BEFORE IT GOES on general release, Die Another Day, the 20th James Bond film
in 40 years, will be unveiled at an appropriately glittering royal premiere
on November 18. Getting the royal seal of approval is only fitting for the
most successful film franchise in history. But it is against the run of
play. Normally, it is Bond who does the bestowing of approval.
He is the connoisseur par excellence. A man who can identify the original
vintage on which a sherry is based and specify what temperature to serve
saké (98.4 degrees). Whatever he drinks, drives and wears becomes a
benchmark for lethal suavity. In the new Bond film, 007 drinks and drives
and checks his wristwatch a lot. He drives an Aston Martin once again after
a three-film interlude with BMWs. He wears Brioni suits. He tells the time
with an Omega Seamaster (waterproof to 300m).
He also drinks Finlandia vodka for his medium-dry martini (shaken, not
stirred, with a twist of lemon peel). Apart from the car, this is all quite
a break with tradition. Bond drank Smirnoff in the novels and in the first
film, Dr No, Sean Connery clearly uses Smirnoff for his
post-reconnaissance-mission cocktail. Every Bond since has been a Smirnoff
drinker. Bond also used to wear Savile Row suits and a Rolex.
The purists are in uproar, just as they were when Bond had time to use a Visa
card in Tomorrow Never Dies, but with Bond, it is not simply a question of
product placement being inherently bad.
Ian Fleming’s conceit was to mix his own connoisseurship of high living with a
superspy fantasy of sex and violence. In the novels and films, Bond is
defined by his expert international consumerism as much as his womanising
and love of adventure. Half the pleasure of the early Bond films is watching
Sean Connery, gliding along on that glorious theme tune, as he checks into
hotels and hits room service. He automatically knows the right breakfast to
order while staying in Istanbul:
“Green figs, yogurt, coffee — very black.” And has no problem putting a
disappointing brandy in its place: “I’d say it was a 30-year-old fine
indifferently blended with an overdose of bon bois.” The brand names are the
rosebuds of Fleming’s prose — Bentley, Church’s, Moreland’s cigarettes;
lovingly selected, top-of-the-line products. The brand names enhance Bond as
much as vice versa, although Bond is carefully not just a label snob. He has
arcane tastes too — regular cigarettes when abroad, obscure liqueurs.
The films certainly started off in the spirit of this Fleming aesthetic. Bond
sports Savile Row suits and corners a girl in his Bentley Sports Tourer. But
over the years the lovingly assembled rollcall of signature Bond tastes
(Beluga caviar, Dom Perignon ’53) have either been updated or sold off to
the highest bidder with decidedly mixed results. The most glaring example of
this is the Bond car.
It was Goldfinger which ushered in the vehicle most closely associated with
Bond, the gadget-laden Aston Martin DB-5 (“Ejector seat? You’re joking.”).
The Aston Martin was picked by the film-makers as appropriate to this
character. No product placement deal forced the issue. And it remains the
perfect Bond-appropriate car for any era (“revolving numberplates,
naturally”). It proved its classic status by returning for the Pierce
Brosnan era in Goldeneye (1995) and Tomorrow Never Dies (1997).
Connery had a few other cars on his travels, most memorably the Mustang rental
car he flips on to two wheels in Las Vegas. But the DB-5 remained his car of
choice.
George Lazenby had a souped-up version, the Aston Martin DBS, for On Her
Majesty’s Secret Service, but Q curiously omitted to include the
bulletproof glass, resulting in his new bride getting shot in the final
scene.
In the late Seventies with Roger Moore, notions of a classic sense of taste
were abandoned in favour of more modish choices. Bond’s car became a Lotus
Esprit with the capacity to turn into a mini submarine. Despite an
underwater speed of 22 knots, this sports car felt too dinky to be a proper
Bondmobile, on a par with Moore’s epaulette-sprouting safari outfits.
The Moore Bond films suffered terrible genre fatigue, whose symptoms include a
chronic lack of gravitas. By 1981 and For Your Eyes Only, Bond was reduced
to performing a car chase for laughs in a Citroen 2CV, the slowest
accelerating production car in the world.
A semblance of automotive seriousness returned with the two Timothy Dalton
films. His 1987 Aston Martin Vantage Volante was able to do 0-60mph in 5.2
seconds and boasted retractable snow spikes and wheel-mounted lasers. But
what’s the point in having a great car when it’s driven by a glum, virtually
celibate 007? The solution for the Pierce Brosnan era has been to reinstate
a) the libido and b) the Aston Martin as Bond’s domestic car, leaving his
overseas cars open to sponsors. Not a bad idea, except that eyebrows were
raised in 1995 when Bond appeared driving a German car, the BMW Z3. It was a
long way from the Anglo-Teutonic rivalry he enjoyed with Auric Goldfinger.
“He’s quite mad, you know.” Just like competing co-stars though, Bond cars
have to fight to get the close-ups.
In GoldenEye the BMW Z3 got only a brief, uneventful appearance — no rockets,
no oil slicks, just a quick deployment of some satellite tracking equipment
— whereas the Aston Martin got to outrace a Ferrari 355GTS, piloted by the
sultry villainess Xenia Onatopp. BMW insisted that they never paid for their
Bond association. Instead they were obliged to fund a six-month Bond-related
advertising campaign to tie in with the film’s release. The company became
in effect a marketing partner.
It is at this point, one suspects, that the cart began to drive the horse. In Tomorrow
Never Dies Bond drove a BMW 750i, which is an expensive and powerful, but
also a quite unBondian saloon car.
The World is Not Enough restored Bond to a roadster, the BMW Z8. But one can’t
help feeling Bond was adding more lustre to the BMW brand than the other way
around. Now that the reunion with Aston Martin has been cemented — Bond uses
it to chase a henchman’s Jaguar across the tundra — parity has been
restored.
In the universe of 007, product placement is offensive only when it is out of
character.
