Born again Bond: In the new film 007 dies then comes miraculously back to life. What a metaphor for a hero who seemed doomed to sink into self-parody

  • Skyfall has been lauded by critics as perhaps the best bond yet
  • Series lost its way through the Sixties and Seventies
  • Daniel Craig is the 'hardened soldier Fleming intended Bond to be'

To countless men like me who are still schoolboys at heart — and to countless women for whom Daniel Craig’s craggy good looks are cinematic catnip — the universally ecstatic reviews of the new James Bond film make almost shamefully pleasurable reading.

After 50 years, in which the movies have often descended to abject self-parody, Bond is a hero who should, by rights, have long ago shuffled off to the retirement home.

Instead, as Mail film critic Christopher Tookey wrote in later editions of Saturday’s paper, the new 007 adventure, Skyfall, is ‘one of the finest of all time’.

Fight: James Bond (Daniel Craig, left) and Patrice (Ola Rapace, right) battle it out in the new 007 film Skyfall

Fight: James Bond (Daniel Craig, left) and Patrice (Ola Rapace, right) battle it out in the new 007 film Skyfall

Intelligent, bursting with thrilling action set-pieces and filled with top-drawer turns by some of Britain’s finest acting talents — Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney — in Tookey’s words, this is a film that assures the future of the Bond franchise ‘for years to come’.

The film hits cinemas a week on Friday and its opening sequence is dynamite.

The miniature movie before the credits has become a signature device for the franchise, whether Bond is leaping out of a plane without a parachute or hunting down enemy agents on a ski run. But Skyfall surpasses them all: this time, 007 is killed.

The edge-of-the-seat tension as Daniel Craig’s Bond is resurrected mirrors the extraordinary way that the character has been reinvented over and over, to meet the changing threats of international war-mongering, crime and terror.

Bond was born out of author Ian Fleming’s anger over Hitler’s war against humanity: the massacres by the SS, the indiscriminate bombing of the Luftwaffe.

Fleming, who had been a spymaster during World War II, knew the desperate measures that were necessary in extreme circumstances. Within a few years of armistice, he had invented 007 to act out his ideals: an agent with a licence to do anything and everything necessary to protect the West against evil.

Still strong: The edge-of-the-seat tension as Bond is resurrected mirrors the extraordinary way that the character has been reinvented over and over. Daniel Craig is pictured

Still strong: The edge-of-the-seat tension as Bond is resurrected mirrors the extraordinary way that the character has been reinvented over and over. Daniel Craig is pictured

It was an outlook perfectly suited to the Cold War.

When the first Bond film, Dr No, premiered in October 1962, the world was closer to global conflict than it had been at any time since Hitler’s suicide 17 years earlier.

Poster: The film hits cinemas a week on Friday and its opening sequence is dynamite

Poster: The film hits cinemas a week on Friday and its opening sequence is dynamite

Kennedy and Khrushchev headed the world’s two superpowers, the United States and the USSR, and they were threatening nuclear war over the Russian operation to station atomic warheads on Cuba, off the Florida coast.

The White House and the Kremlin were backed by vast secret services, with spy networks stretching into every corner of the world.

London’s operation, MI6, born of the Special Operations Executive Fleming had helped to set up, was much smaller. Like Britain’s dwindled empire, it was dwarfed by the enemy it opposed.

There was no shortage of villains for Sean Connery’s 007 to fight. These were drawn from Moscow’s inner secret service, SMERSH, whose most dangerous spies — especially the beautiful double agents — were run by Colonel Rosa Klebb, she of the poison-tipped shoes.

Even her name was a dig by Fleming at the muddle-headed activists who, he believed, couldn’t tell the difference between democracy and communism. In Russian, ‘khleb i rozy’ means ‘bread and roses’, a popular socialist slogan and the motto of the working women’s movement.

But as the Cold War subsided, its clearly defined villains did, too. The KGB had been a monolithic emblem of villainy — now it was fragmenting. Where was a common evil to be found?

The Bond films started to lose their way — and so did Bond himself.

The 007 of Fleming’s books and of the early Sean Connery films was imperialist, arrogant and sexist to boot. He was cold and stoic, with a keen sense of duty and service.

But as the peacenik, feminist, socialist Sixties got underway, Bond’s critics tried everything to neuter his appeal. As a result he was reduced to a camp, quipping, foppish irrelevance. Connery’s Bond grew puffy and spoilt and wore ludicrous wigs.

He was replaced by George Lazenby, an Australian model who took on the role for only one film: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Dramatic: Intelligent, bursting with thrilling action set-pieces and filled with top-drawer turns by some of Britain's finest acting talents, this is a film that assures the future of the Bond franchise

Dramatic: Intelligent, bursting with thrilling action set-pieces and filled with top-drawer turns by some of Britain's finest acting talents, this is a film that assures the future of the Bond franchise

Lazenby had been best known for his performance in a chocolate commercial — his acting didn’t improve with practice.

By the time Roger Moore took over the role in the early Seventies, Bond was about as cold and ruthless as a chat-show host.

Even Sir Roger wouldn’t pretend his acting abilities were outstanding. His critics pointed out that of his two eyebrows, only the right one had any talent.

But he possessed charisma, that hypnotic cinematic appeal shared with Connery — you’d watch him do anything, whether that was unzipping Italian agent Miss Caruso’s (played by Madeline Smith) dress with his magnetic watch or punching Jaws (Richard Kiel) in his titanium teeth aboard a space station in orbit.

Timothy Dalton, who followed Moore, certainly could act. He was a Shakespearean and a stage veteran of everything from Wuthering Heights to Noel Coward. But in his two outings as Bond, audiences simply couldn’t believe in the character.

FILM: The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), with Maud Adams, Roger Moore and Britt Ekland
A9Y78Y ROGER MOORE as James Bond about 1974

Ex-agent: By the time Roger Moore (left with Maud Adams and Britt Ekland in The Man with the Golden Gun in 1974) took over the role in the early Seventies, Bond was about as cold and ruthless as a chat-show host

Even the film-makers at Pinewood had ceased to believe that Britain needed a lone protector, a champion outside international politics, who could smite and destroy evil like some Old Testament avenger. The flint-edge Bond  with a licence to kill was dead.  In his place was a swash- buckling seducer.

Pierce Brosnan played him with Hollywood teeth and lacquered hair. There was still money to be made from the franchise — Brosnan’s GoldenEye grossed $350 million — but Bond had become a parody.

So the producers needed to return to the books to rediscover Fleming’s Bond, not the pale, vain imitations of the films.

There’s a wonderful moment in Moonraker that encapsulates Fleming’s often nihilistic take on the world.

Bond, driving to an appointment with evil in his Bentley, looks up and sees a motor-oil advert written in neon on the twilight London skyline.

It reads ‘Summer Shell is here,’ but a building obscures part of the message. All Bond can see are the words ‘hell is here’.

Didn't impress: George Lazenby is seen in the 1969 Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service, with Contessa Teresa di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg). Lazenby had been best known for his performance in a chocolate advert

Didn't impress: George Lazenby is seen in the 1969 Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service, with Contessa Teresa di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg). Lazenby had been best known for his performance in a chocolate advert

First man: The 007 of the early Sean Connery films (Thunderball in 1965 is pictured, with Luciana Paluzzi as Fiona Volpe) was imperialist, arrogant and sexist. He was cold and stoic, with a keen sense of duty and service

First man: The 007 of the early Sean Connery films (Thunderball in 1965 is pictured, with Luciana Paluzzi as Fiona Volpe) was imperialist, arrogant and sexist. He was cold and stoic, with a keen sense of duty and service

Fleming’s work is full of moments like that: gripping, chilling, inspiring, frightening.

He had witnessed a sea of evil and, taking arms, opposed it: not the cartoon villainy of the later Bond films, but unremitting evil.

The kind that threatens civilisation, in the shape of cancerous  Al Qaeda cells, plotting to bomb planes and discos, and sending children on suicide missions to the gates of army barracks.

After 50 years, the world has turned full circle: we face a global peril again.

And Bond has come full circle, too — in Daniel Craig’s portrayal, he is the steely, selfish, battered, scarred hero of the books, a white knight with a Beretta pistol and a Martini for his sword and shield.

This is the hardened soldier Fleming intended Bond to be. There’s a reassuring moment in Skyfall: Bond leaps to his feet amid tangled wreckage, in a perfectly tailored dinner jacket, and adjusts his cufflinks as he strides towards the camera.

That’s how an Englishman saves the world — and, in scary times like these, we can be glad James Bond is still around.

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