Is James Bond looking knackered, or is it just me? At 54, I’m at an age where I’ve given up on a lot of things. I lost interest in Question Time when David Dimbleby quit, stopped paying much attention to technology after CDs/DVDs went out, and I’m pretty sure Daniel Craig was my last James Bond too. I liked Craig in the part – he was the first Bond to convince you he’d really been in the services – but there are only so many 007s in a lifetime you can take. The last offering seemed to kill off the spy at just the right moment – he’d dwindled from Connery alphadom to a lugubrious, lovelorn loser moaning about his age (something many of us get enough of at home).
The Daniel Craig films tried, fatally, to have it both ways
But the clamour for the next Bond film suggests that if I think Bond’s heyday is over, I’m in a minority. ‘Where’s James Bond gone?’ asked the Sunday Times earlier this month. There are regular updates online on ‘Everything we know about next 007 film’, and an endless glut of features about Craig’s possible replacement (anyone from Aaron Taylor-Johnson to Barry Keoghan to people you’ve never heard of but once showed their pecs on Game of Thrones or Poldark). Does an adult nation really care this much, or is Bond simply a tradition we can’t imagine life without, like Chelsea Flower Show or Last Night of the Proms? The hiatus between films – which has now reached three years – seems to be driving even the most rational Bond fan up the wall.
For nearly all of us, Bond is a childhood memory and about those we’re often sentimental. If you were born in the seventies, the Connery movies, shown regularly on TV, were a surefire way of bonding (sorry) with your father – both of you, for once, equally absorbed by the film. Yet when it comes to choosing our favourite actor in the role – unless you buy the ‘Connery and then the rest’ theory – many of us plump instinctively for whoever played the part when we were ten years old. In my case, this was Roger Moore, who I still feel – to hell with it – was the best Bond of all time. One of the happiest days I ever spent in the cinema was seeing, around the age of eight, a double bill of Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun. The sense of absolute plenitude, as one film finished and you waited for the next, has stayed with me ever since. But the last Bond film I really obsessed about, seeing it again and again in the cinema, was 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, when I was eleven years old. After that I suddenly lost interest, which tells you something; they are kids’ films, which adults go on liking mostly because they’re things they once adored.
My choice of Moore, I realise, puts me on collision course with many Bond fans. The Moore films have a reputation for cringy vulgarity – they belong to the era of Bruce Forsyth, teasmades and Cinzano ads – but this is why they’re such a joy. Moore’s lightness of touch seemed to embrace the silliness and draw you in. Both you and he, his cocked eyebrow told you, knew this was all hokum – about as convincing as his smoochy screen kisses – so why not come along for the ride? ‘I try to make films that are entertaining…’ the actor said in interview, ‘People have enough problems in the world without going and seeing them on the screen. It’s better they should escape from the humdrum normal existence into the world of fantasy and relax. That’s what entertainment means.’
Moore may have been no Connery – while Sean looked as though he’d sauntered in from the gym, Roger was more like a seedily glamorous British airways pilot, and an atmosphere of Langan’s Brasserie, Annabel’s and the tackier Mayfair casinos always hung about him. But this too was part of his appeal. Other Bonds – Connery, Dalton and Brosnan – were your sexual competitors. Roger Moore (the stuff, in my experience, of very few women’s fantasies) was just your mate or the cheeky, raffish uncle of your dreams. He was the happiest Bond, the only one you could believe actually liked people and their company.
There were other things too to celebrate about the Moore era. Live and Let Die had a theme tune to kill and, with its Papa Doc voodoo-vibe, was genuinely unnerving. The Man with the Golden Gun had kung fu, and that creepy maze in which Scaramanga killed his victims. The Spy who Loved Me had… Well, The Spy who Loved Me had everything: the Carly Simon song, that parachute fall off Mount Asgard, the Lotus Esprit which turned into a submarine, and Jaws, the indestructible 7’2” steel-toothed killer played by Richard Kiel. Bond villains in the Moore period seemed to reach a peak, with stars like Christopher Lee, Curt Jurgens and Michael Lonsdale – great actors all – giving us epic, outsize blackguards who, in the post-Moore era, seemed to dwindle to B-movie ghosts.
Clearly Roger Moore’s playfulness of tone – the seductions, the flippancy and above all, the freedom from consequences – isn’t, in the 2020s, coming back. It belongs to a time of assumed goodwill – pre-MeToo, mostly pre-AIDS, almost pre-feminist, a time unaware that, beneath Moore’s umbrella of bonhomie and a culture that could smile along with it, characters like Harvey Weinstein, Jimmy Savile and Mohamed Al Fayed were carrying out their crimes. Yet the Craig films have tried, fatally, to have it both ways, aiming for a torpid moral earnestness while serving up the same silly car chases, ludicrous villains and improbable brushes with death as all the others. Given that EON productions killed off the spy in the last picture, are their hearts actually in it any more, or are they demoralised and neutered, like so many, by the fear of giving offence?
Whether humour or heaviness, EON – which produces the Bond films – must decide which way to jump. A possible reinvention for the franchise is to abandon its audience of gaping ten-year-olds, with what it loses in revenue getting clawed back in production costs. Gadgetry, not a strong feature of the Craig films, should stay gone – superfluous in a world where Mossad can take out thousands of Hezbollah operatives with exploding pagers – and they should go easy on the stunts, Mission Impossible arguably having seen off all comers. Into the rubbish bin too, in an age of budget flights and vloggers, should go the ‘exotic locations’ the series has served up to us like so many Lidl satay-sticks.
The dream Bond, perhaps, would be confined to Cold War Europe, make a feature of postwar London, and look beyond Fleming’s books and past glories for its atmosphere – to films like The Third Man, Mesrine and Carlos the Jackal, to novelists like Le Carre and Deighton, or the wartime thriller writer Alan Furst. It should tell tales of the GDR’s STASI, Ceausescu’s Romania, dissidents in Brezhnev-era Leningrad. There’s a wealth of adult Bond films to be made, edgy, intelligent, even informative about the past. Do this, and many of will feel like Moonraker’s Holly Goodhead: ‘James… take me round the world one more time.’ Serve us up the recent cocktail, though, and we’ll more likely agree with Hugo Drax, the same film’s baddie: ‘James Bond… You appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.’
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