The Mask of James Bond
Why does James Bond last?
James Bond mask for toy figurine, c. 1965
by Richard von Busack
Despite how we all could have used an example of fearlessness in the face of death, the 25th James Bond film No Time To Die was delayed to an October 2021 release…if the theaters are open. The advertisements are already up, captioned “Only in Theaters”. Since the future of movie theaters seems as shaky as they’ve ever been in history, it may be that the custom of going out to see a film depends, in a small way, on James Bond. The stubborn insistence on the Bond film as something that needs to be seen on a big screen just highlights the series’ apartness from the rest of the movies.
The epidemic is a capper to a film that was created under an unusually heavy cloud of worry. British tabloids were up in arms, assuring us that an elderly (50 years old) Daniel Craig was about to keel over at any second, and that the extras on the sets didn’t get enough sandwiches.
While the script was being conceived, and the title was revealed, the Internet bubbled away like the swamp it is, belching up its word clouds of ignis fatuus. Aquaman’s Amber Heard told a reporter that she thinks she ought to be the new James Bond. Others opined Bond ought to be more like Jason Bourne, or more like Jack Reacher, or Idris Elba…
“For some stupid reason, not everyone is aboard with the idea of casting beefy British hunk Idris Elba as 007,” Vulture.com offered. I quote this bullying squib, because it sums up most of the squib’s imitators on line. “I’ve never watched a James Bond movie, but I would if Idris Elba was in it,” is a comment I heard in three different variations on Facebook. If you haven’t seen a Bond movie, how would you know any actor would lead you through it? It’s as if they said, “I have never entered a ballpark, but I would if Tom Hanks was the crusty old manager of the team”…only to at last go and find out that baseball is boring. If there was a word to describe the way elements of the soothingly predictable contrasts with sudden surprise, there’d be a word for both baseball and James Bond films.
A Black Bond would work, naturally. When a tuxedo-clad Chadwick Boseman put on the Bond mask in Black Panther, he looked sensational. The massive Elba would be a first-rate Bond villain — a man of great size, organ-like voice, and serpent-like subtlety. This opposes the qualities in our long time hero James Bond — a resourceful, iconic but sometimes limited character, a man who likes to go unseen sometimes
Maybe Bond needs more friends. He ought to be Ethan Hunt, with a group of solid pals to help him. Note that the entire Mission: Impossible franchise is based on the pre-title sequence of 1964’s From Russia With Love. Our gentleman spy hero is apparently garroted. But then his corpse turns out to be some no-name mustached chump in a rubber mask. (Thus, the advent of the Impossible Mission Force, for whom it is Halloween everyday.)
As for a female Bond, it’s been tried, in films as different as Atomic Blonde and Joseph Losey’s adaptation of Modesty Blaise. Someday they’ll get it right. Given how hard these 007 films strive — and occasionally succeed — to be romances, it’d be a lot more interesting to have a female director than a female Bond.
No Time to Die has a director of notable talent, Cary Fukunaga (Sin Nombre, Jane Eyre). On Craig’s request, Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag) gave the script a polish. She may not be a bad match for Bond. Her aristocratic brittleness couldn’t hurt. (If Waller-Bridge really does have fleas, they’re sucking blue blood.) Perhaps she’ll bring some of the qualities the decadent Simon Raven brought to his rewrite of OHMSS…or On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, as non-Bond obsessives call it.
In SPECTRE, after wounding and capturing the archvillain Blofeld, Bond refused to give his longtime nemesis the coup de grace he asked for because, “I have better things to do.” As No Time to Die beings, the James Bond of the last four movie has sensibly retired to Jamaica. Exterior: MI-6 HQ in London. 007 is bidden into M’s office in the same way the agent has been beeped in for almost 60 years. This time, though — gasp, she’s black. They could have done this as far back as Live and Let Die and it still would have been not soon enough. Making 007 Black and female is the acknowledgement that the times are changing, and that this long running series needs to get out of the year 1964.
Or such is the vague idea that non-fans have of what’s going on in the series, since they gave up on it years ago…or never went in the first place.
James Bond movies are so familiar to the public that they need no heavy description of the way they work. Yet no one can write about Ian Fleming without reminding the reader he was a racist and a sexist. Fleming, hard-working British journalist, fanciful Ministry of Defense spook, and upper-class rotter, wrote more than a dozen James Bond novels from 1953–65. These works of espionage fantasy reprocess the trauma of WWII and the matchless theatrical evil of the Nazis. The books have many arrestingly vivid and savage qualities, with their cold look at the hard-drinking life, with the acrid wit that makes it clear why Raymond Chandler was an admirer. They have tics: Fleming’s heavy use of the exclamation point, and the superlatives in description — all the things that are “the best in the world” from Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee on down. But Fleming’s books contain crackpot ideas, ethnic slurs, and bootlicking admiration for the Americans and their CIA. The worst aspects of this work should be buried in Fleming’s grave. The stone on said grave is marked with a quote from Lucretius. Fleming’s creation is frequently described as a Stoic, so the Lucretius is appropriate: Omnia perfunctus vitae praemia marces, or ”decaying after a great life.”
Commander James Bond of Britain’s MI-6 is coded as 007, with a license to kill without advance paperwork. The script of Casino Royale (2006) suggests Bond is a former member of the Special Boat Service, an outfit something like the Navy SEALS. Bond is sent by his superiors in the Ministry of Defense to investigate and dispatch international criminals. As a character in Fleming’s books, he was supposed to have a name everyone forgets. He’s a deadpan gambler, a compartmentalizer, who nobody knows that well. He’s a drinker and — in the books — a three pack a day smoker. He’s been described as a mannequin with well-defined appetites, for sea-island cotton shirts, for martinis with vodka unbruised by stirring, for Edith Piaf records and for scrambled eggs. (Bond has a passion for eggs in the books, but there’s no way to make eating a plate of scrambled eggs look cool in a film.)
As a film character, he should have little more personality than a subjective camera. James Bond is a pose more than a person, shaded to the taste of each passing decade. The formula is toyed with, but Bond is always the overdressed killer with a signature cocktail, among scads of often barely differentiated women and hotel rooms. Given a clip, I wouldn’t need more than 5 seconds to say which 007 movie we were watching. Sane people wouldn’t have that ability.
Contrasted to the colorful maniacs he hunts down, Bond of the books is a black and white figure. The real life James Bond, considering Fleming’s fictions about him in John Pearson’s bright 1973 novel James Bond: The Authorized Biography of 007, comments “there was no need to make me such a monster…such a humorless idiotic prig.”
This is too harsh a description. This nostalgia-wracked, traumatized figure takes his pleasures, but the remoteness is what made him a world-wide favorite. The self-assurance and aloneness is what makes the mask of Bond fit on anyone. Many men, maybe some women — walking on a dark city street alone or carrying out some tricky driving on a dangerous highway — try to summon up a particle of James Bond’s supreme confidence.
In our polarized times, it’s easy to fear that this avenue of fantasy — the Bondian idea of British nerve and puissance — will stiffen the resolve of the sunseting white-folk order.
Yet in the installment previous to Skyfall, 2008’s Quantum of Solace, Bond had been shooting white guys to prevent them from privatizing the Bolivian water supply. There’s one generalization I can make about the various eras and iterations of James Bond. This is a character on screen who has been as brash as a trumpet and as silly as a slide whistle, who is a clown and a killer. But 007’s most frequent quarry are very rich men ‘moving fast and breaking things,’ in the ominous Silicon Valley cliche. And SPECTRE, the evil conglomerate Bond fought in 9 of the films, indeed turned out to be the wave of the future.
Fleming envisioned the wealthy, stateless megalomaniac terrorist of today as cat’s paws of the Reds. The far more left-wing films hint at the then-mysterious and hermetic Mao-era Chinese peeking from behind the curtain. But the saga’s oldest pleasure is watching this natty civil servant coming up against rich, protected and powerful criminals who are the contractors for some offstage evil. Citizens above suspicion, as often as not, who explain their depraved plans in reasonable, paternal tones. Oh, if just once they’d reveal themselves, as one entrepreneur did in the course of a Fleming novel: “I am, as you correctly say, a maniac, Mr. Bond. A maniac, with a mania for power. That … is the meaning of my life. That is why I am here. That is why you are here. That is why here exists.”
There certainly is a here, here — the kind of here Dr. No is speaking about. “It’s almost like a Bond film, these times we’re living through here,” said Pierce Brosnan in April 2020 during an Esquire podcast. Think of the cackling of Jack Abramoff on the phone (“Those monkeys!”). Think of Jeff Skilling in his Texas tower. Consider Jonathan Chait’s famous comment about the Wall Street Journal editorial page, how this forum transcends ordinary callous punditry and “attains the level of exquisite depravity normally reserved for villains in a James Bond movie.”
Sometimes Bond’s hunting grounds are the domain of the poor, but he’s not going after them, like a real secret policeman. He’s there to track down the fictional versions of real life people like Paul Manafort. Bond infiltrates the millionaire’s world — he visits, he doesn’t live there. In the books, Bond is a bit grossed by what he once described as “the blubbery arms of the soft life.” If he survives his hazardous job, it’ll be to collect what a freelance opponent named Scaramanga once described as “a pittance of a pension.”
The Bond series’ allegedly brutally-real knockoffs take the tales of 007, and steal his initials (“Jack Bauer” or “Jason Bourne”), then update these stories into the idylls of Hoover Institute policy scholars. They change the fantastic populist quality of the Bonds into something that can be screened at a conservative PAC. The Sum of All Fears is an adventure of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. Why not “Jack Bryan,” damn it. There, the threatened nuke, stolen but always shut off in the nick of time by 007, finally detonates. It’s just to show us that, Dr Strangelove wise, we might get our hair mussed but that the bombs aren’t as bad as all that.
Given the element of up to date realism in these dull knockoffs, it’s remarkable that the world still is interested in the actual James Bond. The mask of this character has been worn almost 60 years, with everything else changing around it. Peel off the mask and see some strange imposter — an elderly Roger Moore, or a balding Timothy Dalton, or a bemused Pierce Brosnan, 67 and sitting in his Hawaiian estate in a Tommy Bahama shirt. There’s a portrait of the late Sean Connery on his website that’s some real mystique-solvent, a Matissean study of a leathery octogenarian wearing a too small yellow bathrobe.
Yet there’s little I love in the movies as much as that second of silence, in the blackout between the studio logo and the march of white circles across the screen. Then, the rising hysteria of the horns as 007 materializes in a blink: walking, whipping to the left and firing his pistol at the viewer. First in this circle in 1962’s Dr. No, is Sean Connery’s stunt man Bob Simmons. As Thunderball was the first Bond film made in Panavision, it had to be Connery himself in the intro, since the bigger screen would reveal an imposter. As the episodes went on, the scene is restaged. Bond loses his hat. The legs of his pants flare modishly. The effects become more ambitious.
In this circle we see evidence of time passing. And yet, within it, time stands still.
Watching those moving dots and the reveal of a gunman, it’s as if the shock never wore off since Justin P. Barnes drew his pistol at the crowd and fired in the last scene of 1903’s The Great Train Robbery.
(William Wellman, Yellow Sky, 1948. Mike Monahan caught this. There’s a similar image, without the rifling, in Gun Crazy, 1950.)
I’m rhapsodizing about a trademark. Young people can’t watch this series as long-timers can, conscience of that fourth dimension. They can’t feel the march of the decades behind the Bond films, as the morbid fantasmagorica of a title sequence begins and a torch singer avulses her lungs serenading this killer.
Ancient survivor of ridiculously ancient times…rebuke the fans all you want, but the smart fans rebuke themselves already. We’ve heard all the cutting words about how Bond’s day has past. As Bond’s boss M, Judy Dench used to grouse at her employee, “Sexist misogynist dinosaur…” (this was in Goldeneye, more than 25 years ago!)
At the risk of trying to turn a piece of cake into a kale salad, there’s something admirable about this series’ ability to survive, after all of its rivals die. Death is something that sounds very cool in a film title, but it’s also something that snatches good and irreplaceable people away forever. And yet one character keeps escaping, dodging the bullets, crawling through the heating ducts, leaving better armed, better manned opponents swearing in rage. They shoot him and discover a masked corpse. An imposter. The Englishman escaped again. Are these movies about murder, or about death-defiance, the triumph of life? They’re acrobatic stunts from start to finish, and the pleasure is seeing this berserk aerialist Bond return alive.
And they survive because there’s nothing really like them. This union of Buster Keaton and Cary Grant endures in one after another of these bizarre fantasies. Goldfinger is to me what Wizard of Oz is to normal people, a lasting solace to childhood disappointment. It’s Michael Powell gone fatal, with brash music, and magic — instead of rainbows and tornadoes, it has cars that buck their riders and bowler hats that kill.
Childhood anxiety is the essence of my Bond mania, which flares up like malaria every year or two. The authorities tested the Civil Defense sirens weekly on Fridays at 10 am in Los Angeles, probably just for the sake of looking like they were doing something. Everyone joked that this would be the perfect time for the Russians to strike. I’d read John Hersey’s Hiroshima. From science fiction films I’d soaked up on KTLA, I had a reasonably good imagination of the missiles coming in. For sensible budgetary reasons, it was always Los Angeles that got nuked.
If I leaned over right, I could see a piece of the downtown LA skyline through my bedroom window. I could easily visualize a mushroom cloud capping those buildings, and often did so. I was very certain I was not going to grow up. The missiles were on autopilot, and the destruction would begin whenever they decided they would commence. It all had the inevitability of history that had already happened.
At the sticky and still standing Highland Theater, I’d seen a matinee of the rerelease of Thunderball. I was still not quite old enough to understand what was going on, except that the game afoot was the aversion of nuclear holocaust. The rest of the show had me half-watching. Innuendo was lost on me. I was a pre-sexual kid, baffled at 007’s passion for frequent naps with big haired women. I was not a fighter. I have never owned a gun. I can be easily whipped by toddlers at card games. I had and have zero interest in cars except as transportation.
A year or two later, in Pasadena, I had a better comprehension of the anxieties this series was addressing. I was up for the still-thrilling snatched-capsule pre-titles of You Only Live Twice. Afterwards, there’s a secret summit meeting at a geodesic dome somewhere in the Arctic. The Soviets and the Americans are rattling their swords at each other. The Americans deliver an ultimatum. The Soviets deny the kidnapping of a Yank astronaut. (“The world knows we are a peace loving people.”) Sitting between them, the British representative intervenes and cools the tensions by revealing intelligence: there’s a clue that the attack missile was fired from the Sea of Japan.
A quote attributed to both Slavoj Zizek and Frederic Jameson has it that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”. Similarly, for me, it had been easier to imagine the nuclear obliteration of Los Angeles than that it was to think that any force could intervene between the upcoming war between USSR and the USA. And yet, at least in fantasy, there was someone.
Even in later, in preposterous Bonds like Octopussy (1983) and Die Another Day (2002) the villains are renegade military men seeking glory in a nuclear winter — they’re lone maniacs opposed by patriotic, peace loving Communists. But in the beginning of From Russia With Love, we see how the real power waiting in the wings. Dr. No is the organization’s herald: a student of “the four cornerstones of power,” as he calls counterintelligence, revenge, terrorism and extortion. Such is SPECTRE — a global organization of Gestapo ruthlessness run by a shadowy “#1”.
This #1, Ernst Stavro Blofeld debuts in the film From Russia With Love. He’s first seen observing a pair of male bettas having it out on a fishbowl on the desk of his yacht. Blofeld, as yet nothing but a pair of hands and the back of a chair, is credited as Anthony Dawson, though the voice is Eric Pohlmann.
“Siamese fighting fish… Brave, but on the whole, stupid…Except for the occasional one, such as we have here, who lets the other two fight. While he waits. Waits until the survivor is so exhausted that he cannot defend himself, and then like SPECTRE… he strikes!”
And then Blofeld gives the defeated betta as a snack for his white persian cat.
In the frosts of the Cold War, in this film version of one of JFK’s ten favorite books (so Life magazine claimed), we have a pulp fiction denial of the bilaterality of the Free and Communist world. Fed by strife and confusion, The Special Executive for Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion waits its turn. The 007 films’ critique of the Cold War was tolerated precisely because the films were considered trifles. Bond plunges his hands into the guts of the machinery of ultimate destruction, stopping the spinning dials and the blinking lights, freezing the countdown.
As a half-educated southern California child, I had no idea of geo politics. I was colonized enough that I understood the British were always the good guys, dashing, efficient, modest; men of understatement and women who told jokes without smiling. I didn’t know a single American kid who understood that there were actually two Englands until I was 16 or so. Probably it was Monty Python that brought that news.
As with so many other issues, the British can never look at the issue of James Bond in the same way an American can. Simon Winder’s book The Man Who Saved Britain chronicles how badly the British establishment bumbled after World War II, and how Bond’s competence served as solace to all the defeats. While 007 was advertising English sangfroid in one movie after another, services went missing in the UK — heat, electricity, and garbage removal.
Bond allowed the harried, broke and bored English to escape their island, even as their upper-class was giving them such a royal sceptering. Currency and travel restrictions persisted long after the war, but there was Our Man, anywhere he needed to be, thanks the miracle of jet travel. Thus, as Winder writes, Fleming becomes the British Empire’s last “great memorialist, fantasist and emollient.”
In beach scenes and snow scenes, 007 patrols the old Empire from “the palms to the pines” in Kipling’s phrase. To a know-nothing American kid, his Britishness seemed a kind of neutrality. It was as if he were working for UN, like The Man from UNCLE’s team of Solo and Kuryakin. We know from a chapter in the novel You Only Live Twice that Bond is not born English, but rather half-Scottish, half-Swiss. On screen one saw his Swiss side, a sort of Red Cross-worthy internationalism.
In its first great heyday, the Bond films gathered fans of drastically different ideologies. Ayn Rand chafed at the fact that the audience guffawed at Bond’s jokes, when Dr. No was such “a romantic example of screen art.” J-L Godard’s 1967 Weekend included a line about a woman who, given magic wishes for anything, wants a night with 007. (She doesn’t get her wish.) Robert Bresson, who claimed Goldfinger was his favorite movie, had made his own masterpiece about escape; to paraphrase the subtitle of A Man Escaped: Bond, like the wind, goes where he list. Harold Lloyd’s granddaughter Suzanne told me in an interview how much she and the famed silent comedian had loved Thunderball when they saw it together, first run. The debt to Lloyd and his fellow daredevils are honored in the titles of OHMSS where the silhouette of Bond hangs from the hands of a gigantic clock, as Lloyd did in Safety Last. Alfonso Cuaron was also a fan of the remarkable opening sequence in You Only Live Twice and told me that this was as much an inspiration for Gravity as the more staid Marooned, quoted in Cuaron’s Roma.
But like Cary Grant, Bond was really mid-Atlantic in style. The series was produced by a pair of North Americans, and the New Yorker Richard Maibaum wrote 13 of the series’ scripts. Just as the Beatles repackaged American pop, and resold it to the USA, the James Bond films give our own American pulp fiction a Britishifying. The result was a series of hits that lasted more than half a century.
If there’s a single most attractive characteristic of James Bond, it’s his calm — even when it starts to look like jadedness. Humphrey Bogart was one of the few old movie stars who kept an audience in the 1960s and 1970s. He was loved like Bill Murray is now, and for the same reason: for being a couple of drinks ahead of everyone, for being blase, and cool under pressure. Bogie anticipated Bond: a lone voyager in a world where everything was lethal and yet nothing really mattered.
Just as Manny Farber stopped the show, as it were, to honor the stride of Bogart crossing Las Palmas Boulevard in The Big Sleep, the Bond films producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman also noted this appeal in Connery’s walk. “He had an odd walk, forceful yet relaxed,” said Pearson of his real life Bond. The filmmakers weren’t wrong about their insistence that Sean Connery moved so much better than the average man. Connery never got over the unhappiness of being treated as a show pony, asked to stroll across the room for studio execs and investors.
He was a cleaning woman’s son, a Navy vet, a truck driver and a body builder, an Edinburgher with “Scotland Forever” tattooed on his arm. Like any proud Scot, he had certain opinions of the English, and it galled him to play one of the world’s most famous Brits. Connery was one the most chemical actors who ever made a movie. But like Elvis, he was given to passive resistance when he got bored. And his boredom could be hard to forecast — why such a man would wake up for the cheesiness of Diamonds Are Forever and be less aroused by the colossal sets and cosmic insanity of You Only Live Twice?
Was Connery sometimes a little ducky, with that hair pomade, with the tragic swimwear the producers made him wear? Did Connery, in the golf scenes in Goldfinger, don the same hat as seen on the weird Japanese drawing on the cover of Q: Are We Not Men by Devo? Was he a bit too pushy with women — fouling some of the finest Bonds with oily sexism? Certainly there was some sadism in Connery’s aura — as per the old “sex, sadism and snobbery” critique by Paul Johnson in his 1957 review of the novel Dr No in The New Statesman. It’s there even in Connery’s look, the way he gave a dirty cop’s grim smile when it was time to get a suspect to talk.
The young are going to have ultimate judgement on these movies, deciding whether or not they’ll be viewed with anything more than amused horror for their backwardness. Stephen Marche in Esquire wrote in italics to make his description of a fade out in Goldfinger incontrovertible:
James Bond rapes Pussy Galore. I don’t know how else to describe this scene, even taking the most charitable possible view.
Let’s look: here is a killer secret agent and a woman of mystery in a barn, literally rolling in the hay. There is help within earshot; the barn door is open. We’ve established that these two are violent people with guns. We’ve also seen established that Miss Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman) would be delighted to shoot 007 any time she feels it necessary.
If you want to put something in italics, try this: here is a man and a woman who are mean for the fun of it. Who knows what constitutes foreplay for the likes of them?
As for the sadism that goes with the sexism…A line in Goldeneye shows some kind of attempt to ballast these adventure, when the bad version of Bond, 006 (Sean Bean), a groper and a creep, asks our smoother original: “Do those vodka martinis drown out the screams of the men you killed?” They never would have said anything that unkind to dear Roger Moore, and Connery would have just snickered. But the essence of the killings in a Bond movie are efficiency, not more painful than bang-you’re-dead in the schoolyard. Screams are only heard when Bond knocks someone off a cliff or a building, so we can appreciate the echo.
The effect was last demonstrated in SPECTRE. A beautiful Italian woman (Monica Bellucci) goes out of her Roman villa for a last look at her garden. She knows she is about to be murdered, merely because she was married to someone important in the organization.
A pair of grey shadows representing assassins steal toward her. Two sounds like “punt” whisper and the blurred figures both drop. Bond strides out into focus in the foreground. It’s as painless a pair of killings as a film could offer. Working on You Only Live Twice, scriptwriter Roald Dahl was apprised of the Bond formula. There had to be three girls: one who tries to kill him, one who dies because of being close to him, and the final one he ends up with.
The second part of the formula was that Bond could kill as many people as he wanted but he could never be sadistic about it.
So much of the subversiveness of Connery’s smooth drawling still works — anti-establishment, as they used to say. Note Connery’s sudden flash of interest when the penny drops. Detectives are more interesting than warriors. Some think the series died when Connery walked.
Timothy Dalton was alert, and bore both the rose and the pistol required for the role. Pierce Brosnan, so foxy and humorous, was as bluff as Bulldog Drummond himself.
No matter who wears the mask, the Bond films have an apartness from the rest of the cinema. It’s a weird chain of a tale decades long, running from tragedy to cartoonishness. And yet even the worst have size and dazzle. “People do not make movies like this anymore,” said Craig in the same 2015 Guardian interview where he claimed he’d rather slash his wrists than make another Bond film.
Certainly that apartness will change someday. The Bond production company Eon, is a family business run by Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, descendents of the original producer Albert Broccoli. If Bond is nominally the property of Jeff Bezos now, there are still a number of legal barriers to keep 007 from going the way of all franchises. Recently, John Logan, the scriptwriter on Skyfall and Spectre, wrote an New York Times editorial on the purchase of MGM by Amazon; he said a chill ran down his spine thinking of what would happen to Bond once he was thoroughly in the hands of a conglomerate. Writing for Bond was working for a family business, he said: “Work sessions on “Skyfall” and “Spectre” were like hearty discussions around the dinner table…Every crazy aunt or eccentric uncle was given a voice.”
But family businesses only go on so long. There will be platforming. There already was such branching out in the 1990s, with the animated adventures of Bond’s nephew, James Bond, Jr. Rest assured we’ll re-explore that avenue someday. There will be prequels and tie ins and streaming tv series, and several 00 agents all teamed up, barking at each other and getting into fights.
In the meantime, with his solitude and self-amusement, Craig’s Bond mirrors what Robert Warshow said was the essence of the western movie hero: “He has his own kind of relevance. He is there to remind us of the possibility of style in an age that has put on itself the burden of pretending that style has no meaning.”
The style seems to work. Distracted in a dusty multiplex that seemed emptier with every visit, I once stopped in my tracks seeing Craig and Lea Seydoux on the SPECTRE poster. The pair slouched in their evening wear. Seydoux magnificently insolent, Craig giving the best je m’en fous look since Robert Mitchum. When was the last time you saw movie stars hold their space like that, without irony or apology or satire? The posters do what a movie ought to do, and what the Bond films do: that is, to summon its fans from whatever morass life has caught them in…to provide wickedness and peril.
(Next week: Part 2, the films themselves.)
