This piece appeared in the TLS of November 24 2006
In 1960, Evelyn Waugh felt obliged to explain Brideshead Revisited's
extravagances in a preface to a revised edition of the novel. Chiefly to
blame, he said, were the circumstances in which it was written in 1944, "a
bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster - the period of
soya beans and Basic English .. . . The book is infused with a kind of
gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for
rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find
distasteful". As Paul Fussell has pointed out, the novel's wartime fantasies
-"and with the duck, a Clos de Beze of 1904" acquire extra poignancy when
you read Waugh's complaints about being served sheep's hearts in 1943 or
enduring Randolph Churchill's "uneatable" potato surprise in Yugoslavia.
Even after the war, he was subsisting unhappily on "eggs and macaroni . . .
very occasionally we get a rather nasty fish". And of course there was that
defining incident involving his children's banana ration.
Ian Fleming, Waugh's near-contemporary and friend, had less use for ornamental
language and also seems to have lived in some style throughout much of the
war. Nonetheless, he clearly understood which daydreams would speak to an
audience schooled in post-war austerity when he got to work on his first
novel, Casino Royale, in 1952, at the age of forty-four. James Bond has many
memorable blowouts in that novel, one of them washed down with "probably the
finest champagne in the world". "The trouble", for him, is "not how to get
enough caviar, but how to get enough toast with it". For Simon Winder,
however, the heart of the book is the scene in which Bond orders "half an
avocado pear" as he gets ready to overmaster a Soviet agent at baccarat in
Normandy. Such were the diminished expectations of the average British
reader, Winder writes in The Man Who Saved Britain, that the sense of the
exotic for which Fleming has to work so hard in the later books "is won here
with a mere oily tropical fruit on the windswept Channel coast".
Another key Fleming contemporary, Cyril Connolly, was once made to unpack his
case when leaving Somerset Maugham's villa, rightly suspected of having
stolen two avocados from the garden. Fleming, when he stayed there, is said
to have appalled his fellow guests by whipping his wife so lustily that the
laundry's capacities were stretched by the number of bloodstained towels the
couple produced. His love of sadomasochism, another important ingredient of
the Bond stories, is particularly ungoverned in Casino Royale -most famously
in the scene in which Bond is tied to a chair with the bottom cut out and
has his testicles whipped with "a three-foot-long carpet-beater in twisted
cane". Knowing the drill, Bond steels himself for the inevitable: "a
wonderful period of warmth and languor leading into a sort of sexual
twilight where pain turned to pleasure". Elsewhere, Fleming's private
concerns result in quasi-surreal descriptions, one part Hans Bellmer to
three parts John Willie's Bizarre:
Apart from her legs, which were naked to the hips, Vesper was only a parcel.
Her long black velvet skirt had been lifted over her arms and head and tied
above her head with a piece of rope. Where her face was, a small gap had
been torn in the velvet so that she could breathe. She was not bound in any
other way and she lay quiet, her body moving sluggishly with the swaying of
the car.
Earlier in the book, the genital torture visited on Bond is lovingly
foreshadowed using the same velvet dress. "It marks when you sit down",
Vesper explains. "If you hear me scream tonight, I shall have sat on a cane
chair." Bond, for his part, is initially disgusted by the prospect of female
accompaniment on his mission: "Women were for recreation". His closing line,
and the novel's: "Yes, dammit, I said 'was'. The bitch is dead now".
Obviously, none of this would have given the official filmmakers pause even in
1962, when Dr No inaugurated the Bond movies, skilled as they always have
been at massaging Fleming's kinkier preoccupations to within the acceptable
parameters of the day. But Fleming sold the Casino Royale rights to CBS long
before cutting his deal with Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli, resulting in
1954 in an hour-long television movie featuring Barry Nelson, then a fixture
in such programming, as a teetotal, Americanized "Jimmy Bond". Despite the
presence of a sadly reduced Peter Lorre as Le Chiffre, the sadistic villain,
this failed to bring about a mooted TV series, which was perhaps just as
well. Somehow, though, the rights ended up in the hands of Charles K.
Feldman, who was rebuffed by the Saltzman-Broccoli team when he suggested a
co-production. Feldman avenged himself in 1967 with an unendearingly chaotic
satire notionally based on the novel, now remembered, if at all, as an
embarrassing footnote to the careers of David Niven, Woody Allen and Orson
Welles.
Casino Royale has now come home to the Broccoli family and become probably the
last James Bond film to make use of one of Fleming's original titles. (The
only remaining options are "Risico", "Quantum of Solace", "007 in New York",
"The Property of a Lady" -already used as a line in Octopussy - and, least
promisingly, "The Hildebrand Rarity".) It also comes at one of the periodic
moments in the cycle when an urge is felt to deflate the Bond fantasy, a
tradition that includes On Her Majesty's Secret Service, For Your Eyes Only
and the two films starring Timothy Dalton. Though some of these are fan
favourites, they are not widely loved and are probably best understood as
atoning for the perceived excesses of their immediate precursors. Dalton,
charged with exorcising the baroque disarray of Roger Moore's last
appearance in A View To A Kill, was additionally hampered by
AIDS-consciousness, the winding-down of Cold War hostilities, and the rise
during his tenure of such competing franchises as the Lethal Weapon series.
Daniel Craig, the new Bond, is up against the memory of Pierce Brosnan, who
after a semi-promising start degenerated into little more than an icon for
the triumphalist dinner jacket-wearing classes. Die Another Day, Brosnan's
last outing in the role, was a farrago, and at the time it was seen as
having been humiliatingly outgunned by xXx, a lunkheaded Bond knock-off,
and, more insidiously, by the far classier The Bourne Identity, starring
Matt Damon. On the small screen, too, 24's Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland)
has launched a rival brand of lower-key espionage and violence, while in the
computer games market -an all-important battleground for the affections of
deep-pocketed thirteen-year-old boys -Bond has since the late 1990s been a
pitiable figure compared to the likes of Solid Snake, the oddly codenamed,
intermittently tuxedo-wearing hero of Konami's "Metal Gear" spy series.
Plainly, a fresh approach was needed, and as with both Dalton and the
ill-fated OHMSS, the film- makers have responded by making a lot of noise
about resuscitating Fleming's original hero.
Casino Royale begins with a short black-and-white sequence, heavy on venetian
blinds and so on, in which Bond is seen earning his double-o status by
killing a couple of baddies. These baddies are actual spies rather than
boilersuited minions, and one of them dies quite nastily by drowning in a
sink in a public toilet. The sequence ends with a stirringly executed
variant of the gun-barrel opening shot, at which point cue music, colour,
titles, and in the audience a wave of overexcitement. Martin Campbell, the
director, manages to keep this wave going for much longer than usual by
placing the traditional opening stunt sequence after the titles rather than
before, staging a long and energetic chase through a building site in
Madagascar featuring the talents of Sebastien Foucan, one of the inventors
of Free Running. The chase also serves notice that this Bond is a "blunt
instrument", as M, played again by Judi Dench, puts it. Where Foucan's
character leaps over walls, Craig's Bond bashes through them.
The title sequence itself is notable for dispensing with the silhouetted naked
women pioneered by Maurice Binder, concentrating instead on stylized CGI
combat. This is consistent with the film's emphasis on violence rather than
sex, a sensible move given raised titillation thresholds and the fact that
violence is considered more family-friendly than nudity by the US ratings
system. And this is by no means the only shift of emphasis. There are few
gadgets, though Bond's car has a heart defibrillator in the dashboard. The
gags are very lightly done in comparison to the clunkers that Brosnan was
foisted with, and, happily, John Cleese's Q has been dropped.
Developing-world locations show signs of poverty and are populated by
non-villainous, non-cringing locals rather than the upmarket tourist crowd
through which Roger Moore invariably moved. Above all, Craig's Bond
specializes in gritty close-quarters fighting rather than affectless
shootings -though of course he does those, too -and sustains a lot more
damage than is usually the case.
This being a Bond film, the plot does not bear too much examination. The first
and last thirds of the picture frame a startlingly faithful adaptation of
Fleming's novel, with Le Chiffre, entertainingly played by Mads Mikkelsen,
working as an incompetent financial manager for international terrorists
rather than French Communists. Since 1969, the odd element from Fleming has
only appeared in the movies "in the manner of some battered cult object long
torn from its proper setting", as Winder phrased it. This time round, much
thought has been given to making his creaky 1950s thriller the basis for an
origins story in the manner of Batman Begins. Not surprisingly, it turns out
to be uphill work, since Bond does not have much of a character to develop.
As always, the writers try to smuggle in depth through his relationship with
the girl, here played by Eva Green. But most of their ploys have already
been tried by previous Bond writers, and in the event the withholding of the
theme tune until the end of the movie tells us all we need to know.
Even so, the film does a creditable job of staging the infamous torture scene
in a way that thirteen-year-old boys might not find too worryingly
emasculating. "Wow", Le Chiffre comments dryly. "You've taken good care of
your body." And Craig's pumped-up physique, low centre of gravity, amazingly
blue eyes and Steve McQueenish good looks certainly make him the most
dangerous-seeming incumbent since Sean Connery. His sexiness is aimed at
young women rather than, as Brosnan's was, their mums. He is appealingly
classless and can also act, making the scenes designed to humanize Bond less
embarrassing than similar attempts in the earlier films. Naturally, the
movie has its martinis and drinks them, giving him Fleming's fussy cocktail
recipes to dispense as well as the now-famous response to the
shaken-or-stirred question: "Do I look like a give a damn?". Among other
incidental jolts, we get a taboo-busting glimpse of M's husband as well as a
Bond girl who's allowed to use the word "arse" -though I worried about
thirteen-year-old boys' attention spans during the overlong, effortfully
romantic last act, and, sad to say, the underwater death scene is less
effective and poetic than the one at the beginning of The Bourne Supremacy.
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