Now, pay attention 007. If you believe some of the critics, James Bond is now a character of the past and will never return. Don’t believe a word of this. If there is one thing that will always remain ‘forever’ about James Bond, it is his ability to defy the odds, to survive and stay alive.
Various critics over the years have been out to ‘target’ Bond, and appear to get frustrated when he refuses to die. At various points in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, both literary and film critics have predicted that the Bond phenomena was ‘over’, the fascination with Bond had ‘naturally’ reached an end, and cinema audiences were ‘tired’ of Bond. To give just one example, in 1999 Heat magazine carried the headline on its front page: ‘Goodbye 007 – Will the next Bond be the last?’ Similarly, when Craig was selected as Bond, various critics said it was ‘the end’ of Bond.
Indeed, such doom-laiden predictions often came when there was a change of Bond actor, or a gap between movies.
But every time such claims were voiced, Bond always defied the critics and came back. As Cubby Broccoli himself once commented in 1985: ‘Bond can go on interminably, which I think he will – if they make him right’. Cubby was convinced that Bond would carry on, and he was always looking to the future, and at ways to produce more 007 films: ‘We’ll continue to make them. We’ll find ways to continue to make them, and make them successful’. In fact, as he made it clear at the time, he was working towards a major goal: for James Bond to go on forever.
Those who currently like to write off Bond underestimate the determination of Cubby’s children, Barbara and Michael. They inherited their father’s proud devotion to the Bond franchise and to movie-making more generally and, although they face the very tricky challenge of deciding where the franchise and character will go next, they remain adamant that Bond will be back. Unfortunately, although it follows a familiar and predictable pattern, there has been a recent outbreak of the ‘Bond is finished’ attitude in relation to the current post-Craig ‘what next?’ situation. Frustrated at the lack of official news, some critics have claimed that Bond is now ‘finally’ over, and can never properly return, as cinematic tastes have (supposedly) changed. One gets the feeling that some critics even relish saying this, as they have never been able to quite understand the Bond phenomenon. But what they fail to appreciate is that, as a character, there is something genuinely endurable about 007. Bond will be back, whether some critics like it or not.
Bond is Forever
In a sense, this question of whether the literary or movie versions of Bond can indeed carry on reveals something very interesting about Bond as a character: survival is part of his DNA, and his fans will always ‘will’ him to survive and continue. Even some of the villains seem to recognise this (grudgingly, of course!). At one point in EON’s film version of Moonraker (1979), the main baddie, Sir Hugo Drax (played by the excellent and sadly missed actor Michael Lonsdale) responds to the reappearance of 007 with a bemused, if weary, sigh: ‘James Bond. You appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season’.
This was a great piece of dialogue, as it captured something really important about both Ian Fleming’s literary creation and the version placed on the cinema screen by EON Productions across twenty-five films (not counting two ‘unofficial’ screen interpretations). Both readers and cinemagoers love Bond and his adventures precisely because they enjoy being teased and entertained by all the ways Bond faces extreme risks and nearly loses his life, but always seems to emerge on top: he has defied all the highly imaginative ways the villains have tried to wipe him out once and for all. He has come very close to death, of course, and part of the thrill of reading about him or watching him on screen is to discover how he overcomes such extreme situations. Some of the films have treated this with humour, with Bond using a quip to help the audience laugh with relief. Some of the films have taken a more realistic, gritty approach. But Bond always triumphs.
Fleming’s literary James Bond adventures, together with the fantastically successful movies, often placed the secret service agent in dire, life-threatening situations, where torture, pain and death were ever-present possibilities. But he always endured and survived. In fact, if you think about it, Bond was regularly subjected to ‘tests’ of his stamina and the challenge of overcoming a nasty end.
This is illustrated perfectly in his encounter with Dr. Julius No. As the cruel machine-like Dr. No explains to Bond and Honeychile Rider in Fleming’s novel Dr. No (1958): ‘You have both put me to a great deal of trouble. In exchange I intend to put you to a great deal of pain. I shall record the length of your endurance. The facts will be noted. One day my findings will be given to the world. Your deaths will have served the purposes of science. I never waste human material’. Needless to say, Bond does survive, after enduring an assault course of challenges and extreme pain in a tunnel-like shaft. Monitored closely by the sadistic Dr. No, Bond struggles on and the reader feels nail-biting tension as he faces electric shocks, burns and a heart-thumping encounter with venomous spiders. This ‘test’ culminates in a life-or-death fight with a giant squid. The movie version, with Sean Connery as 007, captures some of the flavour of this, as one still feels the bruising pain and effort that Bond has to go through to escape the ventilation shaft.
If there is one thing many people admire about James Bond, it is his phenomenal stamina and ability to defy whatever is thrown at him. When we watch the 007 movies, how many times have we cheered and sighed with relief as Bond lives to fight another day? He has had gritty physical fights with henchmen on trains, in drawing-rooms, on boats, in lifts, and so on; he has survived near-cremation; he has used crocodiles as stepping-stones for a quick escape; and has even wrestled in mid-air to get a parachute. James Bond, it would seem, has devoted many hours to thinking about the odds of survival. Interestingly, in his novels, 007 creator Ian Fleming gave some intriguing clues about Bond’s life in between assignments, and how his hero occupied his time at his desk in the rather grey building that served as Secret Service HQ, while waiting hopefully for the next call from M’s secretary and a briefing from his boss.
One project involved Bond putting various physical fighting skills into written form for other members of the Service. In Fleming’s novel Goldfinger (1959), the reader learns that 007 spends his hours on night duty at the anonymous Secret Service HQ near Regents Park in London compiling a manual on unarmed combat called Stay Alive!, containing the best that had been written on the topic by his peers in secret intelligence agencies around the globe.
Live and Let Live
It is probably fair to say that the battle between survival and near-death remained at the core of Fleming’s James Bond universe. Fleming himself, at times, became a bit fed up with his hero and the taxing effort that was needed to pen a new Bond novel almost yearly, and became tempted to kill off his secret agent once and for all. Indeed, despite the claims of some people that Bond should ‘never die’ (see how the critics reacted to No Time To Die), James Bond has died before: author Fleming, during the writing of his fifth Bond novel From Russia, With Love (1957), had become rather tired of his famous creation and felt notably ambivalent about his future (he wrote to his close friend William Plomer that he feared ‘staleness’ and ‘waning enthusiasm’ for ‘this cardboard booby’), so he decided (controversially) to kill Bond off. At the end of the novel, Bond crashed to the floor, poisoned by the evil Rosa Klebb. This nearly marked the end of the series, but Fleming seems to have changed his mind after being urged by other friends to not kill off this ‘golden goose’. In a way, even Fleming wanted his creation to survive.
After working on material for a proposed James Bond TV series, a project which collapsed, Fleming found he suddenly had some material that he could easily take and convert into a new 007 novel. One plot scenario he had developed for a TV episode thus became the storyline for Dr. No (1958). And, as all good Bond aficionados will know, the sixth James Bond novel revealed that Bond, despite the seeming ending to the fifth novel, was not dead: he was now recovering (in ‘convalescence’) from the near-lethal kick from Klebb. Bond was well and truly back, much to the relief of Fleming’s growing army of fans.
One of the big shocks of Daniel Craig’s final Bond movie, No Time To Die, was the ‘death’ of Bond, and some fans have devoted huge amounts of time to speculating how Bond did not really die, and how he ‘escaped’. The decision to ‘kill off’ Bond was, frankly, more about actor Daniel Craig’s determination to decisively draw a close on his tenure as James Bond. But, as all Bond fans know, James Bond – born survivor – can never die, and will inevitably live to spy another day. Mark our words.
