What to do? Hollywood was thrown for a loop. They had to find an American equivalent to Bond. Why? It's in the times themselves. And in one word. Spies. Even the sound of the word can recall the early sixties. Say it slowly, almost in a whisper, and you just may pick up the intonation it once had. Sssspieeeeezzzzzz.
Spies were once mysterious, magical creatures, existing on the edge of the crowd. On the edge of life itself. Where had they come from? Before the 60's, they were primarily villains, shadowy characters skulking in alleyways, or knife-wielding assassins with pencil thin moustaches. Now, suddenly, they were cool. They were strong, bold, as in your face and proud of their profession as could be. And amid the Harry Palmers and George Smileys of the time, who was at the fore?
Bond, James Bond. Most people born after the 1960's do not seem to grasp how desperately massive the spy craze was. The cold war was at it's chilliest, people were learning to duck and cover in case of atomic attack (much more civilized than the 90's equivalent of kissing one's posterior bon voyage), and as far as most people knew, James Bond was what the world of the spy was really like.
Television tried to cash in with a number of programs, each more Bond-like than the next, including of course The Man From UNCLE which Ian Fleming himself assisted in the creation of, but the real arena was the world of the motion picture. In theatres, Bond was king. Goldfinger had changed the world's perception of espionage and given us a modern hero, a hero who killed at will, slept with numbers of beautiful women and never spilled a drop of his vodka martini.
Immediately, the character caught on with young and old, but more surprising, in a decade most often remembered for it's protests and civil unrest, the universities of America were also breeding grounds for James Bond fans. There is a wonderful film clip; you've probably seen it, wherein a group of college students are in the midst of a chain dance in a park. The participants are dressed in various tie-dyed garments, thin flowing, "natural", but there, in the midst of these beatific revelers, is a young man wearing sunglasses and a sweatshirt with the famous 007 logo emblazoned on his chest. On top of that, he is a participant in the event, not an outsider watching the so-called "hippies" go through the motions.While some may think it's just a coincidence, it isn't. James Bond was that popular, at times approaching a cultural phenomenon like the Beatles.
It's been said that if Thunderball's initial box office take were adjusted for inflation, that it's only competition for highest grossing movie ever would be Jurassic Park and Gone With The Wind.
Therefore, it was only natural that Hollywood try to duplicate Bond's success. How? That was the question studio executives were asking. What was it about James Bond that separated the character (and the films) from the adventure/action films that up until now had been the bread and butter of the major studios?
Theories abounded. Was it the women? The gadgets? The devil-may-care attitude? Was it all of these? The studios had to find out, and do so quickly before they were left behind.
They began with Derek Flint. Our Man Flint (1966) is easily the best of the 60's renditions of the American Bond. Derek Flint, perfectly portrayed by James Coburn, was Bond taken to the extreme. Whatever Bond did, Flint did it twice, and with more style. While some still take the first Flint film as a serious attempt to make a spy thriller, there is no doubt that it is the most successful parody of James Bond to make it to the big screen. From his continuously manned (?) harem to his ability to stop his heartbeat for two minutes straight, fly a spaceship and dance with the Bolshoi Ballet to boot, Flint was a hedonist without equal.
Tall, iconoclastic rebel, Zen philosopher, expert on all things, yet member of Z.O.W.I.E., a supersecret organization (a common element of American Bond films), Flint was a combination of James Bond and the American desire for BIG. He had to be bigger. He's Bond with tailfins. It's also been noted that while the Bond title sequences played with a glimpse here and there of female nudity, the Flints were a bit less discrete, but isn't that the point?
Sadly, Flint was killed off with the 1967 sequel In Like Flint, which placed our ineffable hero against an evil group of female hairdressers attempting to bring about world peace by replacing government officials with duplicates. Strangely enough, this duplicate concept was taken to another unfunny extreme in the Charles K. Feldman production of Casino Royale, but I digress. Flint, of course, manages to turn the women with his charms as compared to that underachiever Bond, who would have had to sleep with them before turning them to the forces of good. Nevertheless, by the time the Flint flies into space, thus saving the world, no one cared whether he came back down or not. While Coburn was still fun, the need to get bigger and bigger shot the series in the foot. Some might say it was shot a bit higher.Fans of the series always thought Flint deserved another shot, but when that shot came in 1976 as a TV movie, the thrill was definitely gone. Coburn had left the series and Flint had been turned into a straightforward spy with none of the smirking attitude that made the originals work.
Coincidentally, by this point in time the Bond series began to eschew the seriousness of the early films, taking on the satirical attitude which had apparently sunk Flint in the 60's and was now riding that sense of humor once again to the top of the box office. Times do change. As an aside, the Bruce Willis film, Hudson Hawk (1991) made an attempt at Flint-age, even to the point of including Coburn, but the film suffered from an extreme lack of direction (and writing) that could have made the thing work.
Speaking of failed attempts; Matt Helm. Bond's biggest competitor on the paperback racks was a tough, hard-boiled spy who lived life with no regrets. For the uninitiated, I would suggest reading "Death Of A Citizen" by Donald Hamilton, the first of the Matt Helm series and required reading for anyone wishing to understand fully what they have been missing by watching the films. The early books are as taut and serious as a spy thriller can get. Helm is as rough a character as his enemies, and in most cases, rougher. He wins by any means possible, including the use of torture. He's a dark angry killer, pulled back into the world of espionage by force and kept there by necessity. It's what the man does, and he's damn good.
So, with the Bond explosion of the 1960's running full force, what more natural a concept than to take Helm and bring him to the big screen. Perfect. Now, you need a no compromise star, someone whom the audience will believe and follow through these knife-edged adventures. Lee Marvin? James Garner? Clint Eastwood? How about Dean Martin? When the first Helm film, The Silencers, was released in 1966, audiences flocked to see the Martin vehicle. First of all the film had quite a risque reputation. Watching it today, it's hard to see how censors could have considered the film dirty, but a number of scenes of Stella Stevens in a less than attired state fueled the fire. Martin's double entendres didn't help matters much, but Matt Helm was off the ground and there was no stopping it.
The Silencers was a massive hit. It combined the laid-back trademark Martin performance with dozens of beautiful women and just enough espionage to separate it from the other rat pack movies. The plot, Helm being dragged back into I.C.E., yet another supersecret organization, in order to stop a supervillain from destroying a New Mexico atomic test site, worked, especially for an audience hungry for stylish spy thrillers. While the production values never truly approach the Bond series, they are among the highest of his American competitors and the film should be remembered at least for the attempt.
Matt Helm is also worth remembering for another reason. It is the only American "Bond" to date that has lasted more than three films. The Silencers, the most successful of the series at least attempts to bear some resemblance to the source material and it shows. There is a secret agent movie hidden beneath the drinking jokes and interminable breaks for snippets from Dean Martin songs. Too bad it doesn't peek out a little more often. Followed by Murderer's Row, The Ambushers (One of the worst films of all time), and The Wrecking Crew, Martin's Helm series parlayed patented barroom humor and American know-how into an interesting, if flawed, four-year run.
Once again, American filmmakers had made the mistake of thinking that Bond's surface qualities were what made the films popular. They didn't look at Richard Maibaum's excellent writing, the direction of Terence Young and Guy Hamilton, or the sheer production values of the Bond films. They looked at the surface, at the glamour, and assumed that was the secret. Where Bond had his Aston Martin with ejector seat, Helm had a Mercury station wagon and later a gold Ford Thunderbird, both with a bar built into the back seat. Beautiful women? By the armful. Las Vegas showgirl types usually found in bikinis around Helm's private indoor swimming pool (which was definitely a set piece to remember).
Why spend so much time on the Martin films? Because they are direct precursors to the Roger Moore Bond's of the 1970's. They're over-the-top star vehicles built not around a character or series of events, but around the star of the film. There's no difference between Martin's Helm and the Bond we find in Moonraker. They are caricatures, not characters, divorced almost wholly from their source materials.
One wonders what Ian Fleming would have thought of Bond's adventures in space. Hamilton scrupulously avoided comment. Bond fans have been lucky in that from time to time Bond returns to his roots, the novels of Ian Fleming, for inspiration. Helm fans were not so lucky and a worthy character died a truly unenviable death, ending his last incarnation as a TV private eye. Shudder.
With the coming of the 1970's, and Roger Moore's foray into Bondage, Hollywood had become a different place. No longer was the search for James Bond as essential as it once had been. A new type of film had come into fashion, best exemplified by such films as "Point Blank" with Lee Marvin and "The Anderson Tapes" with former Bond, Sean Connery. Crime dramas had become a main staple of the Hollywood diet. Spies were passe and falling. Bond box office numbers seemed to buoy the concept that the genre had overloaded. Bonnie And Clyde, Point Blank, The Wild Bunch. Each of these films had taken the straightforward crime drama and turned the volume up. Suddenly a hero could be an anti-hero. Dirty Harry was the new symbol of order. Not even the American love of secret organizations remained. Times had changed and there was no sign things would ever be going back.In 1977, with the release of The Spy Who Loved Me, EON put a lock on their market share. No one was making spy films. By changing their approach (which ostensibly had changed with Diamonds Are Forever five years previously), EON took a character that very well might have died off and turned the series completely around.
While outside the world was a darker place, meaner in many ways, the world now inhabited by James Bond was safe, predictable, set in a glamorous reality that bore little resemblance to the increasingly claustrophobic urban landscape that most people inhabited. The world was ready for the new formula. In the early seventies, the American love of espionage had been undermined by a sense of distrust that pervaded American life. Watergate and the resulting political furor had taken away a feeling of security that had set the US apart from the rest of the world for over a century. People no longer trusted their leaders, their own institutions, and their films showed this new weltschmerz.
The American spy film became an open field where the darkest suspicions of the Watergate era could play out, where that aforementioned sense of security was put to the test, and usually found to be lacking.Three Days Of The Condor (1975) best exemplifies the change in the genre. Instead of a man who kills for Queen and Country, Robert Redford portays a man who reads books for the CIA, looking for subtle clues, codes, etc. One day, he returns from lunch to find everyone who worked with him has been murdered by a "CIA within the CIA". The bubble is broken.
The hero, instead of donning tuxedo and Walther PPK, runs for his life, then discovers that his only friend, his best contact, is playing both sides. Once again, trust fails, and even in final victory, there is the nagging suspicion that all is not over. While the 70's brought a new seriousness to the spy genre, it also showed Hollywood the futility of attempting to break into EON's hallowed territory.
Most studios just got on with their lives, but others had to take one more shot, which brings us to the most reprehensible attempt at American Bondage, Remo Williams, The Adventure Begins. Based on the Destroyer books of Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir, the film was shamelessly promoted as "James Bond for America". The film was best described as a failure. The title should have been Remo Williams, don't call us, we'll call you. Produced by Dick Clark (TV bloopers and blunders), the film took a fairly interesting concept, that of a New York police officer transformed into a professional intelligence agent with the help of a Korean master of SinAnJu (Don't ask).
While there are fun moments, they are too far apart, and again, as appears to be the most apparent maladjustment with American Bonds, the film drops the ball in favor of big stunt sequences and bad characterization. The plot is laughable and honestly takes up almost a quarter of the film, the rest being the longest set-up in film history, Titanic notwithstanding.
While the film was hyped as the first of a series, once it hit theatres, people wisely stayed away in packs and the series was dropped.In the 80's and 90's, the most successful American Bond has to be Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan. The series has already survived it's first actor change (Alec Baldwin into Harrison Ford), has made it past the sophomore slump and is now approaching a fourth film.But why has Ryan survived whereas all these other examples have not? Because unlike his predecessors, Ryan is not big. Ryan is tied into an essential American-ness, an everyday hero living an everyday life, who just happens to be a spy.
The Ryan adventures are serious, like the original Bonds. They play one very capable man off against a number of adversaries, but with Ryan, there is an added element. He's a family man. Wherever Bond may roam, he is basically a loner. He's had his chance at love and lost. Jack Ryan's first priority is his family. It rounds his character. He's not going off to fight supervillains around the world. He's going to work. At the end of the film, whereas Bond usually ends up in a life raft with a beautiful woman somewhere in the China Sea, Ryan ends up waiting to find out whether his second child will be a boy or a girl.
These scenes ground the character in a very basic reality. In other words, Jack Ryan survives by leaving the fantasy of the superspy behind and sticking closer to the reality of the world of espionage. While this may not sound like much, it's the key, the essential secret that escaped American filmmakers for so long. It took thirty years for the studios to learn the essential lesson: Don't compete with James Bond by imitation, compete by disassociation.
The 90's however, brought a new obstacle to the Bond series. Itself. With the infamous MGM/Turner debacle, James Bond disappeared from the big screen for six years. While the public waited for him to come back and save the world, James Bond couldn't even extricate himself from a California courtroom. In the midst of this gap, room opened up within EON s protected genre for a newcomer. If James Bond wasn t going to save the world, James Cameron would.
In an interview in 1994, James Cameron pointed up this fact by stating that he'd wanted to see a James Bond movie and they weren't making them anymore, therefore he took it upon himself to make True Lies. Taken from the French film La Totale, True Lies is the exception to the imitation rule. It succeeded where others had failed by imitating Bond to a tee. It's a thinly disguised Roger Moore Bond film with different actors, but it is also a one-shot, and a very successful one at that.
The film follows a Bond-like secret agent, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, through a series of adventures while at the same time playing him off against his wife in the supreme conceit that she doesn't know she's "married to James Bond". Finally coming to terms, the husband and wife team up and the fantasy that any of us could be spies if we wanted to takes the film over the top.
It's a well-crafted film, if one can escape it's inherently derivative nature, because it came in the "dry" years between Licence To Kill and GoldenEye. It served two purposes. First of all, it showed that EON was not the only company on Earth that could make a Bond film, and second, it reminded the world that James Bond wasn't around anymore.The stakes had been upped and if EON dropped the ball, others were there, ready to pick it up and run with it.
EON very wisely paid heed and the return of James Bond in GoldenEye was the result.
In 1997, with the release of Tomorrow Never Dies, EON seems to have placed themselves once again at the top of their game. However, with the possible entrance of Sony and their rival product, things have only once before been so chaotic in the world of James Bond. Therefore, before we leave the American Bond behind, there's one last distinguished member of the club that must be visited, that most American Bond of all, Never Say Never Again. Yes, that's right. Never Say Never Again.
While ostensibly a real James Bond film, 1983's Never Say Never Again (hereafter referred to as NSNA,) is a remake of 1965's Thunderball, which suffers from a number of problems, the greatest of which is that the film itself is written for American audiences.
When Richard Maibaum wrote the EON Bond films, he took into account the American audience, but he did not write specifically for them. He realized that Bond would have to appear as a sort of cultural outsider to American audiences if he was going to retain his special qualities. NSNA's author, Lorenzo Semple, Jr., on the other hand, was known for his Batman teleplays of the 1960's and wrote specifically for the American audience, ignoring the International flair essential to the series. While the film earnestly tries to seem "worldly" with it's exotic locations such as Nice and the Bahamas, these locations are treated blandly, taking all the glamour of Bond and dropping it for a series of badly staged set-pieces and awkward dialogue. Is Monte Carlo an exotic location? Certainly, but why film the place so starkly? To compare the luxury of the location, look at the manner in which GoldenEye treats the very same Casino that Bond visits in NSNA. NSNA throws in video games, garishly lit, all centered around the most useless gambling confrontation in Bond history. We don't want to see Bond play a video game, we want to see Bond defeat his enemies (and ours) using his wits and his luck. Not his joystick.
NSNA is filled to the brim with the American joy of the extravagant. Everything in the film is big, from Adnan Koshoghi's yacht (the world's largest) to Palmyra's transformation from a villain's Caribbean island retreat into a castle on the African coast complete with various unattractive middle-Eastern stereotypes and an amazingly high sea wall. Why? What can one say? NSNA is a slow, deliberately-paced James Bond film suffering from too many ideas and too little execution.
It's a film with some great moments; as a matter of fact, some of the more Fleming-esque moments we've seen on film. Blofeld, the luscious Fatima Blush, etc. These are all returns to the heyday of Fleming's Bond. But, they're also evidence that Fleming's Bond had fallen out of favor in the early 80's. Where there are moments of brilliance, there are also moments of complete ineptitude that bring the film down.
While attempting to look European, NSNA is almost the perfect American Bond. All one has to do is look at the final frames of the film. Never again? Wink. The Bond series is exceptional in one respect (among many), and that is its amazing ability to change; allowing the films to stay ahead of their competitors. When Bond was serious, the American counterparts were frivolous, satirical. When America's former love of secret organizations and spies became jaded, wary after the Watergate years, Bond became lighter, more humorous in counterpart. Now, in the late 90's, things have come full circle and James Bond is taking more cues from his American competitors.
From Bond's beginnings as a serious spy, through the Moore epics of the 70's and 80's and into the Dalton/Brosnan years, James Bond is now being renewed much more in the mold of the American action hero. It's a change that seems inevitable considering the past, and with the release of Tomorrow Never Dies, the most successful Americanization of James Bond very well may be James Bond himself.
©1998 by Robert Cotton
Once upon a time, a very long time ago in a land called Hollywood, there was great consternation. For years, decades, Hollywood had ruled the world's box offices with product tried and true. Then one day, a company called EON (Everything Or Nothing) dared to impinge on Hollywood territory with their James Bond movies.
Robert Cotton is the Films Senior Editor for Her Majesty's Secret Servant
