James Bond 1989

Sean Connery in Doctor No

 from DIVERSION, MARCH 1989

It's classic Bond-James Bondfrom the equally classic Goldfinger. And although the film was first shown 25 years ago to audiences who attended at record-breaking levels (it earned $30 million in six months, with many theaters staying open 24 hours a day to satisfy demand), no one seems to have tired of it, or of Bond, the secret agent with the 00 prefix, and the license to kill.

During the 1970s, Goldfinger and its successors repeatedly racked up profits in theatrical reissues and network television screenings. In the early 1980s, videocassettes of the films from CBS/ Fox Home Video consistently sold out. And since the first film, Doctor No (1962), the 17 Bond movies have earned $2 billion in ticket sales. The Living Daylights, the 1987 installment, garnered $11,051,284 in its first three days of release in the United States, the highest three-day gross in Bond history.

Timothy Dalton as 007

And there seems to be no end in sight. Filming for Licence to Kill, the 18th Bond movie, has just been completed in Mexico, in time for release this summer. On the video front, MGM/ UA has remastered and repackaged 13 of the earlier films, while Amvest Video has unearthed a rare early television production of "Casino Royale," the first Bond novel. On television, ABC has rerun some of the movies as many as eight times each since 1972. And in print, novelist John Gardner taking over for Bond creator Ian Fleming, who died in 1964, has written six bestselling 007 novels, while others have offered such volumes as The James Bond Bedside Companion, The James Bond Films: A Behind-the-Scenes History, Bond and Beyond, and Nobody Does It Better.

Amazing? It certainly is to onetime 007 Sean Connery, who noted in 1983: "It's kind of odd that this character should have lasted so long."

Fantasy Figure
Bond was born in 1953, a male fantasy created by Fleming, a middle-aged ex-journalist. Casino Royale, the first of 12 novels that Fleming would churn out before his death, introduced the hero as a dark, brooding, and fallible secret agent. It was wish fulfillment of the most basic kind: Tough guy Bond overcomes almost insurmountable odds (and the wiles of a treacherous woman) to save the day. Adding to the appeal were Fleming's clever embellishments-vivid descriptions of food, drink, and women that, he claimed, "reassure the reader that both he and the writer have their feet on the ground in spite of being involved in a fantastic adventure. "

Even the choice of Bond's name--taken from the real-life author of Birds of the West Indies-was a deliberate attempt, said Fleming, to let readers "put their own overcoats on James Bond and [build] him into what they admire. . . . When you think of it, it is a dull name. I could have called him Peregrine Carruthers, or something lush-sounding, but then I would have defeated my aim of making him credible. I wanted the blankest name possible."

You Only Live Twice

Bond soon took on a life--and followers-of his own. John F. Kennedy named From Russia with Love as a favorite novel; Raymond Chandler called Fleming's work masterly; and British author and critic Cyril Connolly wrote that Bond "makes everyone go back to prep school. . . . In the most horrible Bond episode, one still hears the voice of a small boy in a dormitory describing Chinese tortures."

The secret agent-who reached the peak of his popularity in 1964-65 soon came to be identified with the lost glories of J. F. K.'s Camelot. Like Kennedy, Bond on-screen was seen as youthful, glamorous, witty, and above all, stylish. Said Connery: "I saw him as a complete sensualist, his senses highly tuned and awake to everything. He likes his wine, his food, his women. He's quite amoral. I particularly liked him because he thrived on conflict. But more than that, I think I gave him a sense of humor."

The films were loaded with novelties. Where else could you find a bad guy with a razor-rimmed bowler hat that, when hurled like a Frisbee, sliced off people's heads? Or a woman with a poisoned, retractable spike in her shoe? Or a hero who wears a tuxedo beneath his underwater wetsuit? Only in a Bond film would a villain make his headquarters in a volcano or use piranhas to eliminate superfluous employees. And only Bond himself could get away with the outrageous puns and weak jokes tossed off after "certain" death.

Above All, Style
Bond had style in everything: his suits (Savile Row); his drink (a vodka martini-"shaken, not stirred"); his cars (Aston Martin, Lotus, Bentley). The various Bond incarnations – Connery, David Niven, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, and most recently, Timothy Dalton – have all added their own personal touches to further enhance the Bond mystique.

George Lazenby as 007

And those villains: Auric Goldfinger, who wants to blow up Bond and Fort Knox in one shot; Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who tries to start World War III in three different films; and Francisco Scaramanga, the man with the golden gun (and three nipples), who enjoys a cool murder before making love.

Early on, coproducers Albert "Cubby" Broccoli and Harry Saltzman realized that the fans would return if the stunts and effects continued to outdo themselves. Explains former Bond screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz: "The minute Bond pressed the ejector seat [of the Aston Martin in Goldfinger], and the audience roared, the series turned around. The audience saw outlandish things they had never seen before, and the natural response of anybody-a writer, a filmmaker-is to give them more of what they want."

From cars with ejector seats to a helicopter that could fit into a suitcase, the cinematic Bonds, with the help of the scientist "Q" and his laboratory, never failed to come up with the stateof-the-art in fantasy secret-agent gear. Ideas came from everyone: Writers, camera crews, production designers, even fans, and all were sifted by Broccoli and Saltzman, the mismatched godfathers of 007.

"Cubby's life is those films," says Mankiewicz. "He loves working on them. Harry is just a natural wheelerdealer; he is so mercurial. He would have twelve ideas in ten seconds. And nothing is big enough for Harry. When I was working on Diamonds Are Forever, we had a problem with the script, and Harry said to me, 'What's the basic threat here?' I said, 'Blofeld's going to destroy the world.' And Harry said, 'It's just not big enough.' "

007 (Sean Connery) meets Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman) in Goldfinger.

The "Bond formula" is the outgrowth of a collaborative process. First, the pre-credits sequence typically involves 007 in a wild mini-adventure that has little to do with the main story. In Goldfinger, for example, he blows up a heroin factory and uses a fan to electrocute a bad die in a bathtub. Then Bond is called onto the case proper-largerthan-life bad guys soon try to kill him; he meets the heroine; he encounters the main villain and learns of his diabolical plans; he is captured and taken to the bad guy's secret headquarters; using gadgets, wits, and the help of the "Bond girl," 007 escapes, destroys the bad guy and/or his headquarters, and makes love to the heroine.

This had become so formulized over time that by 1967, Roald Dahl was told only six things when called in to write You Only Live Twice. "Bond had to have three women in the film," said Dahl. "The first one would get killed, so would the second, and the third would get a fond embrace in the closing sequence. And there should be a great emphasis on funny gadgets and lovemaking."

First Bond Girl (Ursula Andress) meets Bond's dad (Ian Fleming).

He was right. The Bondwagon rolled on, outlasting Saltzman (who left the partnership in 1975), television imitators ("The Man from U.N.C.L.E.," "I Spy," "Mission: Impossible," "Honey West"), film competition (Our Man Flint, The Ipcress File, The Silencers), promotional tie-ins bordering on overkill (007 cuff links, a lady's nightgown with 007 sewn in the hem, Bond Bread advertised by Secret Agent James Bread; a toy figure of Bond with tiny daggers that shot out of his shoes), and casting ineptitude (former car salesman and model Lazenby as Connery's first replacement in 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service; one critic observed he filled the role "the way concrete fills a hole"). Somehow, though, Bond once again beat the odds. The 25th-anniversary film, The Living Daylights, introduced a new 007, Timothy Dalton, and a new approach. "In order to keep our originality," current director John Glen noted, "[we] felt we had to get back to real action and people." Added Dalton: "My approach is to humanize the man much more, Bond is not a superman, he is an ordinary man. He's a lapsed idealist who is rediscovering what is right or wrong, what is the truth."

So Bond has come full circle, and the old appeal returns for a more gilded age. J.F.K. and Fleming are gone, and Connery and Moore have since moved on. But 007 endures. "The basic success of Bond," explained 12-time 007 screenwriter Richard Maibaum, "is [that of] a ruthless killer who is also St. George of England, a modern-day combination of morality and immorality. In the age of the sick joke, it clicked." Or as Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in 1965: "Fleming's squalid aspirations and dream fantasies happened to coincide with a whole generation's. He touched a nerve. The inglorious appetites for speed at the touch of a foot on the accelerator and for sex at the touch of a hand on the flesh, found expression in his books. We live in the century of the Common Bond, and Fleming created him."