The Sky Does Not Fall

What a strange thing the James Bond industry is.  I was thought to be a bit young to see the early films, and there are still plenty I have never watched at all. But from time to time I’m tempted by the publicity, and go along. I usually enjoy myself in a fairly futile way , but only by viewing the whole thing as an elaborate joke.

 

By contrast, Ian Fleming’s original books, which in most cases have nothing to do with the films at all, are quite clever period thrillers, with an undercurrent of real nastiness, set about half a century ago and absolutely ready to be filmed in their proper time, costume, language etc  (if anyone can be bothered to do that properly, and if copyright allows) .  When they first came out, they were considered a bit risque, and I clearly remember one of my mother’s friends,  a respectable middle-class person,  rapidly hiding a hardback first edition of ‘Goldfinger’ which we had found her reading in her suburban garden one long-ago summer afternoon.

 

 I’m told that the recent film of ‘Casino Royale’; made a sort of attempt to do this, though the violence in that particular book was so appalling that I preferred not to go and see it, so I don’t know. I can’t imagine that it transported Daniel Craig back to the 1950s, or did it?

 

The trouble is that the films are now a sort of cult within a cult. They refer to themselves and mock themselves. And of course they are immediately commercially successful. I saw the film in a full cinema on Sunday afternoon, having bought the tickets the day before. People were being turned away at the door. The most striking thing about the occasion was that the film began before it began, with advertisements for products that had been placed in the film. This was more like movie-placement in the advertisements, than like product placement in the film.

 

From then on it’s more or less inexplicable. (Plot spoiler warning. If you really care about the plot, don’t read on. Personally, I can’t see how anyone could care) .

 

Bond dies. He is killed, shot by a fellow-agent before falling an incredible distance into deep water.

 

Then, just as MI6 runs into trouble at home, thanks to the publishing of secret files that Bond failed to save from an unknown enemy, despite a car/motorbike chase and a struggle on the roof of a speeding train, we find him alive again hanging out in a beach bums’ bar somewhere in Asia, living on who knows what and drinking a lot.

 

So he then comes back, wheezing and unfit, and is sent in pursuit of the man he was trying to kill when the film began (I think).

 

Somehow or other this leads him to a glamorous woman in a gambling club (so glamorous she is actually smoking) and then to the villain.

 

Now, the villain is brilliantly-portrayed, and quite witty. But as it is obvious that he has had the glamorous woman horribly beaten up, and as he then casually shoots her dead for no reason at all, the joke seems to me to wear out at that point.

 

This is one of the problems with the Bond films. Because their tongues are always in their cheeks, we find ourselves laughing off genuinely horrible events.

 

We are also , I think, expected to warm to Judi Dench, here using her great talents to play the head of MI6 and shown telling a bunch of politicians that there really is still a threat big enough to justify her huge and rather ridiculous organisation ( which can’t even keep its on secret files secret, in the film).

 

But in the end, what is the threat? It is just a resentful former agent, sacrificed by Ms Dench in a  long-ago deal with the Chinese, who has nursed his private bitterness ever since.

 

He needs to be very bitter, because all the really big bogeymen that used to scare us in the days of the original Bond have vanished, or proved to be insubstantial. Hence the need for this ridiculous, spectacular, expensive vendetta, and for a hilariously pointless battle in the Scottish Highlands.

 

I love Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ and almost know the crucial bit (leading to ‘…To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’ ) by heart, though I stumble over one or two bits. I often feel the words ‘And though we are not that which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are’, stealing into my mind.  It’s lovely to hear them spoken by a great actress to a big audience, as Judi Dench does while trying to justify her budget. 

 

But there’s also rather a sad undercurrent. Would you believe it, Bond spirits ‘M’ out of London in the old Aston Martin (with ejector seats and machine guns) which Sean Connery was driving about in, almost 50 years ago. And as the ancient vehicle is revealed, the old Bond theme tune swells into the soundtrack. We are being asked to be nostalgic for the old Bond, British and proud of it. I was reminded, alas, of that terrible film ‘Barry Mackenzie Holds His own’ (I think that’s what it was called and I can, more or less, explain why on earth I went to see it) in which ‘Waltzing Matilda’ is played to give a nostalgic, patriotic gloss to a load of old rubbish. There are other problems, not least the strange references to Bond’s parents, and the brief glimpses we have of their graves, during the Scottish battle scenes. If he had such parents, could he possibly be the age he is now? Or is Bond now a sort of Doctor Who, reincarnated every few years to remain always the same age?

 

Far better(for once) to go Back to the Fifties