s the only person in Rome who can meet its specifications.  Despite his misgivings, Johnson decides to stay in the woman’s luxurious palazzo when he meets her beautiful and alluring daughter (Rosanna Schiffiano).  But the longer he remains with the two women, the more his grip on reality loosens and the stronger the insinuation becomes that mother and daughter are the same person – two versions of la strega, the witch of the title.

 

© Arco Films / Cidif

 

Italian cinema was awash at the time with full-blooded, gothic horror movies, but director Damiano Damiani ploughs his own furrow with La Strega in Amore, making it dreamy rather than macabre and creating something that wouldn’t seem out-of-place in an arthouse cinema.  Unfortunately, the film’s premise doesn’t justify its one-hour-49-minute running time and it could have been a half-hour shorter.  Still, after seeing Johnson play fairly upright and decent characters, it’s interesting to see him in this playing a vain bastard, somebody you partly feel is getting what he deserves.  And after the languid, arty build-up, the film’s nasty climax delivers a jolt.

 

In 1975, Johnson not only starred in, but also wrote the original story for the forgotten thriller Hennessy, directed by Don Sharpe.  This is perhaps the first film inspired by Northern Ireland’s Troubles, which’d erupted in 1969.  It’s about an IRA explosives expert (Rod Steiger) who, after the British Army kills his wife and child, decides to blow up the state opening of the British parliament, destroying both the government and the Queen.  Johnson gives an endearing performance as the weary, dishevelled policeman trying to stop him.

 

Hennessy is patchy but has an impressive cast that also includes Lee Remick, Trevor Howard, Eric Porter, a young Patrick Stewart and an even-younger Patsy Kensit (playing Steiger’s doomed daughter).  The final scenes in the House of Commons, featuring the Queen, landed the filmmakers in trouble because they used real footage that Buckingham Palace had authorised without knowing it would end up in a film.  Also, at the time, the film’s subject-matter was extremely sensitive.  As a result, its British cinematic release was almost non-existent.

 

© Hennessy Film Productions / American International Pictures

 

Presumably because The Haunting had put him on the radar of horror filmmakers, Johnson continued to appear in scary movies during the 1970s and 1980s. These included Ovidio G. Assonitis and Roberto Piazzoli’s Beyond the Door (1974), Massimo Dallimano’s The Cursed Medallion (1975), Pete Walker’s The Comeback (1978), Sergio Martino’s Island of the Fishermen and The Great Alligator River (both 1979), and Don Sharpe’s What Waits Below (1984).  He was also in Roy Ward Baker’s kiddie-orientated The Monster Club (1981).  This was the ninth and final horror-anthology movie made by American (but British-based) producer Milton Subotsky.  By my calculations, Subotsky’s nine anthologies contain a total of 37 stories.  The Vampires, the one featuring Johnson in The Monster Club, is possibly the worst of all 37.  You feel like banging your head against the nearest hard surface at the story’s punchline, when the bloodsucking Johnson reveals he’s escaped destruction at the hands of some vampire-hunters thanks to a ‘stake-proof vest’.

 

In 1979, 16 years after The Haunting, Johnson played another doctor, a medical one, in a very different sort of horror movie.  This was the Italian film Zombie Flesh Eaters, directed by the legendary Lucio Fulci.  He was Dr Menard, the weary, dishevelled – by this time Johnson was good at doing ‘weary and dishevelled’ – but stoical GP on a remote Caribbean island trying to deal with an epidemic of reanimated, hungry cadavers.  The movie is both gleefully gory and lovably schlocky, with its highlights including a once-seen-never-forgotten underwater battle between a shark and a zombie.  Despite this, Johnson gives it his all.  He spouts the less-than-epic dialogue with as much earnestness as he would doing Shakespeare.

 

Financial pressures meant Johnson wasn’t able to retire and he continued working until his death.  According to his Wikipedia entry, he said in a 2000 interview he was “constantly worried where the next job was coming from,” but then quipped: “At least at my age the opposition gets less and less because they keep dying.”  His 21st century roles included ones in Simon West’s Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), Woody Allen’s Scoop (2006), Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008) and Tom Browne’s acclaimed Radiator (2014).

 

Also in his later years, after Lucio Fulci had become a cult figure and Zombie Flesh Eaters had become something of a camp classic, Johnson was invited to horror movie conventions to discuss his experiences making the film.  A serious Shakespearean actor he may have been, but he always sounded gracious and affectionate towards Fulci.  He was even complimentary about the film’s most notorious moment, wherein his character’s wife gets grabbed by the hair and dragged through a freshly-smashed hole in a door by a rotting zombie arm.  In the process, in loving close-up, she gets a big splint of wood protruding from the hole embedded in her eye – this was surely what cemented Zombie Flesh Eaters’ place on Britain’s list of banned ‘video nasties’ in the 1980s.  According to the journalist Tristan Bishop, an 80-something Johnson enthused to him at one convention, “That spike in the eyeball scene!  Wasn’t that genius?  So cinematic!”

 

Clearly, Richard Johnson was a man who enjoyed his work.

 

© Argyle Enterprises / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

© Variety Film / Variety Distribution

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Still got a Licence to Kill – and thrill

 

© Eon Productions

 

Another unwelcome reminder that I’m now old and decrepit…  I’ve just discovered that 35 years ago today, on June 13th 1989, Licence to Kill opened at the Leicester Square Odeon in London.  Time, I think, for a 35th-anniversary tribute to one of my favourite Bond movies.

 

Few events depress me more than when a film critic like Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian or Pete Travers in Rolling Stone, who knows nothing about James Bond and whose general opinions I don’t think much of either, decide it’s time to pen a feature ranking the Bond films from ‘best’ to ‘worst’.  That invariably means that the 1989 movie Licence to Kill with Timothy Dalton playing Bond ends up near the bottom, held off the ‘worst’ spot only by 1985’s A View to a Kill.  Bradshaw, Travers or whoever the no-nothing critic is will invariably damn Licence to Kill with such adjectives as ‘humourless’, ‘dour’, ‘violent’ and ‘misjudged’.

 

This was the film where Timothy Dalton and the Bond production team decided it was time to shake up the tried-and-tested formula of fantasy plots, over-the-top villains and unlikely action set-pieces and incorporate something more authentic.  In fact, Licence to Kill is a trailblazer for the Bond films of the 21st century, when the series was rebooted into a darker, grittier and critically acclaimed form with Daniel Craig.  But it rarely gets any credit for that.

 

Well, today, 35 years on, it’s time to stand up and be counted.  I think Licence to Kill is a great Bond movie.  When it appeared, I believed it was the best instalment in the series since the 1960s and I still regard it as being among the best half-dozen in the series’ 60-year history.  That its critical reputation is tarnished is down to bad luck.  It was unlucky in the reaction it got from fickle film critics who’d spent the previous two decades complaining that the Bond movies, during the tenure of Roger Moore, had become ‘too silly’ and had lost the ‘serious’ tone of the Ian Fleming books on which they were based.  But the moment that Licence to Kill appeared, they wailed that it was ‘too serious’ and lamented the loss of the glorious silliness of good old Roger Moore.

 

Licence to Kill was unlucky too because, although it made a respectable profit outside the USA, the American takings were the lowest ever for a Bond movie.  Despite what many think, this wasn’t a reflection of its quality, but the result of it being released at an inopportune time when cinemas were already crowded with Lethal Weapon 2, Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (a film that coincidentally was choc-a-bloc with Bond alumni like John Rhys-Davies, Alison Doody, Julian Glover and the original 007 himself Sean Connery).

 

© Eon Productions

 

And it was unlucky to be the last movie before the great Bond hiatus of 1989 to 1995, during which no new Bond films were made due to a legal dispute between Danjaq, the franchise’s holding company, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / United Artists.  This gave people the false impression that Licence to Kill, and Timothy Dalton, had crocked the series for half-a-dozen years.

 

When I saw Licence to Kill 35 years ago, what impressed me first was that it had a plot.  Not a tangle of subplots and diversions created because producer Cubby Broccoli and his writers wanted to fit in copious action and special-effects set-pieces involving, say, gondolas that turn into speedboats, and speedboats that turn into hang-gliders, and crashing cable cars, and Bond falling out of a plane without a parachute, and laser-gun shootouts in outer space, but a plot that moves smoothly from A to B and to C.

 

Licence to Kill begins with Bond being best man at the wedding of his CIA buddy Felix Leiter (David Hedison, who’d already played Leiter in 1974’s Live and Let Die).  Leiter’s big day proves even more eventful than expected because he has to interrupt his nuptials to seize Latin American drug baron Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi).  Sanchez has suddenly turned up on American soil in pursuit of his errant mistress Lupe (Talisa Soto) and her boyfriend – whose heart Sanchez cuts out before Leiter and the Feds clamp the cuffs on him.

 

© Eon Productions

 

Felix gets married as planned, but things take a dark turn when Sanchez escapes from captivity, with the aid of crooked DEA agent Ed Killifer (Everett McGill).  He and his henchmen turn up at the Leiters’ home on their wedding night to get revenge.  Leiter’s new wife Della (Priscilla Barnes) is murdered – Sanchez’s number-one scumbag minion Dario, played by a very young Benicio Del Toro, crows at Leiter, “Don’t worry, we gave her a nice honeymoo-oon!”  Leiter himself is dunked in a shark tank in a marine research centre in Key West, which is one of the fronts for Sanchez’s US drugs-smuggling operation.  Later, Bond discovers Della’s dead body and Leiter’s just-about-alive one, minus a couple of limbs, and vows revenge.

 

Bond starts by investigating the marine-research lab and then Sanchez’s research vessel the Wavekrest – by this time Sanchez himself has returned to base, a fictional Latin American country called Isthmus.  He tangles violently with Dario and Sanchez’s sleazy American lieutenant Milton Krest (Anthony Zerbe) and, gratifyingly, he drops Killifer and his suitcase of blood money into the shark tank that Leiter was maimed in.  (“You earned it!  You keep it!”)

 

Along the way, he finds an unexpected ally in the form of Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell), an airplane pilot who’s been working for Leiter in some mysterious capacity, and incurs the wrath of his boss M (Robert Brown), who thinks he’s getting involved in matters that don’t concern him (“We’re not a country club, 007!”) and revokes his licence to kill.  This was why the film had provisionally been titled Licence Revoked until, the story goes, research in the USA suggested that many Americans didn’t know what the word ‘revoked’ meant.

 

Now rogue, Bond steals a fortune in drugs money from the Wavekrest and uses it to fund a trip to Isthmus for him and Bouvier.  There, he tries to assassinate Sanchez but fails and, in the process, unwittingly exposes a secret operation being run against Sanchez by agents from Hong Kong.  This leaves Sanchez with the impression that the agents were the ones trying to assassinate him and Bond, by exposing them, is actually on his side.  An unlikely bromance ensues and Sanchez, enamoured with Bond, tries to recruit him into his organisation.

 

© Eon Productions

 

Aware that Sanchez is obsessed with loyalty, Bond starts planting doubts in Sanchez’s mind about the fidelity of his many henchmen who, in addition to those already mentioned, include his head of security Heller (Don Stroud) and his whizz-kid accountant Truman-Lodge (Anthony Starke).  Time, though, is running short for Bond because the two members of Sanchez’s organisation who know his true identity are returning to Isthmus: Krest, on board the Wavekrest, and Dario, who’s coming by way of El Salvador, where he’s managed to procure some stinger missiles.  Sanchez intends to use these to shoot down American aircraft in revenge for his recent incarceration.

 

What follows involves much mayhem and gruesome death – death by being doused in gasoline and set alight, by being blown apart in a decompression chamber, by being impaled on forklift-truck blades, by being fed into a cocaine-grinding machine.  A lot of this is inflicted by a now-paranoid Sanchez on the people who work for him.  Yes, Licence to Kill seems a million miles removed from the Roger Moore Bonds, where the most gruesome things were the inuendo-laden jokes cracked while Moore got intimate with ladies about half his age.  But while the brutality here may shock someone accustomed to the escapist fantasises of the 1970s and 1980s Bond movies, I loved it.

 

This was the sort of Bond imagined by Ian Fleming, most of whose books I’d read before I saw any of the films.  Not that Fleming ever wrote about 1980s Latin American drug dealers – his gangsters were of the James Cagney variety, with names like ‘Jack Spang’, ‘Sluggsy Morant’, ‘Sol Horowitz’, ‘Sam Binion’ and ‘Louie Paradise’.  But Dalton nails it as the screen Bond who was closest to the character described by Fleming.  Smooth and confident on the surface, but subtly troubled underneath, he does some bad stuff in the line of duty and hates having to do it.  But even more, he hates the evil deeds – like the murderous violation of his best friend’s wedding – that compel him to do it.

 

© Eon Productions

 

Not that the film is unremittingly dark.  It has some amusing lines and likeable performances.  One thing that brings a smile to the face is the entry into the plot, halfway through, of Bond’s secret-service armourer Q, played by the venerable Desmond Llewellyn.  Q takes some leave and nips over to Isthmus to help Bond and Bouvier out, bringing with him a cache of his famous gadgets.  (“Everything for a man on holiday.  Explosive alarm clock…  Guaranteed never to wake up anyone who uses it.  Dentonite toothpaste…  To be used sparingly.  The latest in plastic explosive.”  “I could do with some plastic,” Bond notes.)  After the Moore films, where Q’s main function was to be the butt of Bond’s jokes, it’s nice to see him with an expanded role and in a different dynamic with Bond.  In Licence to Kill, the two men actually like, respect and care about each other.

 

Llewellyn, though, is just one player in a generally delightful cast.  A 1980s / 1990s action-movie character actor, and nowadays a Sinatra-esque crooner, Robert Davi is excellent as Sanchez.  He tempers sufficient quantities of rottenness with some unexpected integrity – for instance, he insists on honouring the deal he’s made with Killifer, even though his sidekicks urge him to take the easier option of whacking the guy.  Some similarly distinguished character actors play the other villains: Zerbe, Stroud, McGill and, of course, Del Toro.  Plus you get some familiar and welcome faces  in smaller roles, including Frank McRae from 48 Hrs (1982) and The Last Action Hero (1993) and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa from the Mortal Combat franchise.

 

Also deserving praise is Carey Lowell.  Just as Davi is the great overlooked Bond villain, Lowell is the great overlooked Bond girl.  From the very beginning, when she shuts up the odious Dario by shoving a pump-action shotgun into his crotch, her Pam Bouvier character means business.  Her gutsiness is immensely refreshing after so many Bond actresses in the 1970s and 1980s had been given roles that were wooden (Carole Bouquet), insipid (Jane Seymour) or just plain dumb (Jill St John, Britt Ekland, Tanya Roberts).  It’s good too that she doesn’t just exist to follow Bond but has her own agenda.  She plans to retrieve the stinger missiles before Sanchez does serious damage with them, a scheme for which she’s enlisted the help of the duplicitous Heller.

 

© Eon Productions

 

What else do I like about Licence to Kill?  I like its references to Ian Fleming’s fiction.  Milton Krest, the Wavekrest and Sanchez’s fondness for whipping Lupe with a stingray’s tail come from the 1960 short story The Hildebrand Rarity, while Leiter’s encounter with the shark is lifted from the 1954 novel Live and Let Die.  I like how the secondary Bond girl, Talisa Soto’s Lupe, survives the film.  The secondary Bond girl in many films, from Lana Wood’s Plenty O’Toole in Diamonds are Forever (1971) to Berenice Marlohe’s Severine in Skyfall (2012), ends up as a sacrificial lamb, killed to show how beastly the villains are.

 

And I like how the film is a spiritual sequel to perhaps the best-ever Bond movie, 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which ends with Bond getting married and then seeing his new wife Tracy murdered by his nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld.  This is referenced in Licence to Kill by a moment when Bond becomes melancholic during Leiter’s wedding.  “He was married once,” Leiter tells Della, “but that was a long time ago.”  (When I saw the film in 1989 in a cinema in Aberdeen, someone in the row behind me declared: “Aye, an’ he looked like George Lazenby at the time!”)  This suggests that later in the film Bond isn’t just avenging Leiter and Della, but Tracy too.

 

Licence to Kill isn’t perfect, though.  There are a couple of longueurs.  For a man who’s recently lost  wife and limbs, David Hedison’s Leiter seems unfathomably cheerful when he reappears at the end.  Maybe it’s the drugs they were feeding him at the hospital.  And Carey Lowell’s Bouvier is ill-served by a scene where she encounters Lupe, finds out that she’s spent the night with Bond and reacts like a sulky, jealous schoolgirl.  When Q diplomatically suggests that Bond only did it for the sake of the mission, she retorts: “Bullshit!”

 

Licence to Kill was, alas, Timothy Dalton’s final showing as Bond.  When the franchise finally got going again with 1995’s Goldeneye, it was with the cuddlier Pierce Brosnan in the role.  I like Brosnan, but always found his attempts to combine the physicality of Sean Connery with the smoothness of Roger Moore a little unconvincing.  As I’ve said, Dalton strikes me as the actor who came closest to portraying Bond in the way Fleming had imagined him and, for me, there’s no higher accolade.  He’s the connoisseur’s Bond.

 

© Eon Productions

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It’s Timmy time

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

 

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part Two, sequel to his 2021 sci-fi blockbuster Dune and an adaptation of the second half of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel of the same name, has been on release for a few weeks now.  Though we’ve been busy recently moving apartment, my partner and I found time to watch it yesterday afternoon in our new neighbourhood’s cinema.

 

The film’s opening 20 minutes weren’t a happy experience for us.  Villeneuve immediately plunged us into the action, with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and their Fremen escorts Chani (Zendaya) and Stilgar (Javier Bardem) pinned down on the surface of the desert planet Arrakis by a squad of heavily-armed, black-clad goons from the villainous House of Harkonnen.  The tension mounted as the two parties, hunting each other, snuck across the planet’s scorched landscapes of sand and rock…  The soundtrack was unnervingly silent…  And from right behind us came an incessant cacophony of rustling paper, crackling wrappers, slurpy masticating and greedy chomping.  We were attending a 1.30 pm screening of Dune 2 and the couple sitting behind us had decided to guzzle a takeaway lunch while watching the film.  I wished a giant Arrakis sandworm would surface directly under their seats and guzzle them.

 

Finally, the couple managed to finish their meal, their unwelcome sound effects abated and we were able to focus fully on Villeneuve’s movie.  So, what did I think of it?  Before I give my verdict, here’s a warning.  In the entry ahead, there will be spoilers galore for Dune 2.

 

Well, to be honest, I didn’t enjoy it as much as its predecessor.  Mind you, I expected that three years ago as I walked out of Dune 1.  As I wrote at the time: “One thing I suspect makes this version of Dune so good is that, in telling only the book’s first half, it’s a story of tragedy.  And tragedy, as any student of Shakespeare will confirm, is one of the most powerful forms of narrative.  I suspect Villeneuve will find it harder to make the next instalment of Dune, dealing with how Paul marshals his forces and finally restores order on Arrakis, as gripping.  For me, at least, downbeat endings last longer in the imagination than happy ones.”

 

To be fair to Villeneuve and his co-writer John Spaihts, the ending they come up with here is less happy than the one I remember in Herbert’s novel, which I read as a teenager.  But the plot, wherein Paul Atreides joins forces with the Fremen, Arrakis’s Bedouin-like natives, and they take on the scumbag Harkonnens, still feels emotionally less complex than that of the original film.

 

© New English Library

 

The first film saw Paul’s honourable, though imperialistic father Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), head of the House of Atreides, get tricked into taking stewardship of Arrakis.  There, the House is destroyed by the brutal and grudgeful Harkonnens, with the connivance of the galactic Emperor (the ever-whispery Christopher Walken) and the Bene Gesserit, a female sect with Jedi-like powers who’re secretly manipulating events.  Paul and Jessica are among the few survivors and the Fremen reluctantly take them under their wing.

 

I had some problems with Dune 2’s pacing.  Much of the film takes place in the Arrakis desert, where Paul and his mum are gradually initiated into the ways of the natives.  Some Fremen are particularly interested in Paul because he seems to fulfil a long-held prophecy about a messiah who’ll come from another world and not only lead them to freedom but make their sandy world green again.  While I respect Villeneuve’s efforts at ‘world-building’ here, I feel this section goes on too long.  He ladles on the Fremen’s rituals and lore, especially things involving hallucinogenic substances like the spice – the prized commodity, necessary for enabling space travel in the Dune universe, which makes Arrakis such a big political deal in the first place – and the Water of Life, a blue fluid extracted from baby sandworms, the planet’s main non-human lifeform.  Though as any Scotsman will tell you, the Water of Life is actually whisky.

 

Also, the scenes where Paul argues with the Messiah-believing faction of the Freeman (headed by Bardem) that he isn’t really the Messiah put me in mind of the 1979 movie Monty Python’s Life of Brian.  While Chalamet tried to convince them that he wasn’t the Chosen One, I kept expecting to hear Terry Jones call out in his raspy old-lady voice: “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!”

 

© HandMade Films / Python (Monty) Pictures

 

Conversely, towards the end, things feel rushed.  As Paul and the Fremen escalate their attacks on the Harkonnens, who’ve taken over Arrakis and are trying to supervise its spice production, and the planet slips out of control, the Emperor and his daughter (Florence Pugh) are compelled to make an intervention.  They head for Arrakis…  And after their spaceship lands at the Harkonnens’ base, Paul and the forces of the Fremen simply turn up, unobserved and unannounced.  Until then, we’ve been led to believe that they’re confined to the inhospitable, storm-ridden south of the planet, outside the Harkonnens’ control.  How they arrive so quickly and easily, with legions of troops, a cavalry of sandworms and an arsenal of missiles, in the Harkonnens’ backyard is a mystery.  It’s as if the planet of Arrakis has suddenly shrunk to being the size of the Isle of Wight.

 

Meanwhile, certain sub-plots from Herbert’s book don’t quite enrich the movie in the way they could have – or are cut altogether.  The return of Paul’s faithful warrior-mentor Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) happens abruptly.  He just pops up all-of-a-sudden.  I’d have liked to know how he survived the massacre in the previous film, especially as we last saw him about to engage the Harkonnens in desperate battle.  Gurney brings with him an unexpected revelation about some ‘House Atomics’, nuclear missiles belonging to the Atreides that Duke Leto quietly stashed away on Arrakis.  These become a handy bargaining chip for Paul when he points them at the all-important spice fields and are a deus ex machina if ever there was one.  I can’t recall if these were in the book – if they were, I assume they were introduced less jarringly.

 

I do recall the book having an interesting twist whereby Gurney believes Jessica is the one who betrayed the Atreides to the Harkonnens.  But there’s zero interaction between the two of them in Dune 2.  Rebecca Ferguson, incidentally, deserves praise for her portrayal of Jessica, who grows into a sinister, if not chilling figure as she exerts more and more influence over the Fremen.  Gurney would be right to distrust her.

 

Elsewhere, I was perplexed by the absence of Thufir Harat (Stephen McKinley Henderson in Dune 1).  Thufir is a mentat, beings in the Dune universe who do the work of computers.  Employed by Paul’s late father, he has a reasonable supporting role in the first film and it’s noticeable that he’s not around in Dune 2.  In the novel, the Harkonnens enslave him after their bloody takeover, but then he secretly tries to undermine his new bosses whilst working in their headquarters.  In Dune 2, his presence might have solved the problem of how Paul moves his forces to the proximity of the Harkonnens and the Emperor without anyone noticing – Thufir could have deactivated the monitoring systems.  Anyway, the film leaves us to surmise that Thufir perished during the slaughter of the Atreides, though Villeneuve thanks McKinley Henderson in the credits, presumably for accepting the dropping of his character with good grace.

 

Ironically, in the first adaptation of Dune, the 1984 movie directed by David Lynch, which tried to shoehorn the entire novel into two hours and 17 minutes of running time and was derided for leaving so much out, Thufir is shown surviving the Atreides’ massacre and becoming the Harkonnens’ slave.  In that version, he was played by Freddie Jones, father of Toby Jones, with big, spidery eyebrows.

 

All that said, I did enjoy Dune 2.  The film was generally impressive and there were moments where I went, “Wow!”  Following on from Arrival (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), it’s good to see Villeneuve again treat a science- fiction story with high seriousness.  And I like how, for all that the male characters hog the screen and flaunt their testosterone, it’s implied that the female characters, as portrayed by Ferguson, Charlotte Rampling, Florence Pugh and Lea Seydoux, are the ones really running the show.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

 

Also great is Villeneuve’s depiction of the Harkonnens.  The scenes set on their home planet truly capture their fascistic, creepy, sado-masochistic awfulness, resembling black-and-white footage of rallies in Nazi Germany but populated by the bald-headed Cenobites from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser franchise.  Even their fireworks look dark and perverted.  And as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, the psychopathic nephew of arch-villain Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) who’s drafted in to quell the Fremen’s resistance and restore order on Arrakis, Austin Butler gives possibly the best performance in the film.  (In the old David Lynch movie, Feyd-Rautha was the character played by the reggae-loving Geordie, Sting.)

 

Though Butler just about manages to steal the show, it is one of those films that’s helped immeasurably by its ensemble cast.  That includes Timothée Chalamet who, as Paul, has the hardest acting task – he could have ended up a dull goody two shoes or, as he agonises over whether or not he should proclaim himself the Messiah, a whiny pain in the neck.  But Chalamet avoids both pitfalls.

 

Lastly, watching Dune 2, I realised it featured no fewer than three James Bond villains – Walken (Max Zorin in 1986’s A View to a Kill), Bardem (Raoul Silva in 2012’s Skyfall) and Dave Bautista (Mr Hinx in 2016’s Spectre).  For good measure, you get a Bond lady too, Lea Seydoux who played Madeline Swann in Spectre and 2021’s No Time to Die.  Yes, I know.  It’s sad that I notice these things.

 

© Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

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The literary Bond revisited: Colonel Sun

 

© Vintage Publishing

 

Here’s the latest in a series of posts wherein I look at the original James Bond novels and short-story collections from the 1950s and 1960s.  This time, however, I’m looking at a Bond novel that wasn’t written by Ian Fleming.  It’s 1968’s Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis.  Why?  Well, I slagged off Amis’s The Old Devils (1986) on this blog a few months ago, and I feel a bit guilty about giving poor old Kingsley a (verbal) kicking then.  So here’s my take on Colonel Sun, which I believe is much better.

 

In some ways, the 21st century has been a difficult time for James Bond.  On the film front, the new century began with one of the worst Bond movies ever, 2002’s Die Another Day, an ignoble end to Pierce Brosnan’s tenure in the role.  And, though the franchise was steadied with the recruitment of Daniel Craig and a more serious, mature and sensitive approach to the character, trouble never felt far away.  See, for example, the long periods between productions – six years from Spectre (2015) to No Time to Die (2021) – and Craig’s well-publicised reluctance to play Bond again after Spectre.  And the fact that, in the most recent movie, the filmmakers took the unprecedented step of – MASSIVE SPOILER AHEAD! – killing him off at the end.

 

Plus, there’s been much talk in recent years about Bond’s ‘obsolescence’.  The thinking goes that as a privileged, white, stuck-up, sexist macho-man rooted in the early decades of the Cold War, Bond has become embarrassingly anachronistic in our more socially-aware era today.  Laurie Penny, for instance, said as much in a New Statesman article in 2015.  There’s a parallel argument that in the high-tech modern world Bond is obsolescent too.  This was even referred to in Spectre, when Bond is faced with a new, tech-obsessed superior called C (Andrew Scott).  C vows to “bring British intelligence out of the dark ages, into the light” and argues that “an agent in the field”, like 007, can’t “last long against all those drones and satellites.”

 

And yet, no matter how unfashionable Bond might be nowadays, you can’t deny that well-regarded modern writers are still keen to follow in Ian Fleming’s footsteps and have a go at writing new Bond novels.  These include Sebastian Foulkes (with 2008’s Devil May Care), Jeffery Deaver (with 2011’s Carte Blanche), William Boyd (with 2013’s Solo) and Anthony Horowitz (with 2015’s Trigger Mortis and 2018’s Forever and a Day).  Long before Foulkes, Deaver, Boyd and Horowitz got in on the act, though, another writer attempted to construct a novel around Fleming’s legendary superspy.

 

In 1968, just four years after Fleming’s death, Kingsley Amis wrote a Bond adventure called Colonel Sun and published it under the pseudonym Robert Markham.  By then, Amis was a big noise in British letters thanks to works like 1954’s Lucky Jim and 1960’s Take a Girl Like You.  I should say my 2015 Vintage Classics edition of Colonel Sun makes no mention of Robert Markham on its cover and advertises it unapologetically as a Kingsley Amis novel.  Anyway, before I offer my thoughts on Colonel Sun, here’s another spoilers warning.  There are lots of them ahead…

 

© Ian Fleming Publications

 

The novel is set a little while after the events of Fleming’s Bond swansong, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), which Amis is rumoured to have polished up when Fleming died before he could revise it himself.  It begins with an audacious attempt by some unidentified villains to kidnap both Bond and his secret-service boss M.  They’re only half-successful.  M is abducted and whisked out of England, but Bond manages to elude his would-be abductors and is tasked with tracking M down.  He soon homes in on an island in the Aegean Sea.  There, M is being held by a Chinese officer, ‘Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the Special Activities Committee, People’s Liberation Army’.

 

The Colonel has a dastardly plan.  The Soviet Union is hosting a secret international conference in the area and Sun plans to destroy it and the delegates in a mortar attack, the blame for which will then be pinned on Britain.  Sun intends to make it look like one of the last mortars blew up accidentally, before firing, and leave Bond and M’s dead, but still identifiable, bodies in the wreckage.  Thus, China will benefit from the discrediting not only of the USSR for sloppy security, but also of the UK for warmongering.

 

To rescue M and thwart Sun’s scheme, Bond joins forces with a woman called Ariadne Alexandrou, a Greek communist who’s been working for the Soviets; and a Greek World War II veteran called Niko Litsas who, after fighting Nazis, fought communists during the 1946-49 Greek Civil War.  Amis discreetly skates over Britain’s sorry role in this episode of Greek history.  In 1944 the British government decided to back the anti-communist faction in Greece against the left-leaning one, even though the former faction contained many Nazi sympathisers and collaborators and the latter contained many partisans who’d fought for the Allies.  Despite their ideological differences, the trio bond – ouch – and are soon prowling the Aegean Sea in a vessel called The Altair whilst figuring a way of taking the fight to Sun and his many henchmen.

 

Amis’s plot is generic and a few things don’t make sense.  For example, why does Sun want to plant the elderly and normally deskbound M at the scene of the crime?  This is the literary M we’re talking about, not the feistier and more empowered cinematic version played by the likes of Judi Dench and Ralph Fiennes.  Wouldn’t it look more believable if the body of another, physically-able British agent was found there next to Bond’s?  It’s hard to see this as anything more than a perfunctory excuse for the novel’s main gimmick, the kidnapping of M.

 

But Colonel Sun is still good entertainment and feels more credible as a Bond novel than the other non-Fleming Bonds I’ve read.  For one thing, unlike the rather bland villains in most of the 21st century Bond-novels I mentioned above, Colonel Sun makes a memorable baddie.

 

© Methuen

 

Yes, he belongs to a long tradition of Oriental supervillains found in pulpy colonial adventure fiction – Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books being the most notorious examples.  He’s not even the first bad guy in the Bond canon to follow this dubious blueprint, an honour that belongs to the titular character of Fleming’s Dr No (1957).  But Sun is splendidly eccentric.  He’s irritatingly polite and addresses friends and foes alike by their first names.  He also sees himself as an Anglophile: “Sun did not share his colleagues’ often-expressed contempt… for everything British.  He was fond of many aspects of their culture and considered it regrettable in some ways that that culture had such a short time left.”

 

Then there’s his penchant for torture.  Near the novel’s end, just before he lays into Bond with an array of kitchen utensils (‘knives, skewers, broom-straws’), he explains: “True sadism has nothing whatever to do with sex.  The intimacy I was referring to is moral and spiritual, the union of two souls in a rather mystical way.”  Later still, he surprises us when he confesses to Bond that “I didn’t feel like a god when I was torturing you back there.  I felt sick and guilty and ashamed.”

 

Admittedly, I could have done without the linguistic quirk that Amis gives him.  Thanks to his “quick ear and passionate desire to learn” English and a “total ignorance of the British dialect pattern”, he’s ended up with a bizarre accent combining the “tones of Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Belfast, Newcastle, Cardiff and several sorts of London…”  As a result, every time Colonel Sun opens his mouth in the book, I imagine his voice sounding like an Artificial Intelligence one created from a dataset involving Liam Gallagher, Billy Connolly, Ringo Starr, Van Morrison, Jimmy Nail, Charlotte Church and Ray Winstone.

 

Colonel Sun also feels like a proper Bond novel because Kingsley Amis’s authorial voice doesn’t sound that different from Ian Fleming’s.  Putting it more crudely, it feels closer to the originals than the modern pastiches do because Amis was as much of a curmudgeonly snob as Fleming was.  By the 1960s, Bond’s rarefied world of Bentleys, dinner jackets and private members’ clubs were on their way out; and Amis bellyaches about it as you’d imagine Fleming would.  When Bond drives through some English farmland, he writes: “Places like this would last longest as memorials of what England had once been.  As if to contradict this idea, there appeared ahead of him a B.E.A. Trident newly taken off from London Airport, full of tourists bringing their fish-and-chip culture to the Spanish resorts, to Portugal’s lovely Algarve province, and now… as far as Morocco.”

 

Also activating Amis’s Licence to Grump is the prospect of the great, fish-and-chip-loving unwashed discovering the Greek islands.  Describing a waterfront, he observes: “At the near end were whitewashed cottages with blue or tan shutters and doors, then a grocery, a ship’s supplier, harbour offices, a tavérna with a faded green awning.  No neon, no cars, no souvenir shops.  Not yet.”

 

Still, some aspects of Colonel Sun are surprisingly liberal, considering Amis’s cranky right-wing politics.  Adriane, the book’s heroine, is resourceful and able to look after herself and Bond comes across as less of a sexist boor than one might expect.  Meanwhile, some Soviet characters are depicted sympathetically: for example, Gordienko, Moscow’s man in Athens, who believes Bond’s warnings that something fishy is afoot and will have bad consequences for both their countries; and Yermolov, the pragmatic, vodka-loving dignitary who at the end expresses the USSR’s gratitude to Bond for foiling Sun’s plan.  Indeed, Yermolov feels like a prototype for the tough but avuncular General Gogol, the KGB head played by Walter Gottel, who appeared in every Bond movie from The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) to The Living Daylights (1987).  In Colonel Sun, Yermolov even offers Bond the Order of the Red Banner; just as Gogol awards Roger Moore (‘Comrade Bond’) the Order of Lenin at the end of 1985’s A View to a Kill.

 

© Eon Productions

 

But before we assume that old Kingsley has gone all hippy-dippy and peace-and-love, we should bear in mind that the Soviets are the good guys here only comparatively – because the bad guys are the Chinese.  The novel even postulates that the West and the Soviet Union are on the brink of working together because of the increasing threat posed by China.  Richard Nixon’s jaunt to China in 1972 must have knocked that notion on the head.  Happily, by the time of the 1997 Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies, which has Pierce Brosnan joining forces with Michelle Yeoh to take on Rupert Murdoch, sorry, an evil, fictional media mogul played by Jonathan Pryce, the Bond-verse had decided that the Chinese could be good guys too.

 

While Colonel Sun has never been filmed, it’s interesting how a few of its ideas have turned up in the Bond movies.  The kidnapping of M was a key plot element in 1999’s Tomorrow Never Dies, while a villain called Colonel Tan-Sun Moon features in Die Another Day.  And if Colonel Sun’s musings during the book’s climactic torture scene sound familiar – “Torture is easy, on a superficial level.  A man can watch himself being disembowelled and derive great horror from the experience, but it’s still going on at a distance…  a man lives inside his head.  That’s where the seed of his soul is…  So James, I’m going to penetrate to where you are.  To the inside of your head….” – it’s because they were used as dialogue in Spectre, during the scene where Christoph Waltz violates Daniel Craig’s skull using a torture device that looks like a dentist’s drill on a robotic tentacle.

 

In Spectre, Waltz’s character is revealed as being none other than Ernst Stavro Blofeld.  Having James Bond’s great arch-enemy borrow his best lines?  Colonel Sun would have been flattered.

 

© Eon Productions