It was the 1960s and I was about 12 years old when I discovered the James Bond books by Ian Fleming. Brought up as I had been on the usual schoolboy diet of pre-watershed fiction, Bond for me was nothing short of an epiphany. The first book I read, Moonraker, catapulted me instantly into a world of unbridled adult adventure, where thrills, spills and derring-do were for the first time accompanied by liberal lashings of grown-up sex.
And I use the word ‘lashings’ advisedly. Because the James Bond stories, in their original literary form, went well beyond the ‘handsome hero beds gorgeous girl’ formula that has characterised the Bond movie franchise and its countless imitations for most of the past 40 years. The big difference was that Fleming’s novels invariably included elements of sadism. So too, you may argue, did many other adventure yarns. But Fleming’s sadism wasn’t the sanitised, comic-book stuff I’d encountered in other books and films — it was a distinctly dark and often overtly sexual variety that fed my own nascent sadomasochistic impulses before I had any idea what sadomasochism was.
The first three Sean Connery movies were truest to the spirit of Fleming’s creation. After that, the franchise slipped into the empty-headed, ludicrously-glamourised action style that has characterised it pretty consistently until now. With every new Bond movie having to top its predecessor for science-fiction gadgetry, slick stunts, cheesy quips, slow-motion explosions, entertaining deaths, exotic bimbos and luxury product placement, plots and acting were rendered pretty much obsolete (how else could George Lazenby ever have got the call?).
So when it was announced that Daniel Craig (top) had secured the lead role in Casino Royale, I didn’t immediately see it as an inspired piece of casting even though I had admired Craig’s previous work. For all the sins of these films, I’d got pretty used to Pierce Brosnan as Bond and had even had the treat of attending the Royal Première of one of the Brosnan films on my birthday (you probably saw me in the audience, just below and slightly to the left of the Queen).
But now I’ve seen the new movie, I can see just why there was so much enthusiasm among the sharper pundits for Craig as Bond. Because Casino Royale — in which, basically, Bond plays poker for Britain — doesn’t just substitute one lead man for another. It completely re-invents Bond. Or rather, de-invents him, and gets back substantially to the spirit of Ian Fleming’s books, which were, for their time, pretty revolutionary. You can’t, of course, entirely ignore what has gone before, so setting Casino Royale in 1953 (when the book was first published) was always going to be one nod to authenticity too far. But given that Fleming’s very first Bond novel has, like its stablemates, been updated to the present day, the film does remarkably well in giving us a Bond we’d forgotten (or never knew) had existed. A man who had earned his double-0 status as a cold hearted assassin with a sadistic streak rather than as a philandering adventurer who could remove women’s undergarments at a hundred yards by the mere raising of an eyebrow.
Although the Casino Royale movie plot is still a bit flimsy, there is an unprecedented focus on characterisation and dialogue. With Craig in the role, I saw James Bond as a real person for the first time since the films took over the books’ job of delivering me the Bond experience. Pervery-wise, it gets points for including a fairly accurate depiction of the book’s infamous scene in which a naked Bond is tied to a chair from which the seat has been removed so that he can be tortured in an overtly sexual way. But it’s in the choice of Eva Green (right and below) to play the story’s full-blown love interest, Vesper Lynd, that this film is absolutely inspired. This black-haired, blue-eyed, French-born femme fatale is going to have pervs everywhere swooning.
Described by Bernardo Bertolucci, who cast her in his 2003 film The Dreamers, as “so beautiful, it’s indecent”, she has that something — call it a dark radiance if you will — that pushes the old kinkometer straight into the red. Louise Brooks had it, Bettie Page had it, and for a lot of people, Dita von Teese has it too. But Eva Green takes it to another level, and even if you haven’t noticed it in her previous movies, you can’t escape it in Casino Royale. If she doesn’t emerge from 2006 voted the actress most pervs would like to get kinky with, then there is no justice in the world.
But that’s enough about me; back, albeit briefly, to Casino Royale. The friend I saw it with, who was similarly impressed, pointed out that it was the only Fleming book the Bond franchise hadn’t previously turned into a film. “So,” she wondered, “what are they going to do next?” The answer, if they’ve got any sense, is go back to all the genuine Fleming stories and remake them with the same renewed attention to the authentic Bond character.
Who knows, if they do, they could get another 40 years out of him.
