“This
man is supposed to be a spy and yet everybody knows he is a spy. Every
bartender in the world offers him martinis that are shaken not stirred.”
- Roger
Moore
Not many enterprises can boast of never going
out of fashion or of never failing to get people talking fifty years down the
line. It’s been fifty years since the first Bond film, Dr No, and this past week saw the Bond brand still going strong with
the release of the latest film, Skyfall.
The James Bond brand has become such an
ever-present part of society that we take for granted the lengths that are gone
to to keep the fire of the enterprise burning bright. One of the tricks to this
feat is that the Bond character is continually being reborn – from only falling
in love twice, giving comic relief through Roger Moore, to the laddish Bond
portrayed by Pierce Brosnan. The Bond of each time has to some extent fitted
into the generation of his incarnation.
It all began with the books from the 50’s
penned by Ian Fleming. The 50’s saw radical change, before the flashy and
revolutionary 60’s, and people were looking to inhabit a new radical world
apart from the horrors and tragedies of the war. Ian Fleming was a radical in
his own way and was witness to a different kind of heroes in action – the
intellectual badass and the tough, ruthless men who were well-educated and part
of high society. They were the commandoes and special agents that inspired
Fleming to write the character of Bond, an Eton dropout and government assassin
who was bored by the demure traditions of courtship. Even Bond’s name was a
deliberate distancing from the convention of upper-class British “gentlemen”
crime fighters. Bond might not be a gentleman in the customary sense of the
word, but he is a hero in all kinds of ways.
Although the literary embodiment of Bond provided
escapism through a spy who traipsed to exotic locations around the world and
bedded highly desirable women, he was not suited to the time he was born into
through the novels and the words could not quite do justice to his
larger-than-life persona and escapades. Bond became the poster boy of the
Swinging 60’s – flippant, sexy, amoral, and oh-so-charming. The first Bond,
Sean Connery, and arguably the finest, set the bar for the Bond actor very
high.
James Bond is a fantasy, but he has become
real enough to millions of fans around the world who have remained faithful to
the brand for years and will continue to do so just because there is no hero
quite like “Bond, James Bond”.
