The spy who saved the universe…

Conceived by British journalist Ian Fleming in the January of 1952 while he was on holiday at his Jamaican estate called Goldeneye,Fleming gave birth to James Bond,a character so named because,“I wanted the simplest,dullest,plainest-sounding name I could find,” as he told Reader’s Digest in an interview.

That dull name now represents an iconic image which has set cash registers ringing with the Bond franchise raking in billions of dollars so far. “It is the biggest film franchise ever,” Kabir Bedi,who played an evil henchman called Gobinda in the 1983 Bond movie Octopussy told Screen. The figures agree with Bedi. The film series has grossed over $4 billion (nearly $11 billion when adjusted for inflation) worldwide,making it the highest grossing film series ever.

Let us introduce him in his own way then. “The name is Bond. James Bond.” So popular is the intonation that movie-makers (think Saif Ali Khan in Hum Tum) and even the common man has used this form of introduction at some or the other time. But what makes Bond so powerful? What is it about the character that is so disarmingly alluring that every teenage boy wants to be James Bond while every teenage girl wishes to be wooed by someone like him?

It can’t be only the combination of guns,gadgets and girls that Bond typically holds in his hands at various stages of a movie. It has more to do with the humanisation of a spy who works for the British Intelligence (also known as MI6),that secretive group of government workers about whom people know nothing. That even such a hallowed individual can turn out to be a serial drinker with no compunctions for his womanising ways must have appealed to the predominantly male audience worldwide.

Feminists have tried to convince makers of the Bond series to drop his casual attitude to women and grant them more respect,but their efforts have been in vain. An avid fan will recall that Bond had a wife named Tracy who’s death is most evident in The Spy Who Loved Me where Roger Moore suddenly reacts when her death is mentioned. This gives a new fillip to Bond’s attitude to women,thereby allowing the audience to gaze at Ursula Andress emerge from the sea in Dr No in 1962 to drooling over Halle Berry doing the same stunt in Die Another Day 40 years later.

It is interesting to note that the content of James Bond’s stories has no ownership even though MGM and EON Productions jointly own the character. After Fleming’s death,subsequent novels were written by such literary stalwarts such as Kingsley Amis,John Gardner,Raymond Benson and Sebastian Faulks although many of Bond’s traits are romanticised versions of Fleming himself. Bond films,therefore,have a wide array of literary cues as well as the freedom to choose its own scripts depending on the production team’s wishes. “The producers start from the climax. So if they decide to shoot the climax at Niagara Falls,then the story will be set around that area,” Bedi says. Incredibly,most of the movies and themes that the makers have selected have worked in its favour over the character’s five-decade long tryst with fame.

Bond movies are also made successful by its peripheral characters and hard-hitting promotions. Citing the example of Octopussy Bedi said,“When the movie released in 1983,Roger Moore (who played the title role) was sent to US and Europe to promote it in those regions. I was sent to South America and I extensively toured Brazil,Paraguay,Uruguay,Chile,Peru with a bevy of Bond girls to promote the film.”

Its peripheral characters have dwindled since the series first began with Dr No. Thus,the steady loss of Bond’s gadget guru Q,M’s secretary Miss Moneypenny and even other agents with whom Bond interacts briefly before getting into his groove. Their importance can be gauged from Bedi’s following comment. “From the moment you become a part of a Bond movie,a whole legion of fans want to know about you. They write to you and turn up at your doorstep. It’s a huge event in the life of an actor.”

The most interesting aspect of Bond was the array of innocuous weapons at his disposal. While the vanishing Aston Martin in Die Another Day takes the cake in this department,other notable gadgets include a cigarette rocket used in You Only Live Twice,the Moonraker Laser that was shot to space in Moonraker and the amphibian car/ boat used by Pierce Brosnan in the opening sequence of The World Is Not Enough. Contemporary action movies have widely incorporated some of these gadgets in their plots.

Other entities that have remained Bond fixtures are its title track,its outrageous and often daring play with bare CG women in its expansive choreography in its opening sequences. Many of the title tracks used in these movies have made the careers of musicians soar to great heights. Duran Duran reached the top of the US charts with the title track of A View To A Kill in 1985 while Garbage revived itself by scoring for The World Is Not Enough at the turn of the millennium. A case in point is Madonna. The pop diva,apart from lending her vocals to Die Another Day,also bargained for a role in the movie,the only pop artist to be featured thus. Bond’s title theme was written by Monty Norman and scored by the John Barry orchestra for Dr No. However,it is still a matter of fierce debate as to who the music really belongs to.

Bond movies were also known for larger-than-life villains and the opulent dens from where they generated their vices and power. This was generally followed by blowing up the den to smithereens towards the end of the movie along side killing the villain. Examples of controlling the solar output of the world in The Man With The Golden Gun set in a remote island and an underground satellite launcher in Golden Eye come to mind. The extravaganzas of Bond’s nemesis’ have largely reduced over the years though. This has helped sharpen the plot points rather than mock the fake sets and insipid special effects that were the norm till Timothy Dalton was playing Bond.

Unfortunately,women seem to have a raw deal even after shooting a Bond movie. Like the Oscar winners,it has been known that actresses who win the role to score with Bond see their careers plummeting in the foreseeable future. In current memory,examples of actresses such as Denise Richards (The World Is Not Enough),Halle Berry (Die Another Day) and Eva Green (Casino Royale) come to mind. Berry almost reinvented the stereotype of the Bond femme fatale after she stepped out of the sea in an orange bikini and enacted the role of an agent. The gender and colour changed when blonde actor Daniel Craig was introduced as the new James Bond in 2006’s Casino Royale while stepping out of the blue sea in matching shorts.

Craig seemed to click with the newer audiences with his gritty and personal touch to James Bond as he takes on an evil corporation to avenge the betrayal of his ladylove. He is so far removed from his ancestors that when asked how he would like his martini he hisses,“Do I look like I care?” instead of saying the oft-quoted “Shaken,but not stirred”. While old-timers wince at Craig’s brazenness to changing the very essence of Bond and despair at the appalling similarities with Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne series (about an American spy recovering from amnesia and discovering who he really is and played by Matt Damon),the films featuring Craig still stayed true to the format of Bond and,more importantly,set the cash registers ringing.

Chiselled Craig takes away from the suave and charming ways of his predecessor Pierce Brosnan who appeared in four Bond movies between 1995 and 2002. Timothy Dalton can rightly be described as a precursor to Craig with his brooding charisma and focus on the job at hand and appeared in two movies. Roger Moore,the man who gave Bond worldwide recognition with his offhand wit and easy charm,appeared in the largest number of movies in the Bond franchise along with Sean Connery,whose ambitious portrayal was largely instrumental in setting up the series at its inception stage,and set the stage for the 22 Bond movies that have released to date.

Even Bedi admits that Connery is his favourite Bond even though he worked on a movie with Moore playing the secret agent. Bedi says that Bond productions are like well-oiled machines. “Everything needed for production is immaculately in place and the crew works with clockwork precision,” he says

He gives the example of Octopussy’s climax scene where Bedi fights with Moore atop the wings of a plane. “The climax scene was shot in three countries (even though its a fight in the skies). Moore jumped atop the plane from a horse in Pinewood Studios,London,the fight sequences were shot in Germany against black and brown montage scenes while the final scene where I fall from the plane was shot in Utah in the United States with the help of a skydiver,” he informs.

In recent times,skeptics have denounced the skirt-chasing spy’s relevance by looking at the general themes that Bond movies have employed over the years. If the ’70s and ’80s were dominated by plots revolving around the Cold War and its fallouts,the ’90s movies were about megalomaniac mass murderers with nuclear proliferation as plot-points. Although there is no shortage of world issues at the current time,especially since 9/11,James Bond finds himself sidelined by the growing complexity of the world,making it difficult for him to justify his presence at saving the world. Little wonder then that Daniel Craig’s first outing was as a brooding lover than saving the world.

The aura of Bond has so diminished that Angelina Jolie,when asked if she would consider being a Bond girl at the release of her latest movie Salt said,“I want to be James Bond.” While that is enough to shame all the Bonds put together,it is a telling sign of the character’s weakness to sustain himself in a world that stands at the crossroads of a moral and ethical paucity rather than the brute bouts of power that Bond is more accustomed to deal with. Reacting to rumours and reports of actresses such as Aishwarya Rai and Freida Pinto being approached to play Bond babes,Bedi is confident that an Indian actress can easily share screen space with Bond “because they are second to none”.

In one of Hollywood’s greatest ironies,the most successful film series of all time has put the production for the next Bond movie (tentatively titled Bond 23) on hold indefinitely as parent studio MGM fights to shake off a $4 billion debt before giving its favourite child another go at the silver screen. “It is one of the strangest things that the studio with the biggest money-churning series to date cannot make its next Bond film.” Bedi rues.

He also believes that the character will continue to be relevant as well as make a successful comeback in the near future. “James Bond films are the hallmark of stylish action entertainment and has an established history. It will always be here,” he says with conviction,his famous baritone covered with hope and a little sugar.

But there is no denying that the cauldron of elements that Bond has passed through has been shaken,stirred and poured into a melee of uncertainty and despair for many of its fans. As Q says before his departure from the series in The World Is Not Enough,“I have always strived to teach you two things. Always know your enemies and always have an escape plan.” Maybe the Bond bosses can look into the line and revive their golden goose before the man with the license to thrill is silenced forever.