The Ties That Bond

I love the holidays because it means that SpikeTV will have a James Bond movie marathon. Catching such mediocre fare as Timothy Dalton's films, then comparing them to more classic examples of, say, Dr. No is revealing.

One of the last really decent Bond films, The World is Not Enough, has this elaborate skiing sequence where 007 has to evade snowmobiles hanging from parachutes. Yawn. It's rather lukewarm, as you, the viewer, lose your sense of disbelief that snowmobiles, with or without parachutes, are capable of killing our favorite secret agent.

Yet in the first twenty minutes of Dr. No, Bond arrives in Jamaica on a regular Pan Am flight. The Bond theme is going full blast as Sean Connery simply walks out of the airport. Wow-ee! There's more intrigue in an unassuming waltz to the pickup zone than there is in a multi-million dollar mountain chase. But wait! There's more! Just as you begin to wonder if the director isn't just abusing this new piece of music at every opportunity, Bond does something amazing.

While fanning himself with his hat (Remember when Bond wore a hat?), he holds it up to cover his face from a woman taking a photograph of him. He thinks nothing of it, and she gives him a scowl that makes you know she's up to something. Sure enough, there are about three different spies at the airport waiting to tail him and start gathering some info on his business.

Authentic Bond was always a contradiction: a secret agent who wasn't. He would travel under pseudonyms only periodically, practically as an afterthought. Before fighting the evil mastermind, Bond would have dinner at his evil palace, and perhaps beat him in a game of evil backgammon (never easy because the evil mastermind always cheats). He wasn't just serving queen and country. He was cultured and hedonistic.

Then came the gadgets. Original Bond didn't need gadgets, and at some point gizmos replaced good story telling. (If you want to know precisely when, it was somewhere between Live and Let Die and Octopussy. L&LD: "I will roast this deadly tarantula with a cigar and an ordinary can of hair spray." OP: "My fountain pen squirts acid!" I leave further comparison of these two films to the reader.)

Now, there's nothing particularly bad about the formula of Bond + gizmos. But somehow the people at EON Productions have forgotten that Bond at his center is a relic of the Cold War, and thus flourishes best in the heart of a conspiracy rich in paranoia and espionage. An occasional lapse in this environment is refreshing, say when Bond goes rogue in License to Kill, but when the espionage collapses into a forced and unprovoking final shootout in a hall of mirrors such as that in The Man With the Golden Gun, you start to wonder if the meaning of Bond has changed in the mind of a public who increasingly has no recollection of the permanent fear invoked in the free world by the Cold War. People were, in the back of their minds, continually unsure of what "Ivan" was dreaming up to crush capitalism and, perhaps, bring about the mutually assured destruction that we were told by our leaders he had no problem creating.

When EON lost the rights to use SPECTRE, there was a turning point in the films that I regretfully wish they would bring back. Not necessarily as SPECTRE itself per se, but perhaps instead as M.A.L.E.V.O.L.E.N.T., the Malicious Agency Leaning EVentually tO Lasting EcoNmic Turmoil.

Whatever! You get the idea. Bond needs a Cold War climate much more than he needs Halle Berry boobing around as some uncalled for Bondette.