James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  The prestige of Bond television broadcasts would be maintained for more than a decade after the first ABC broadcast. VHS or Betamax versions of Bond films would not be available to the public for rental until the early eighties, and not until the late eighties for purchase. Recording the TV broadcasts was hardly an option for most when blank video tapes retailed at something approaching £20.

  Nowadays, before alighting on terrestrial television, Bond films go through lucrative tiers of extra-cinematic distribution not yet invented or popularised in the seventies: video/DVD, satellite, cable and pay-per-view. Once they do trickle down to that free-to-view plateau, their multiple repeats acquire them the immortality of moving wallpaper and a pleasant, lazy viewing option.

  Embracing television did none of the long-term harm to Bond some at UA and Eon might have feared. Cinema audiences for 007 have held up even as revenue from television broadcasts daily pour in from around the world.

  The process has also served to give 007 an enhanced cultural presence. Up until the 1970s and his arrival in living rooms, Bond was far less visible a figure than other fictional icons such as Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, the Saint and even Napoleon Solo. The age of Bond ubiquity had dawned.

  Asked if he is serious in his contention that his intervention with Sean Connery’s agent saved the Bond franchise, David V. Picker says, ‘Absolutely.’ He uses the same word in response to the question of whether United Artists would have been happy for Connery to make another Bond. He adds, ‘He certainly could’ve. He chose not to … People would have accepted Sean as long as he wanted to play the role. And you know what you do if you’re smart? You make him a little older.’ Connery, however, seems to have simply treated the project as an exorcism and a quick money-spinner before moving on.

  By now, Eon were evidently long past the point where they would consider only an unknown to play Bond. The success of the series made it a role that any actor would be honoured to be offered on a long-term basis.

  Michael Billington, best known as Colonel Paul Foster in the Gerry Anderson TV series UFO, had been approached about playing Bond prior to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. For Live and Let Die he was given a screen test and a nod from his agent, and was ‘stunned’ when he failed to get the part. The closest he would ever come was his appearance as Soviet agent Sergei Barsov in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977).

  With Billington rejected, the option of John Gavin – who’d already signed on the dotted line before Connery’s return – was due to be picked up. Suave and handsome, Gavin certainly looked the part, even despite turning forty in 1971. He was also, unlike Lazenby, of vast thespian experience, having appeared in motion pictures since the late fifties, including roles in Psycho and Spartacus. He would, though, have to work on his English accent: he was a native of Los Angeles.

  According to some, the only reason that Roger Moore and not Gavin became the next Bond is that Harry Saltzman insisted on an Englishman in the role – which, in point of fact, was a first. Gavin was paid off, his presumed disappointment assuaged by a rumoured $100,000 for precisely no work.

  Not only had Roger Moore been considered by Eon for Dr. No and by Feldman for Casino Royale, something more concrete had been in the offing following You Only Live Twice. Had that movie been followed, as originally planned, by The Man with the Golden Gun, Moore would have been the new 007. As it transpired, the next film was delayed by military violence in the intended shooting location of Cambodia. By the time the decision was made to change the adaptation to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Moore was engaged elsewhere. Eon and Moore were finally in sync for Live and Let Die.

  Moore was born in 1927 in Stockwell, where he was raised. Despite his ‘toff’ tones, he is from working-class stock, the son of a policeman. Asked why his accent bears no trace of ‘Sarf Lahndan’, he says, ‘I went to RADA where we were all taught to speak without a regional accent.’ However, he appends, ‘I don’t know if I sound posh. I think of it as more of a flat accent.’

  Moore began his career in movies, but his first proper success came on television, both sides of the Atlantic. Ivanhoe, The Alaskans and Maverick preceded a seven-year stint on The Saint. His being cast as Bond would instantly have struck many as somehow logical. Not so much because he was handsome, quintessentially English (or at least of the refined, ostensibly upper-middle-class stripe most non-Britons consider to be quintessentially English) and tall (six-foot-two, like his predecessors). Rather it was because his roles in The Saint and then The Persuaders! made him seem to the public a fixture of an amorphous action hero/espionage industry. Nonetheless, Broccoli had to appoint him over the misgivings of both Saltzman and United Artists. However, their suggestions – Burt Reynolds (mentioned not for the first time) and Steve McQueen – were risible. The studio even made an approach to Clint Eastwood, who – to his credit – laughed at the idea, regardless of the honour conferred.

  Moore was already forty-five on his appointment – making him four years older than Connery had been when Diamonds Are Forever was released. ‘It didn’t really bother me,’ Moore shrugs of his advanced years. ‘I was fit and looked after myself.’ With regard to his approach to 007, he says, ‘I read the books, of course, and the only line that stuck out was when Fleming wrote Bond didn’t particularly like killing … I took that with me in my interpretation of the character. My Bond would rather kiss than kill.’

  Moore’s rather uncomplicated position as regards his profession is illustrated by his response to the question of whether he was hamstrung by simultaneously trying not to resemble Sean Connery and his own portrayal of Simon Templar. ‘I play everything the same, so there’s no great planning into making my characters different,’ he bluntly states. ‘I was conscious of not speaking with a Scots accent, and Guy Hamilton deliberately avoided having my Bond say lines associated with Sean’s Bond, such as ordering a vodka martini, shaken, not stirred. I never said that line in any of my seven films. But otherwise I approached it like I did everything else.’

  Richard Maibaum was never too impressed by Roger Moore. ‘One of my reservations about Roger is that he is not the physical superman Sean made you believe Bond was,’ he said. Maibaum also detested Moore’s approach to the role: ‘He does what I consider unforgivable: he spoofs himself and he spoofs the part.’ On top of that was Moore’s penchant for changing Maibaum’s carefully crafted dialogue for double entendres.

  As Maibaum was unavailable to script Moore’s debut, he didn’t have to endure this immediately. The screenwriting job on Live and Let Die went to Tom Mankiewicz.

  Live and Let Die was released Stateside on 27 June 1973, not reaching the UK until just over a week later. This was symbolic, as it was the second successive Bond film set in the United States. In Diamonds Are Forever, the milieu of screaming sirens and gigantic car bonnets just made it another Bond-movie exotic backdrop, but a return to the same territory so quickly suggested something depressing and nationally emasculating: Americanisation of a property.

  One could argue that the motivation to adapt to the screen the American-set Live and Let Die was not to make Bond just another de facto US cop drama but to hop a ride on the Blaxploitation bandwagon. However, that in itself was viewed by some as depressing, as it marked the first time that James Bond movies were following a trend rather than setting them. Eon decided that, because Live and Let Die was a Fleming story inordinately populated with black Americans, it would provide the ideal vehicle with which to join the trend kick-started by the jive-talking, Afro-sporting likes of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft.

  For the first time in the gun-barrel sequence, Bond is hatless. Moore strides purposefully and, when he spins, places his left hand on the wrist of his shooting arm. For the first time since (technically) From Russia with Love, 007 does not appear in the pre-title sequence. Instead, we have a montage involving the murders of three Secret Service agents.

  Paul McCartney had clearly forgiven Eon for the Goldfinger line that dismissed the list
enability of his previous ensemble. The title song is performed by his group Wings, the first occasion a bona fide rock act had been commissioned to provide a Bond theme. McCartney’s weaving melody, adroit incorporation of the title phrase, unexpected reggae bridge and pseudo-improvisation (a little ‘Say!’ just before the line ‘Live and let die’) are all delightful, with the only blemish the tautologous ‘in which we live in’. George Martin gave the song the orchestral swells appropriate for a Bond theme, and as a consequence was given the job of scoring the movie in the absence for the first time of John Barry (then busy working on stage musical Billy). Apart from a couple of gauche moments when his music works against the action, Martin does a good job.

  Our first sight of Moore is in bed with an Italian lovely. He will later seduce Rosie Carver (Gloria Hendry), making her the first black Bond girl, before – conforming to the three-conquests grid then a staple of 007 films – moving on to female lead Solitaire (Jane Seymour). While his macho credentials are thus established, it’s noticeable how much softer a Bond is Moore. His suits are of a lighter shade, he wears leather gloves, he is less muscly and less hairy. He seems slightly ridiculous in Harlem, where Connery – honky or no – would not have. Even the fact that Moore has light-brown hair and is uncommonly polite somehow makes him seem less of a man, unfair and irrational as that may be. He is undeniably handsome (albeit, like Lazenby, with a distracting mole). However, he is not smoulderingly sexy like Connery at his peak, but, rather, a smoothie, and furthermore a smoothie who – courtesy of the over-ripened tone of Moore’s voice and his propensity to use the term ‘darling’ – can too easily tip over into being a smarmy creep.

  Moore favours big cigars over cigarettes and bourbon over Martinis. He doesn’t deliver the ‘Bond, James Bond’ introduction until twenty-three minutes into the two-hour film, when he meets Solitaire. (He tries to deliver the line to Mr Big as well and is met with the response, ‘Names is for tombstones, baby.’)

  At first, it seems depressingly clear that this will be another Bond film whose precepts are that of the comic book. In the pre-title sequence, one of the agents is implausibly killed in the rarefied environs of a United Nations session, and furthermore by the method of transmitting something unspecified into his translation earphones. Mr Big (Yaphet Kotto) is a criminal intent on driving the Mafia out of the heroin business before moving in himself. However, the street value of the heroin with which he intends to flood the ghettos free of charge is over a billion dollars, making him similar to the spaceship-owning SPECTRE in already having so much money that one wonders why there is a need to strive so hard for more. An initial sense of Bond not being in peril is created by his reaction when Mr Big’s goons are set to take him out and waste him: he smugly intones to Solitaire, ‘Now, promise you’ll stay right there. I shan’t be long.’

  On the plus side, Mr Big is the first freestanding movie Bond villain since Goldfinger. Moreover, things start hotting up in the final third. The moment when Bond stands on an artificial island surrounded by encroaching crocodiles is genuinely creepy and suspenseful. It’s also amusing: its unexpected conclusion has him simply trotting to safety over some of the half-submerged creatures.

  The drama of Bond fleeing the baddies in New Orleans via speedboat is counterpointed by the comedic outrage of the obese redneck sheriff J.W. Pepper as he watches him and his pursuers. As with Rosie Carver, one suspects that Pepper has been inserted to counter accusations of racism that might result from the predominance of black baddies, but it is a funny and a wonderfully over-the-top performance by Clifton James. The actual chase – involving speedboats working up enough velocity to sail over obstacles and across land – is skilfully and entertainingly directed by Guy Hamilton.

  The coda action takes place on a train. The ending is new Bond territory. Baron Samedi (Geoffrey Holder) is in this version of the story a separate villain, not Mr Big’s rumoured alter ego. Earlier in the film, he had mysteriously evaporated under Bond’s gunfire. Now he is shown sitting on the train’s bumper laughing in his inimitable maniacal way – and breaking the fourth wall by raising his hat to the audience. It provides a concluding note of ambiguity where previously Bond had always been shown as unmistakeably the victor. It’s also something that belongs more in a supernatural movie.

  Another difference in tone appears earlier. When 007 hijacks an aeroplane containing a flying pupil, the latter’s ‘Holy shit!’ is the first profanity in a Bond film.

  Some critics and fans detested Moore’s softer Bond, but the picture’s rentals of nearly $50 million meant it had done better than Diamonds Are Forever, even if the takings were still skewed away from the all-important US market towards the ‘Rest of the World’. In short, Live and Let Die indicated that a recently creaking franchise had life in it yet.

  With a proposed junior Bond novel series having fallen flat and the first adult Bond continuation novel also having been a failure, Glidrose Publications – as they were renamed in September 1972 – took several years to decide how to further exploit the valuable brand name they possessed. When they did, they used lateral thinking.

  John Pearson had not only published the authorised The Life of Ian Fleming (1966) but had a high profile via his bestselling Kray Twins biography The Profession of Violence (1972) and his award-winning novel Gone to Timbuctoo (1962). His James Bond: The Authorized Biography (some later editions spelt ‘authorized’ with an ‘s’ and/or appended to the title ‘of 007’) was published in August 1973.

  The book – which began as a series of articles in The Sunday Times – resembles a grandiose version of what is today called fanfic. It mingles Pearson’s anecdotes of meeting the real Bond (aged fifty-two, at odds with the Secret Service and about to be married to Honeychile Ryder (sic)) with vignettes depicting both Bond’s childhood and his adult adventures in the field. Pearson also portrays Bond as an operative in the wartime missions guided by Ian Fleming.

  Although few knew Fleming and the literary Bond better than Pearson, the experiment doesn’t quite work. Not only is the prose made disjointed by its episodic structure, but there is a feeling of insubstantiality: the vignettes rarely assume the stature of even short stories. Moreover, the previously discussed presumption issue is intensified. For instance, the author takes it upon himself to pinpoint Bond’s home as being in Wellington Square (one of a few real-life King’s Road-adjacent candidates for 007’s domicile) and even to project from Kissy Suzuki’s pregnancy a son called James.

  The book did reasonably well sales-wise, but, with Pearson spurning what he has said were vaguely held-out offers for him to write Bond continuation novels, 007’s literary adventures were subsequently put into abeyance again.

  At UA’s insistence, Roger Moore’s second Bond film followed quickly after his entrée, The Man with the Golden Gun premiering in both the UK and US on 19 December 1974.

  Some reviews of his first Bond film were scathing. ‘Will James Bond live on in the 1970s?’ asked John Russell Taylor of The Times. ‘Not much longer, if this episode is anything to go by.’ Moore was unconcerned. ‘I tried not to read what the critics wrote, as for every good review you’re bound to get two bad or indifferent ones,’ he reasons. ‘I was employed to do a job, and they brought me back to do more after the first film, so nothing else bothered me.’

  Although John Barry is back, the music is uninspired, a casualty, Barry claimed, of the UA-dictated short turnaround time. The title theme’s Don Black-penned lyric is no more risible than that of Goldfinger but its instrumentation bops along like the introduction to a cheap made-for-TV movie. Matters are not helped by the fact that Lulu has nothing like Shirley Bassey’s range.

  Guy Hamilton was directing his final Bond picture. The script saw a reversal of the Diamonds Are Forever situation: Tom Mankiewicz wrote the first draft but was replaced by a returning Richard Maibaum.

  Bond is removed from duties after a golden bullet embedded with ‘007’ arrives at the headquarters of the Secret Service. With
the tacit approval of M, Bond sets off to find Scaramanga so as to enable the resumption of his current mission of protecting a scientist called Gibson, who may have the answer to the world’s energy problems – a topical issue in the wake of recent muscle-flexing by OPEC countries. The two stories implausibly dovetail when Scaramanga turns out to have been hired to kill Gibson.

  Once again, the Bond series jumps on a media bandwagon, this time kung fu. Accordingly, the Jamaican setting of the book is swapped for Far East locations Macau, Hong Kong and Thailand. Although devotees will insist the early-seventies craze for martial arts was created by Bruce Lee, in point of fact most of the people who were swept up in the phenomenon – kids – couldn’t get into Lee’s X-rated films and were instead fans of the ABC television series Kung Fu starring David Carradine. The Man with the Golden Gun, therefore, was the first opportunity for many children of the period to see martial arts on the big screen. The prism through which they were able to view it, though, was a distorted one. Moore does not look physically up to the action as he is forced to participate in contests in a Hong Kong dojo.

  Mary Goodnight (Britt Ekland) is one of Bond’s squeezes in this film, and the distaff Secret Service agent plays quite a prominent role, even though she’s often portrayed as a bubble-head. The other paramour is Andrea Anders (Maud Adams), and it transpires that she, not Scaramanga, had sent the golden bullet: she had wanted Bond – the only man whom Scaramanga speaks of as his equal – to rescue her from the gilded cage of her concubine state. Why she hadn’t simply sent Bond a message instead is just one of an inordinate number of plot illogicalities.