Tim Stanley
Dr Tim Stanley is a historian of the United States. His biography of Pat Buchanan is out now. His personal website is http://www.timothystanley.co.uk and you can follow him on Twitter @timothy_stanley.
RIP James Bond: killed by political correctness and an overdose of oestrogen
The trailer for the new Bond movie Skyfall has landed – and it looks rubbish. The video above is how it should be done. Sorry, but Bond ain’t Bond unless he’s flying into space with a Russian minx called Tatyana Innerthigh on a deadly mission to kill a fat bald man with a cat.
The rot set in with the casting of Daniel Craig. Things had been going a little haywire since the late 1980s, when the producers first caved into the non-existent popular demand for political correctness. But being the 1980s, they interpreted that to mean people would like to see beautiful ladies with big chests occasionally firing a gun (Hell, yeah!). Then along came Pierce Brosnan and things returned to their campy natural order. “I thought Christmas only came once a year,” etcetera, etcetera.
But Craig was all wrong for the part and signalled the intention of the moviemakers to turn Bond into Raymond Chandler without the laughs. They fail to pull it off because the pressure to sell theatre tickets means they have to betray their own vision. So, on the one hand we have Bond going to psychiatrists, emoting, feeling pain, getting angry, breaking fingers, pulling out a man’s spleen with his teeth, yada yada. On the other hand, we have him leaping 30 foot chasms, turning cars upside down, or sinking half of Venice. Through it all there’s the mawkish “family” of MI6, headed by Judi “Brave But Fragile” Dench. Bernard Lee’s “M” was a gruff Head Boy. Dench is a prissy school mistress with a crush on one of her pupils – Grazia Magazine’s idea of a strong woman.
As for Craig himself, his body is all wrong. Roger Moore’s body was always that of a slightly overweight middle-aged man with a taste for brandy and cigars. He probably required a stunt double for strenuous walking. Connery, whilst lithe to begin with, was a hairy bread pudding by the early 1970s (hairy everywhere but his head). There’s a scene in Diamonds Are Forever where the delicious Jill St John (who also bedded Henry Kissinger) looks at the naked Connery and says, “Why James, there’s more to you than meets the eye.” Yeah, about 4 stone I’d imagine.
Connery and Moore played their parts in an age when character trumped looks and women were encouraged to find a man attractive well into his seventies. They might have had prostate trouble, but they also had wit and charm. And we, the heterosexual men for whom these movies are made, could watch them and aspire to be them. For the price of a safari jacket, at least.
By contrast, Daniel Craig is the Bond for the Men’s Health Magazine generation – an absurd body that no human being could replicate squeezed into a pair of orange trunks. Gentlemen, Bond has been stolen from us and redesigned to appeal to women. In order to keep the men glued to their seats, the producers throw in lashings of sadistic violence. Without innuendo, Bond has thus become violent feminine porn. It’s not much fun unless you’re into hard pecs and snapped necks.
How to rescue the series, if we must? Follow this simple formula. 1) Replace Daniel Craig with a slightly older, arthritic actor with a twinkle in his eye. Frankly, I think Roger Moore could still do it. 2) Think big. Have Bond save the world from a giant death ray on Mars. And make sure the villain goes waaaay over budget on uniforms. 3) Give the evil mastermind a strong foreign accent and a parrot. 4) Don’t forget that beyond all this War on Terror stuff, Britain’s nemesis is always Russia. So lots of blonde women in KGB uniforms. 5) Replace the unfunny John Cleese with Rolf Harris. 6) More girls, more guns and a piranha tank
Modern moviemakers increasingly don’t understand what the movies are for. They’re about the creation and nurturing of myth. Folks buy movie tickets to see Johnny Weissmuller swinging through the trees, Raquel Welch fight a pterodactyl, or Beatty and Dunaway evaporate in a hail of bullets. They don’t pay to watch someone else’s idea of what is clever or “zeitgeist defining.” We want magic and mystery. We want invisible cars and Union Jack parachutes. We want Roger Moore. We want the biggest, we want the best. We want Bond. And beyond.
