The Spy Who Loved Me – Blood and Porridge

December 10, 2024

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

July 22, 2023

People who stunted my development

© The Mirisch Company / United Artists

I read recently that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – better and less grandiosely known as the folk who dole out the Oscars every year – are currently considering creating a new Oscar that will honour the work of the movie industry’s stunt performers. A yearly award for the film featuring the best stunt-work looks a real possibility thanks to the efforts of Chad Stahelski, director of the John Wick series (2014-23). He commented last month, “We’ve been meeting with members of the Academy and actually having these conversations… Everybody on both sides wants this to happen. They want stunts at the Oscars. It’s going to happen.”

Also creating a buzz lately about stunt-work – proper, practical stunts carried out by real people, as opposed to artificial action-sequences created with cartoony, shit-looking Computer-Generated Imagery – has been the trailer for the new Mission Impossible movie. This is framed by a stunt involving the world’s most famous scientologist in which he deliberately barrels off a very high cliff. The last person to do this so spectacularly was Roger Moore – or more accurately, stuntman Rick Sylvester – in the pre-credits sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me (1978).

Anyway, now seems an opportune time to dust down and repost this piece about my favourite practitioners of the art of stunt-work, which originally saw the light of day in 2018.

In my boyhood, there were no personal computers, video games or Internet to keep me inside the house. For amusement, I had to go outside and play in a variety of locations that, thinking about it now, were a wee bit dangerous – at roadsides and riversides, in derelict buildings and old sheds, and on any roof or in any treetop I managed to climb up to. I suppose many kids in the 1970s played in places like those, but I had an advantage. I lived on a farm, which was full of machinery sheds, hay-sheds, grain stores, slurry pits, silage pits, workshops and outhouses. It was also right next to a river and a busy road. Perhaps it was this potential for injury and death in my play-area that prompted me, like most pre-pubescent males in the 1970s, to resolve that when I grew up I was going to be a film stuntman.

Accordingly, when I went fishing one day at the age of nine and fell off the riverbank, into the river, the way I recounted the mishap to my school-mates later made it sound like how Paul Newman and Robert Redford had famously jumped off the cliff and into the river in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). This feat of derring-do had actually been performed by the stuntmen Howard Curtis and Micky Gilbert. To be honest, the bank I fell off was only two feet above the water, and the water itself was only three feet deep, but in situations like these you’re allowed to use your imagination.

In fact, I became much less enamoured with action-movie stars when it occurred to me that, most of the time, they didn’t perform the breath-taking stunts featured in their films. Those were done by unsung stuntmen and stuntwomen, who therefore were the people I should admire. If I’d been on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, with my autograph book, I think I would have ignored Harrison Ford and made a beeline instead for stuntmen Vic Armstrong and the late Terry Richards. And that’s a big reason why I despise the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day, which made heavy use of CGI during its action scenes. It seemed a betrayal of all the stunt-work that’d distinguished the Bond movies during their previous 40-year history and an insult to all the people who’d contributed to that stunt-work. (By my count, Armstrong and Richards both worked on six official Bond movies, and each had one ‘rogue’ 007 production to their names too – Armstrong with 1983’s Never Say Never Again, Richards with 1967’s Casino Royale.)

Anyway, here’s a list of some of my favourite stunt performers throughout history….

© Walter Wanger Productions / United Artists

Born to a US ranching family in 1895, Yakima Canutt became a world-champion rodeo rider and by 1923 was involved in the fledgling motion-picture industry, inevitably playing cowboys in westerns. However, he’d had his voice ravaged by flu during a two-year stint with the US Navy and he realised he couldn’t continue as an actor when silent films gave way to the talkies, and so he started to specialise in stunt-work. Canutt ended up as stunt double for John Wayne, who claimed to have got many of his famous cowboy mannerisms – the strut, the drawl – from him. As a cowboy, after all, Canutt was the real deal.

His most famous stunt is one he performed in 1939’s Stagecoach, in which he leaps onto a team of horses pulling the titular stagecoach, falls between them, gets dragged along and then disappears under the stagecoach itself. This inspired the sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones is dragged beneath a German truck. Canutt later became a second-unit director and staged the chariot race in 1959’s Ben Hur. And despite sustaining injuries that required plastic surgery on at least two occasions, he lived to the ripe old age of 90.

Bud Ekins was a champion motorcyclist as well as a stuntman. It was he – not Steve McQueen, as was believed for a long time – who rode the Triumph TR6 Trophy motorbike near the end of 1963’s The Great Escape, when McQueen’s character, pursued by half the German army, attempts to leap the giant fence that separates him from Switzerland. (The famously petrol-headed McQueen did ride the motorbike during the preceding chase and was keen to perform the jump himself, but the filmmakers talked him out of it.) That alone earns Ekins a place in my Stuntmen Hall of Fame, but he went on to do lots of other cool stuff. He worked with McQueen again in Bullitt (1968), driving that film’s iconic Ford Mustang 390 GT, and he was also involved in Diamonds are Forever (1970), Race with the Devil (1975), Sorcerer (1977) and The Blues Brothers (1980).

Every time I’m on board a cable car and spot another cable car approaching from the opposite direction, I wonder if I’ll see Alf Joint perform a suicidal leap from the roof of one car onto the roof of the other – for Joint was the stuntman who doubled for Richard Burton in 1967’s Where Eagles Dare when Burton’s character had to hop cable cars close to the fearsome Schloss Adler, the mountaintop stronghold of the SS. Like many a great British stuntman, Joint’s CV is a roll-call of Bond movies (he made two), Star Wars movies (one) and Superman movies (three). He doubled for Eric Porter, playing Professor Moriarty in the acclaimed 1980s TV series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, when the character plunged to his doom at the Reichenbach Falls; and for Lee Remick in The Omen (1976), presumably during the sequence when Remick is pushed out of a hospital window and crashes through the roof of an ambulance passing below.

© Winkast Film Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

I also remember Joint performing a memorable stunt during the adverts for Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates, which ran on TV from 1968 to 2003 (though I hear they were revived a few years ago). These featured the Milk Tray man, a Bondian character who kept risking life and limb in order to deliver boxes of the chocolates to a beautiful lady, with the tagline being: “And all because… the lady loves Milk Tray.” I can’t recall if it was the same lady receiving all the chocolates in all the adverts – if it was, the poor woman must have developed type 2 diabetes by 2003. Anyway, Joint did the Milk Tray man’s dive off a vertiginous cliff, into a shark-infested sea, in perhaps the most famous of these adverts in 1972.

Also involved in Where Eagles Dare was Eddie Powell, a stuntman who seemed to divide his time between James Bond movies – he made ten official ones, plus Never Say Never Again – and Hammer Films, where he was a stunt double for Christopher Lee in movies like The Mummy (1959), Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966) and To the Devil a Daughter (1976). For that last film, he also did a ‘full body burn’ stunt during a scene where satanic forces cause Anthony Valentine to spontaneously combust inside a church. In addition, Hammer gave him a few acting credits, predictably eccentric ones, such as the lumbering, bandaged monster in The Mummy’s Shroud (1967) and the half-man, half-beast Goat of Mendes conjured up at a witches’ sabbat in The Devil Rides Out (1968).

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts Productions

Later in his career, Powell performed stunts as the titular, drooling, acid-blooded, multi-mouthed beastie in Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). For instance, he took part in the first film’s engine-room scene where the alien swoops down on the hapless Harry Dean Stanton.

Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t mention William Hobbs here as he wasn’t exactly a stuntman. He was a fight choreographer, more precisely a sword-fight choreographer, and his work enlivened many a swashbuckler over the years. He directed the swordplay in The Three Musketeers (1973) and Four Musketeers (1974) and presumably had the difficult task of restraining Oliver Reed, who from all accounts threw himself into the movies’ fight scenes with the enthusiasm of a blade-wielding Whirling Dervish. He also worked on Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), Ridley Scott’s The Duellists (1977) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), for which he devised the samurai fights. I generally can’t stand the 1980 Dino De Laurentiis production of Flash Gordon, but the sequence where Sam Jones fights Timothy Dalton on a platform while spikes erupt at random points and at random moments through its floor, again overseen by Hobbs, is one of the film’s few good parts. Near the end of his life he was still working, on TV, arranging fights for Game of Thrones (2011-19).

Actually, you can see Hobbs in action in this instalment of the long-running TV show This is Your Life (1955-2007), rehearsing a gruelling-looking swordfight with Christopher Lee just before Eamonn Andrews surprises Lee and shepherds him off to a TV studio for a star-studded retrospective of his career. (I usually found This is Your Life tacky and maudlin, but I thought this one was fascinating because, besides Lee and Hobbs, it corrals such movie legends as Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and the afore-mentioned Oliver Reed together under one roof.)

© Troublemaker Studios / Dimension Films

And now for a lady, the New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell, who doubled for Lucy Lawless in the Xena: Warrior Princess TV show and for Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies. Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004) involved a stunt where a shotgun blast hurled Bell backwards – this did so much damage to her ribs and wrist that she spent months recovering from it. But there were clearly no hard feelings between Bell and Tarantino because for his next movie, 2007’s Death Proof, he cast her as herself. She plays a movie stuntwoman – called Zoe Bell – who turns the tables on Kurt Russell’s car-driving serial killer. Tarantino shares my disdain for CGI and insisted that all the vehicular action seen in Death Proof was the real deal, including a ‘ship’s mast’ stunt where Bell straddles the hood of a speeding Dodge Challenger R/T with only a couple of straps to hang onto. Since then, she’s done more gigs for Tarantino, as a stuntwoman in Inglourious Basterds (2009), as an actress in Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2016), and as both in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

Finally, no roundup of my favourite stuntmen would be complete without mention of Vic Armstrong, who’s in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s busiest stunt double. His brother Andy, his wife Wendy, and a half-dozen members of the younger generation of his family all work in the stunt / special-effects business too, which must make the Armstrongs the Corleones of the stunt-world.

As well as seven official and unofficial Bonds, his filmography includes three Indiana Joneses and three Supermen, plus a Rambo, Terminator, Omen, Conan and Mission Impossible. He served not only as Harrison Ford’s stunt double while he played Indiana Jones, but also in Blade Runner (1982), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Mosquito Coast (1986), Frantic (1988) and Patriot Games (1992). Indeed, back in his youth, his resemblance to the star was so striking that Ford once quipped to him, “If you learn to talk, I’m in deep trouble.”

© Titan Books

April 29, 2023

The literary Bond revisited: Octopussy and The Living Daylights

© Jonathan Cape

I once read a comment made by esteemed poet Philip Larkin about James Bond’s unsuitability for a short-fiction format: “I am not surprised that Fleming preferred to write novels. James Bond, unlike Sherlock Holmes, does not fit snugly into the short story length: there is something grandiose and intercontinental about his adventures that require elbow room and such examples of the form as we have tend to be eccentric and muted.”

As a boy, I would have agreed. I read most of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books back then and the one I was least enamoured with was For Your Eyes Only. Actually, FYEO (as I’ll refer to it) wasn’t a novel but a collection of short stories featuring Bond. In one of them, Quantum of Solace – which had nothing to do with the 22^nd official Bond movie, made with Daniel Craig in 2008 – all 007 did was sit and listen to somebody else narrate a story about a different set of characters.

For me at the age of 11, a good Bond story needed a super-villain with an imposing HQ, and a nefarious scheme involving espionage and / or criminality, and a love interest, and various action scenes where said super-villain tried, unsuccessfully, to bump Bond off. And of course, with Ian Fleming, there’d also be a wealth of background detail culled from Fleming’s experiences as a globetrotting journalist, naval intelligence officer and bon viveur and from his research – research was something he was scrupulous about. Cramming all these things into a short story was not viable, I thought. Thus, the truncated slices of Bondery that appeared in FYEO just seemed weird to me.

They seem much less weird to me today – especially since, after reading FYEO, I saw such opulent but ramshackle Bond films as The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979). Their plots were so disjointed, thanks to the filmmakers’ wish to squeeze in as many different, exotic locations and spectacular action set-pieces as possible, that they often felt like a series of short, barely-connected stories rather than a single, coherent, movie-length one.

Anyway, Larkin wasn’t talking about FYEO but about Fleming’s other collection of James Bond short stories, Octopussy and The Living Daylights, which was published in 1966, two years after Fleming’s death. This book constitutes Bond’s final appearance in print, as penned by his creator. It originally consisted of just the two stories mentioned in the title, although subsequent editions beefed it up with the addition of two more, The Property of a Lady and 007 in New York. Nonetheless, it remains a slim volume. Even with four stories, it comes to a mere 123 pages.

Since then, of course, Octopussy and The Living Daylights have lent their titles to Bond movies, in 1982 and 1987 respectively. A film has yet to be made called The Property of a Lady and to be honest I think Adele or Billie Eilish would have difficulty wrapping their vocal chords around the title in a Bond-movie theme song. (“The proper-TEE… of a lad-EE…!” No, can’t imagine it.) Obviously, 007 in New York wouldn’t cut it as a movie title at all. Mind you, there was a TV movie made in 1976 called Sherlock Holmes in New York starring, heaven help us, Roger Moore as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s deerstalker-wearing detective, so anything is possible.

© Eon Productions

Octopussy and The Living Daylights was one of the few Fleming-Bond books I hadn’t read in my boyhood, so when I encountered a copy of it in a bookstore a while ago thought I’d give it a shot. How would I get on with it? Four decades after I’d read FYEO, would I find the short-story James Bond more palatable?

The opening story, Octopussy, is the longest one in the collection but it has Bond only as a secondary character. The story concerns a Major Dexter Smythe, described acidly by Fleming as “the remains of a once brave and resourceful officer and of a handsome man…” Now “he was fifty-four, slightly bald and his belly sagged in the Jantzen trunks. And he had had two coronary thromboses… But, in his well-chosen clothes, his varicose veins out of sight and his stomach flattened by a discreet support belt behind an immaculate cummerbund, he was still a fine figure of a man at a cocktail party or dinner on the North Shore…”

The North Shore mentioned in that excerpt is the north coast of Jamaica. During the post-war years Smythe and his wife, now deceased, established themselves there after escaping from hard-pressed, austerity-era Britain: “They were a popular couple and Major Smythe’s war record earned them the entrée to Government House society, after which their life was one endless round of parties, with tennis for Mary and golf (with the Henry Cotton irons!) for Major Smythe. In the evenings there was bridge for her and the high poker game for him. Yes, it was paradise all right, while, in their homeland, people munched their spam, fiddled in the black market, cursed the government and suffered the worst winter weather for thirty years.”

Yet this easy, comfortable life in Jamaica didn’t fall into Smythe’s lap. Gradually, Fleming enlightens us on how Smythe was able to afford it. In a back story that has echoes of B. Traven’s 1927 novel and John Huston’s 1948 movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, we learn that in the Austrian Alps at the end of World War II, he stumbled across something immensely valuable that he hoarded for himself. To do this, however, he also had to commit murder. Octopussy describes what happens when Smythe’s ‘ancient sin’ finally catches up with him. The bearer of the bad news – that the authorities have found out what he did back in the war and intend to arrest him – is a ‘tall man’ in a ‘dark-blue tropical suit’ with ‘watchful, serious blue-grey eyes’. It’s Bond. But Bond isn’t just carrying out a professional errand. Eventually we discover that he has a personal stake in bringing Smythe to justice.

Once you accept that the story is about Smythe rather than Bond, it proceeds agreeably. The plump and comical Smythe, who paddles about the reef in front of his villa and rather pathetically talks to the fish that swim there – plus an unfriendly, tentacled mollusc whom he’s christened ‘Octopussy’ – gradually loses our sympathy as Fleming peels back the layers and we discover the cruel, and unnecessary, deed he committed to enrich himself decades earlier. Bond is hardly a paradigm of virtue but, equipped with a conscience and a rough-and-ready code of ethics, he’s the antithesis of what’s represented by Smythe. The scene where the flaccid and weak-willed Smythe confesses his crime to Bond is admirably low-key, but Fleming infuses it with a cold, sadistic tension.

The Property of a Lady, on the other hand, is a conventional Bond adventure in miniature. It has 007 turn the auctioning at Sotheby’s of an artwork designed by Carl Faberge – according to the catalogue, “(a) sphere carved from an extraordinarily large piece of Siberian emerald matrix weighing approximately one thousand three hundred carats” – into a trap to catch the KGB’s director of operations in London. Also involved is a female Russian double-agent working in the British Secret Service, whom the service is aware of and uses to feed fake information back to Moscow. To be honest, the plot didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t see how Bond, by snaring London’s top KGB man at Sotheby’s, could avoid alerting Moscow to the fact that British intelligence had cottoned onto the double agent’s existence and were using her for their own ends.

Still, the story is readable and the scenes set in Sotheby’s allow Fleming to show off his knowledge, acquired through research or personal experience, of the world’s most famous broker in fine art. When Bond expresses surprise that the auctioneer doesn’t bang his gavel three times and declare, “Going, going, gone,” an expert informs him, “You may still find that operating in the Shires or in Ireland, but it hasn’t been the fashion at London sales rooms since I’ve been attending them.”

Elements from both Octopussy-the-short-story and The Property of a Lady turn up in Octopussy-the-1982-film, which starred Roger Moore. In the film, the title character is not an octopus but a beautiful and mysterious woman played by Maud Adams, whose father, it transpires, once received a visit from visit by Bond similar to the visit that Major Smythe received in the original story. The film also features a proper octopus, and there’s some business too about a Faberge egg being auctioned off at Sotheby’s. However, if you’ve seen Octopussy-the-movie and don’t remember these things, that’s hardly surprising because it’s a mad mishmash of things – involving nuclear warheads, circuses, exiled Afghan princes, feuding Russian generals, knife-throwing identical twins, hot-air balloons, snake charmers, gorilla suits, everything bar the proverbial kitchen sink. It’s one of the very worst Bond movies in my opinion.

Meanwhile, Hannes Oberhauser, the character murdered by Major Smythe in Octopussy-the-story, plays a small but important role in the backstory of Spectre (2015), the fourth Bond with Daniel Craig in the title role. He’s mentioned in a plot twist that bears upon Bond’s relationship with his old nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz). That twist was much derided by the critics, though as a fan of the books I was pleased that Oberhauser got name-checked in a Bond movie at last.

© Eon Productions

The third story in the book, The Living Daylights, sees Bond assigned a mission in Berlin. He has to kill a Soviet sniper whom the KGB have lined up to shoot a defecting scientist while he flees from the east to the west of the city – the story is set shortly before the creation of the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie. Bond has a crisis of conscience when he discovers that the enemy sniper is a woman, an attractive blonde whom he’s seen posing as a member of an orchestra that’s performing over on the Communist-Bloc side of town. This story is incorporated, more or less intact, into the early part of the 1987 movie The Living Daylights, which was the first one to star Timothy Dalton as Bond. In the film, however, the action is moved to Bratislava, the defector is a KGB officer and his defection is planned to take place during an orchestral performance in a concert hall.

Although the rest of the plot of The Living Daylights-the-film is rather convoluted and unsatisfactory, and there are a few daft moments seemingly left over from the previous movies in the series, it felt like a breath of fresh air to me at the time. It was an attempt at a slightly more sensible Bond film and had an actor in the lead role trying to depict Bond as the moody, occasionally conscience-stricken character that Fleming had originally written. And having a big chunk of Fleming’s story in it at the start definitely helped.

The final story, 007 in New York, is a trifle – Bond is sent into the Big Apple to warn a former Secret Service member that the man she’s cohabiting with is actually a Soviet agent, though he spends most of the story’s eight pages planning the shopping, eating, drinking, clubbing and wenching that he’s going to do while he’s there. This allows Fleming to show off his knowledge of the city – “Hoffritz on Madison Avenue for one of their heavy, toothed Gillette-type razors, so much better than Gillette’s own product, Tripler’s for some of those French golf socks made by Izod, Scribner’s because it was the last great bookshop in New York and because there was a salesman there with a good nose for thrillers, and then to Abercrombie’s to look over the new gadgets… And then what about the best meal in New York – oyster stew with cream, crackers and Miller High Life at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central? No, he didn’t want to sit up at a bar… Yes. That was it! The Edwardian Room at the Plaza. A corner table.”

Fleming was known to have a predilection for sadomasochism, so it’s telling that 007 in New York also sees Bond considering a visit to a bar he’d heard about that “was the rendezvous for sadists and masochists of both sexes. The uniform was black leather jackets and leather gloves. If you were a sadist, you wore the gloves under the left shoulder strap. For the masochists it was the right.” Bond has an old flame in New York whom he intends to meet up with and enjoy some nightlife with, including the S-&-M-themed nightlife, and it’s here that a tiny sliver of 007 in New York makes it into the movies too. The old flame’s name is Solange, which is the name of the character played by Caterina Murino in Casino Royale, which saw Daniel Craig’s debut as Bond, in 2006.

007 in New York is tied up with a gentle, though unexpected, twist that’s worthy of Somerset Maugham – a writer whom Fleming was a big admirer of. And that, unfortunately is it. Fleming had passed away prior to this collection’s publication and no further Bond material was to be published under his name. Thus, Octopussy and The Living Daylights marked the end of James Bond as a literary phenomenon…

For all of two years, until 1968, when Kingsley Amis published Colonel Sun.

October 4, 2021October 5, 2021

Stop getting Bond wrong! (Part 2)

Continuing my ranking of all the James Bond films from worst to best, here are my candidates for the franchise’s top twelve. Candidates? No, they are the top twelve. Don’t even try to argue with me.

12: The Living Daylights (1987)

Lately, The Living Daylights, Timothy Dalton’s debut as Bond, has seemingly been reappraised and now figures highly in some rankings of the franchise. It was even placed at number 4 in a recent feature in the Independent. Well, hold on. It’s good, but not that good. After 14 years of quips, raised eyebrows and safari suits, Dalton’s more serious Bond is a breath of fresh air. While preparing for the role, he even read Ian Fleming’s original books, which no doubt helped. He and love interest Maryam d’Abo make a likeable couple and the film begins strongly, its first act following Fleming’s 1962 short story of the same name. Later, alas, it gets unnecessarily muddled and the two main villains, despite being played by Jeroen Krabbé and Joe Don Baker, are rather blah, although Andreas Wisniewski is memorable as the lethal hitman / henchman Necros. The scene where Necros engages in vicious hand-to-hand combat in a kitchen, using various kitchen utensils and appliances, was evoked in last year’s Christopher Nolan epic, Tenet. I hated Aha’s theme song at the time, but since then it’s grown on me. (The same can’t be said for Duran Duran’s A View to a Kill.)

11: Dr No (1962)

I feel guilty ranking Dr No, the first entry in the series and the film that turned former Edinburgh milkman Sean Connery into a superstar, at only number 11 on this list. However, when I saw it as a kid I was disappointed and that sense of juvenile disappointment has lingered ever since. This was because I’d read Ian Fleming’s 1958 novel Dr No beforehand and loved the fact that (1) it had a giant squid in it and (2) Bond killed Dr No at the end by burying him alive in bird-guano. I was looking forward to seeing these things in the film, but neither appeared – the squid presumably because of budgetary restrictions and the guano presumably because it would have grossed out the audience. So, if Connery had got to have a scrap with a giant squid and got to drown Dr No (Joseph Wiseman) in bird-shit, I’d have enjoyed the film more and placed it higher.

10: Thunderball (1965)

The previous movie in the series, Goldfinger (1964), got the emerging Bond formula exactly right. In comparison, Thunderball seems slightly askew. It’s overlong and the copious underwater sequences slow the pace somewhat. Still, it has much to enjoy. Connery is at the top of his game and the film shows off its set-pieces (for example, Bond being pursued during some Bahamas Junkanoo festivities), its gadgets (for example, the jet-pack in the opening sequence) and its villains (for example, Luciana Paluzzi as Fiona Volpe) with as much brassy aplomb as big-lunged Welshman Tom Jones sings the theme song.

9: You Only Live Twice (1967)

I’ve always had a soft spot for You Only Live Twice, which has Sean Connery battling Ernst Stavro Blofeld and SPECTRE in Japan, although it’s commonly rated as one of the lesser Connery Bonds. Maybe it’s because I lived in Japan for a good many years myself. The theme song by Nancy Sinatra is, of course, lovely and there’s a good supporting cast, including Donald Pleasence as Blofeld and Tetsuro Tamba as Tiger Tanaka, head of Japanese intelligence and one of the great ‘Bond allies’ – up there with Pedro Armendariz’s Karim Bey in From Russia with Love (1963). Apart from the Japanese setting, the film jettisons almost everything in Fleming’s dark, introspective 1964 novel and replaces it with an archetypically ludicrous Bond-movie scenario: Blofeld wanting to trigger World War III by nicking American and Soviet spacecraft and hiding them in his secret hollowed-out Japanese volcano-HQ. The futuristic volcano set, courtesy of production designer Ken Adam, is amazing. Alas, its impact is vitiated in the final scenes when we see it as an obvious model, being rocked by explosions, with little dolls (representing the casualties of the film’s climactic battle) bouncing up and down on its floor.

8: Casino Royale (2006)

Any half-decent movie was going to look good after the debacle of 2002’s Die Another Day, and I feel Casino Royale, which rebooted the series and introduced current 007 Daniel Craig, is slightly overrated as a result. But it’s still pretty good. Craig gives Bond an impressively physical exterior whilst suggesting that not all is as solid internally. As Vesper Lynd, the sublime Eva Green is easily the best Bond girl since Michelle Yeoh. And Mads Mikkelsen is great as the evil but harried Le Chiffre. For once, the violence actually looks like it involves pain, stress and fear, no more so than when Bond gets his nuts whipped on a bottomless chair. Kudos to the filmmakers for keeping the scene in which Le Chiffre gets his comeuppance as low-key as it was in Fleming’s 1953 novel, although the subsequent stuff set in Venice, where Bond has to rescue Vesper from a building sinking rapidly into the Grand Canal, seems a tad gratuitous. It’s as if it was decided that a big, dumb action climax was necessary to keep the traditional Bond audience happy.

7: Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

Some Roger-Moore-sized eyebrows will be raised at my inclusion of Tomorrow Never Dies in my top dozen Bonds. But while this film isn’t massively memorable, it doesn’t do anything wrong either. Michelle Yeoh as Wai Lin is easily the best Bond girl during Pierce Brosnan’s four-movie tenure, Vincent Schiavelli makes a brief but memorable appearance as mordant assassin Dr. Kaufman, and the scene where Q, played by a now-octogenarian Desmond Llewelyn, gives Bond custody of a remote-controlled car is delightful. And Jonathan Pryce has fun playing villainous media tycoon Elliot Carver, trying to trigger a war between China and Britain – aye, right, the Chinese would really be quaking in their boots at the prospect of a war with Britain. Pryce is clearly channelling Rupert Murdoch, so what’s not to love?

6: The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

Among Roger Moore’s entries (ouch), The Spy Who Loved Me is the one that undeniably belongs in the premier league of Bond movies. On paper it looks as lazy as all the other ones made in the 1970s and early 1980s – cars that travel underwater, a villain who kills people by dropping them into shark-pools, a giant henchman with steel teeth and a plot that’s been copied from 1967’s You Only Live Twice, though with stolen nuclear submarines instead of stolen spacecraft. But it’s done with such élan that Moore, director Lewis Gilbert and writer Michael Wood get away with it. The corking pre-titles sequence here made it a rule for all subsequent Bond movies that they had to begin with a big stunt. No wonder that in season two of I’m Alan Partridge (2002), Steve Coogan gets upset when he discovers that Michael-the-Geordie has taped over his copy of The Spy Who Loved Me with an episode of America’s Strongest Man. “Now you’ve got Norfolk’s maddest man!” he rages. Quite.

5: From Russia with Love (1963)

Although the first Bond movie, Dr No, sets the template for the series – larger-than-life villain hatches grandiose, ludicrous scheme amid gorgeous locations, gorgeous ladies and exciting action sequences – and the third one, Goldfinger (1964), consolidates that template, the intervening movie From Russia with Love does something a little different, with a scaled-down plot-MacGuffin (getting a Soviet defector to the West with a valuable cryptography device) and a storyline that’s unusually gritty and realistic by Bond standards. Mind you, From Russia with Love still has a great roster of villains – Lotte Lenya’s Rosa Klebb, Vladek Sheybal’s Kronsteen and Robert Shaw’s Red Grant. Shaw’s vicious battle with Connery late in the film has been emulated in other Bond movies – see Brosnan vs. Sean Bean in Goldeneye (1995) or Craig vs. Dave Bautista in Spectre (2015) – but never bettered. Also praiseworthy is Mexican actor Pedro Armendariz as Kerim Bey, the wise, wily head of British intelligence in Istanbul who takes Bond under his wing. Tragically, this was Armendariz’s last movie – during filming, he was dying from cancer, quite possibly caused by his participation in the notorious 1956 John Wayne film The Conqueror, shot just 137 miles from the location of an atomic-bomb test in Nevada.

4: Skyfall (2012)

Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace (2008), the latter a direct sequel to the former, and both preoccupied with Vesper Lynd and Jesper Christensen’s villainous Mr White character, can often seem like they’re locked in their own, private, non-Bondian universe. From the old, pre-Daniel Craig movies, only Judi Dench’s M remains. What makes Skyfall a pleasure is that it starts to join the dots and make the series feel like the Bonds of old again, adding a new Q (Ben Wishaw) and a new Moneypenny (the divine Naomie Harris). It also, eventually, brings in a new M to replace Dench, Ralph Fiennes, who in a gratifying bit of character-development is initially presented as an arsehole but gradually wins Bond’s respect and trust. Javier Bardem makes a good villain and, when Bond and Dench’s M take refuge at Skyfall, the Scottish Highlands estate where Bond spent his childhood, we get a welcome appearance by Albert Finney as the estate’s irascible but handy-with-a-shotgun gamekeeper Kincaid. It’s been said that director Sam Mendes originally wanted to cast Sean Connery as Kincaid, which would have been weird… but awesome.

3: Licence to Kill (1989)

The dark horse of the series in more ways than one, Licence to Kill got a bad rap because it underperformed at the box office, earned itself a British 15 certificate with its violence, and offended critics who, after condemning the Bond movies for years for being too silly, suddenly started carping about how they missed the loveable silliness of Roger Moore. However, if you’re a Bond connoisseur who likes to see 007 taken seriously, it’s one of the best. Timothy Dalton goes after drug baron Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi) when Sanchez maims Bond’s best buddy Felix Leiter (David Hedison) and murders Leiter’s wife on their wedding night. This, of course, echoes what happened to Bond after his wedding back in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), making Licence to Kill a spiritual if not direct sequel to that film. Much mayhem ensues as Sanchez and his henchmen (Anthony Zerbe, Don Stroud, Everett McGill, Anthony Starke and a young Benicio Del Toro) meet a range of gruesome fates. The sight of Del Toro’s sneering scumbag Dario getting fed into a grinding machine is particularly delightful. But there’s light amid the darkness. Carey Lowell is excellent as Pam Bouvier, a truly capable and no-bullshit Bond girl, and there’s a lovely sub-plot where Desmond Llewelyn’s Q turns up to give Bond some unofficial help, showing that however much they’ve bickered in Q-Branch over the years, the two men are actually friends. Also, Robert Davi’s Sanchez is more than a simple thug. Valuing friendship and loyalty, he likes Bond when he first meets him and is aggrieved later when he discovers that Bond has really come to destroy him.

2: Goldfinger (1964)

The film that ticks all the boxes in the list of things you want from a Bond movie. Action-packed opening sequence where Bond puts a previous adventure to bed? Tick. Shirley Bassey booming her way through a classic John Barry composition? Tick. Memorable villains? Tick. Gadgets, gimmicks, classy cars? Tick. A great Bond girl? With Honor Blackman, definitely a tick. A great Bond? Well, it’s Sean Connery, so definitely a tick too. Basically, the series could have stopped here, because after Goldfinger there was nothing that could be done again any better – The Spy Who Loved Me’s refrain Nobody Does It Better might have been written about this film. Incidentally, Auric Goldfinger’s scheme in the movie makes more sense than his scheme in Ian Fleming’s 1959 novel. In the book, Goldfinger just wants to rob Fort Knox, which would be logistically impossible. In the film, he cannily plans to explode a nuclear device in the fort, making the US’s gold reserves unusable and skyrocketing the value of his own gold.

1: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)

It’s generally agreed that Australian actor George Lazenby wasn’t much cop as an actor. Ironically, his single movie as Bond, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, is in my opinion the best one of all. It helps, of course, that the film follows Ian Fleming’s 1963 novel closely. The main change is an upgrading of Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s fiendish plan. In the book, he intends to decimate Britain’s agriculture, whereas in the film it’s the world’s agriculture that he’s gunning for. (Accordingly, the instruments of Blofeld’s plan, the disease-carrying ‘Angels of Death’, are upgraded from a group of brainwashed English schoolgirl-types in the novel to a bevy of brainwashed international glamour-pusses, including Angela Scoular, Anoushka Hempel, Jenny Hanley, Julie Ege and Joanna Lumley, in the film.) Director Peter Hunt orchestrates some brilliant action sequences on the icy slopes around Blofeld’s Alpine lair, the theme tune possibly constitutes John Barry’s finest hour, Telly Savalas makes a formidably physical Blofeld, and Diana Rigg is splendid as the confident but simultaneously vulnerable Tracy di Vicenzo, the woman who finally wins Bond’s heart and gets him to the wedding altar – though with events taking a dark turn soon after. It’s arguable that because it’s so different from the usual entries in the series, wistful in tone and tragic in its ending, the awkward and uncertain Lazenby actually fits in nicely. Here, Bond appears fragile and wounded, and Lazenby is believable in terms of what the character goes through. You couldn’t imagine Connery swaggering through the movie with his usual insouciance and having the same impact.

And now we have a new Bond movie in the cinemas. Where will 2021’s No Time to Die figure in future rankings of the 25 Bond films, from best to worst? Well, I see that the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw has just given it a five-star review. So… it’s probably rubbish.