With the new Bond film coming out in a week, I’ve been keeping myself pumped by watching DVDs. From reading that sentence you could assume I’m watching Sean Connery in Goldfinger, Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only, Pierce Brosnan in The World Is Not Enough or Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. Well… no I’m not. I went out to the library and grabbed up season one of Robert Culp and Bill Cosby in I Spy and Michael Caine’s first two Harry Palmer films, The Ipcress File and Funeral In Berlin. How can I get primed for a Bond film by watching non Bond product? And if I’m going to watch secret agents who aren’t Bond why wouldn’t I watch the direct imitations like Robert Vaughn in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. or James Coburn as Dereck Flint in Our Man Flint and In Like Flint? Simple, Daniel Craig’s Bond is not the Bond of old, going after maniacal super villains in their volcano lairs, armed with blow gun cigarettes and remote control cars. Like Kelly, Scott and Palmer, this Bond is in the real world, dealing with more realistic villains and participating in the darker side of espionage, where you do things you’re not proud of but can maybe learn to live with, sans pocket size, super cool gadgets. Of course knowing my luck the new film film will trot out a flame throwing fountain pen or a tic tac size nuclear missile, completely destroying the arguments in this post.
Archive for November, 2008
I was at one of my home away from home places the other day, Borders Bookstore (the Library is another but since they don’t sell super sized hazelnut lattes they will always be second best), and I was flipping through some of the new Doc Savage reprints, reading the introductions, when I came upon an interesting reminiscence by Will Murray for Land of Terror (Doc and the Fab Five track a murderer to an island populated with dinosaurs). While most of the article is about how great Doc is (natch) what was interesting to me was the round about way he got to the books. Murray was a die hard James Bond fan who went to the Sean Connery movies and read the books, where he discovered the Doc Savage reprints and found he liked them better than Fleming’s books. The thing that struck was his gradual disenchantment with Bond because of the books, or as he put it, this wasn’t the his James Bond from the movies. I had gone through a similar experience, having discovered James Bond in the film version of Diamonds Are Forever playing on TV and became an instant Connery fan while in grade school, which of course led me to the books in Junior High and major disappointment. Though I enjoy the novels now as an adult, at the time they seemed a boringly endless description of scenery and food interrupted occasionally with a little action. Where were the high speed chases and shoot outs, the fist fights with indestructible giants, and the super cool gadgets? My God The Spy Who Loved Me is told from the point of view of another character who recounts her personal history for the first third before getting into the actual plot, which is a minor attempt of arson and murder for profit with the narrator as proposed victim and Bond doesn’t even appear until the the last third. I am thinking about this more and more because of Quantum of Solace coming out in two weeks. Mainly I’m going through a similar experience as I had with the original Fleming novels. Daniel Craig’s Bond is not the Bond of my childhood, grittier with a solid grounding in reality, like Christopher Nolan’s version of Batman, it took some time for me to wrap my head around his new version of my beloved 007 in Casino Royale. But after getting over the lack of laser beam watches and volcano lairs I find that Craig replaces Brosnan for me as the second best Bond ever, after Connery of course and am looking forward to the new film with great anticipation.
