the brilliantly leaping gazelle

My last few posts have not been about especially frothy and lightweight topics, so you’ll be delighted to read that I’ve decided to put my earnestness to one side and instead focus my attentions on the worlds most famous secret agent, James Bond.

I’ll try and be as brief as possible, because eventually I’m going to name the person who I think has been more of enemy to Bond than SMERSH, Blofeld and Oddjob combined and the reasons why I think that.

First of all however, I need to be clear about which James Bond it is I’m discussing. Is it the Bond of the books or the Bond of the movies?

There’s the Bond of the original looks penned by Ian Fleming. There are 12 of these and 2 books of short stories. Fleming died in 1964, and the first ‘continuation novel – which either kept a beloved character alive or kept a lucrative cash cow going , your pick – was written in 1968 by Kingsley Amis. 

So far, six authors have written a total of 25 such books, some writing Bond as existing in the modern age, others writing their Bond as existing within the timeframe of gaps of Flemings originals. With me so far? Original Bond and ‘Continuation’ Bond.

Then there’s also ‘Spin Off’ Bond, the ‘Young Bond’ book series – started in in 2005, two authors and nine books – which has the schoolboy Bond doing things that only exist because of the authors guaranteed payday, the ‘Double 0’ series that doesn’t feature Bond at all but instead the lethal licence holders – one author, two books, and most bizarrely of all, ‘The Moneypenny Dairies’ one author, three books. 

Therefore a compelling case could be made for suggesting that the Fleming estate, who commission these ‘continuation’ ad spin-off books, have not exactly covered themselves in glory when discussing who has tarnished the Bond of the literary world. However, they are but amateurs when it comes to disgracing the world of Bond. Reading all the guff that followed the news that the Broccoli family have upped sticks and handed full creative control to Amazon for the film rights, one might think that the Bond films were great masterworks of cinema, rather than being little more than ‘Carry On’ films, albeit with better production values. A lump of coal has more in common with a flawless diamond than the films have with the books. The films took the books title, characters names and basic plot and essentially made up the rest and not even that in the recent ones.

In the original Fleming books – two of which contained nine short stories – Bond sleeps with fourteen women. The films though turned the Bond of the books into little more than a sexually transmitted disease in a tuxedo, while avoiding all references to his borderline sadistic, clearly misogynistic and other qualities that not suited to thrilling cinematic romps.  Another bugbear is that in the books Bond is often in real danger, and has only his courage to rely on. There are hardly any gadgets and the ‘Q’ in the books is simply the quartermaster who gives Bond advice on guns.  The films? Things got so bad that Eddie Izzard even did a sketch about it

So in the same way as the Fleming estate, the Broccoli family can quite legitimately be accused of tarnishing the name of Bond. But even they are not the villains here. Nor is it Jeff Bezos, despite him looking like Blofeld and being a megalomaniac billionaire who controls a vast retail and media empire and dreams of conquering space. I mean, if he had a furry white cat he couldn’t be better suited to the role.

No, the person I hold uniquely and irrevocably to blame for all of the ills that have befallen James Bond since 1970 is George Lazenby. 

‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ (OHMSS), the only film in which he played Bond, is by quite a wide margin easily the best Bond film ever. If you think otherwise, you’re wrong. Unusually faithful to the plot of the book, great cinematography, real emotional heft, a great soundtrack and above all, in Lazenby a Bond who could fight. Just 20 minutes in and already we are treated to two fight sequences that make one realise just how poorly served by Connery we were. Critics often suggest that Lazenby couldn’t act, as if Connery was treading the boards instead of water, using his Bond pay checks to fund his forays into doing Ibsen and Shakespeare between, rather than playing himself in every film he was in. He even played the commander of a Russian nuclear submarine with a Scottish accent in ‘The Hunt for Red October. He really put the con into Connery. 

Far from being a flop, as received wisdom has it, OHMSS was a hit, not a huge one, but enough of one for Lazenby to be offered a seven movie deal. Had he accepted, we’d have got Bond out for revenge, a Bond fuelled by single-minded desire to kill the person who had killed his wife, only minutes after getting married. That Bond had talked about giving up being a spy, so more ruthless, more character driven Bond might have been ours. Audiences would have believed in a simple quest for revenge more than an implausibly far fetched scheme for world domination. But we had to wait until 1989 and Timothy Daltons ‘Licence to Kill’ to get that Bond. 

But he didn’t and Connery, together with acting so wooden he was fire risk, returned in ‘Diamonds are Forever’ a film that pretended that the events of OHMSS had never happened and instead reverted back to the Bond of underground lairs built out of dormant volcanoes. Had he accepted, we would have spared Roger Moores Bond, all the eyebrow acting, smutty innuendo, safari suits and the endless product placement.

Everyone wanted Lazenby. But he said no. And that’s why he’s the real villain. Because he promised so much, a glimpse of what was possible but was never to be.To make one Bond film and for it to be the best of the entire series, isn’t a really high bar. But I still daydream about how subsequent films might have focused upon Bonds quest, with him only being a secret agent incidentally, and only then when it coincided with his goal.