James Bond 1983

 

from DIVERSION, June 1983

Roger Moore vs Sean Connery: friendly duel.

To some of us, Sean Connery is and always will be the only James Bond. Notwithstanding that fact, many moviegoers have settled for Roger Moore's pallid interpretation since Connery abdicated the film role, in 1971; indeed, Moore's most recent Bond films have grossed between $150 and $200 million each.

But now a cinematic showdown, as unusual as any 007 has faced in 21 years on the screen is in the offing. There will be two Bond movies released this summer: Connery returns to the screen as Bond in Never Say Never Again, and Moore essays the secret agent once again in Octopussy. The big-screen Bond is based on the hero of the highly successful series of books created by Ian Fleming, an upper-crust former British naval officer who had been involved in espionage activities during World War II. Fleming wrote his first Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1952, drawing on his wartime intelligence work and his skills as a journalist (he had covered Moscow spy trials in the 1930s and later worked for the Sunday Times of London) to create the suave and dangerous secret agent with a license to kill.

Although the book sold well for a first novel and received good notices, a film sale failed to materialize. Instead Fleming sold the rights in 1954 to CBS, which produced an unsuccessful television version of the story with Barry Nelson as an American spy, Jimmy Bond. Fleming wrote another script about a Bond-like figure that never made it to the TV screen (although Fleming salvaged the plot for his novel Doctor No), and did treatments for a CBS TV series about Bond that also was never made. It was not until 1963, one year before his death, that Fleming found the tremendous success he was looking for, with the film version of Doctor No, starring Sean Connery. By then, of course, President John Kennedy had told the nation that he loved the Bond books, an endorsement that certainly didn't hurt the secret agent's Image.

Producer Albert R. Broccoli, who with Harry Saltzman optioned the rights to all the Bond novels (except Casino Royale) in 1961, began what has become the most successful film series in history. By 1964 Bondmania was at its peak. Goldfinger, the third Connery 007 picture, grossed $10,374,807 in 13 weeks of U.S.Canadian release. Crowds clamoring to see the the film were so large that the DeMille Theater in New York City opened its doors 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for showings.

Taking Stock Of Bond
Bond toys, gadgets, and board games flooded the market. There was a model of OO7's Aston Martin, a spy attache case, a toy figure of Connery with tiny daggers that shot out of his shoes, 007 toiletries that promised to "make any man dangerous," even a rock song featuring the lyrics "My baby went and fell in love with 007."

There was also a rash of highly derivative spy movies (The Ipcress File, Our Man Flint) and television series (Secret Agent, The Man From U.N.CLE.), but none could match the success of the Bond phenomenon.

Connery bowed out of the series for the first time in 1967 (George Lazenby replaced him, as one critic put it, "the way concrete fills a hole") but returned in 1971 to make Diamonds Are Forever, a movie that broke records everywhere. In 12 days, it took in $24,568,915 at cinemas around the world. Despite that success, Connery announced that he would never do another Bond picture, and Broccoli turned to Moore, who had starred in the long-running television series The Saint. Although many Bond fans found Moore a weak substitute for Connery, the Moore Bond movies have garnered ever-increasing box office receipts.

Maude Adams and Moore in Octopussy.

The Plot Thickens

How and why Connery has come to reprise his Bond role one more time for independent producer-director Kevin McClory is a somewhat complicated story. McClory had convinced Fleming to let him bring Bond to the screen as early as 1958. Discarding the books as source material, McClory, Fleming, and veteran screenwriter Jack Whittingham concocted a screenplay called James Bond of the Secret Service, involving nuclear terrorism and a Bahamian-based villain named Largo. When that project fell through, Fleming adapted the story for the film Thunderball (starring Connery). McClory charged plagiarism and sued. The case was tied up in the courts for three years but resulted in an agreement between Broccoli, Saltzman, and McClory whereby all three of them coproduced Thunderball. Coming at the height of the Bond craze, the movie was a smash hit, collecting $28 million in U.S. rentals, which made it the most successful Bond movie until Moonraker in 1979. McClory's involvement might have ended there except for a clause in his agreement with Broccoli and Saltzman that allowed him to remake Thunderball ten years after the date of its initial release (1965). In 1976, McClory announced preproduction plans for the remake, saying he had a screenplay by spy novelist Len Deighton, Connery, and himself, but Broccoli took McClory to court and the production was stymied for six years. Then, last year, Jack~ Schwartzman took over the project (with McClory as executive producer), now called Never Say Never Again. The old script was junked, and a new one was written by Lorenzo Semple Jr. (Three Days of the Condor). Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back) was hired to direct.

Dr. Maybe
Connery's involvement had begun in 1975, when McClory invited him to work on the screenplay for the remake of Thunderball. "It was clever of McClory to involve Sean," one observer noted. "Once Sean wrote it, he startedto care about the character he'd previously got fed up with playing."

Back in Bondage: Connery with Klaus Maria Brandauer in Never Say Never Again.

Connery told the press that he thought it would be fun to go back and play Bond after ten years because "he would be different, that much more experienced, older, and I would find a different vein of humor and do things that are more difficult to do and play." The new producers' approach was to have Connery play the character at his own age, which is now 52, "and not go on pretending Bond is still 32."

Never Say Never Again (a title that purposely recalls Connery's earlier insistence that he would never return to the screen as Bond) is intended to update Bond in much the same manner that John Gardner's recent 007 novel License Renewed brought the print Bond into the 1980s. Bond is no longer a youthful agent; he is a man slightly out of step with thc times, an antihero of sorts, which is a canny move considering that part of Bond's carly appeal had been his iconoclasm.

Now, however, antiheroes are the norm, and the new Connery approach clearly worries producer Broccoli, whose own Moore Bond remains proestablishment and who has said that the approach contcmplated in Never Say Never Again might affect Bond's following with millions of fans who still want clear-cut heroes.

For his new Bond movie the producer is taking no chances. Octopussy is nominally based on an Ian Fleming short story that was published posthumously. But because Bond barely appeared in that story-he turned up at the end to arrest the villain, who, in fact, had already been killed by his pet octopus, Octopussy-Broccoli abandoned the original completely. The film version features the usual 007 ingredients: a larger-than-life villainess named Octopussy, a menacc that threatens the world, and a grab bag of incredible gadgets.

Contrasting Styles
Who will win the cinematic confrontation this summer'? If brand loyalty is the key, Connery may have the edge. "I was standing in the back of Graumann's Chinese [Theater] when Diamonds Are Forever opened," recalls Tom Mankiewicz, who was co-screenwriter on that film. "And at the beginning of the film, when Sean says, 'My name is Bond. James Bond,' there was such a roar from the audience. It was like welcoming home a son from the war. There's a great loyalty for him, and the picture was a smash partly because people just wanted to see him again."

Connery may have the edge for more reasons than nostalgia. As a pcrformer, he is uniquely suited for the Bond role. His Scottish acccnt seems at odds with the suave English hero Ian Fleming envisagcd, which gives him the proper balance between comedy and seriousness. Moore, touted as more in the Fleming image, does not work as well, partly because he is so Flemingcsque. Moore's Bond scarcely sees the humor of his situations, while Conncry's recognizes the humor without losing sight of thc inherent dangers. Connery also gave the scries the focus, the hard dramatic cdge, it needed.

Penultimate film: Connery and Jill St. John in Diamonds Are Forever.

"I start with the serious and try to inject as much humor as I can to get a balance of ingrcdients," Connery said in an interview with Time. "Roger comes in the humor door, and I go out it."

"Sean and I saw him differently," says Moore. "When I started, Bond naturally took a much lighter tone. After all, who could take me seriously as a spy'r"

The stakes on both Bond movies are high: each film has run up a $2.5 million-plus budget. The films will also be competing with Return of the Jedi, a Jaws 3-D, the sci-fi Krull, and other big films for box office dollars this summer. Will there be enough Bond fans to make Bond's double return doubly successful'? If not, may the best Bond win.