Aldous writes:nightwing, I believe you're being too hard on the real Bond (from the novels). You understand the character very well, but I don't agree Bond is brutish or a thug. He does have some sophistication, and he is human (unlike the character in the films), despite being a "blunt instrument". Maybe you forgot for a moment that this man makes his living by being cool under pressure, thinking quickly, and adapting to different environments around the world. He's physically tough, and he can hurt people, but he's not a "thug".
Well, maybe "thug" is going it a bit high, as they say across the pond. But the point I meant to make is that most people's impression of "James Bond" is informed by the films, not the books. In the books, he doesn't know how to fly a plane, defuse a bomb or perform a HALO jump. He certainly isn't an expert on butterflies, rare orchids, vintage sherry or microchip technology. In the early books, at least, he has no sense of humor and certainly doesn't crack wise as he kills people. He averages one romantic conquest per adventure, not dozens. In short, whereas most people would describe Bond as a high-society sophisticate, technologically adept, supremely cool under pressure and given to philandering ways, that is not what you find in the books, where Bond dresses relatively casually, probably couldn't operate a toaster without his housemaid May, falls hard for women and is always depressed when it doesn't work out, and definitely knows a thing or two about fear, even panic.
Movie Bond seems to be an amalgam of Fleming's creation plus traits of the actors who played him. Much of what we think of as "Bondian" traits are really mannerisms and qualities of Connery and Moore. So what I was getting at is that audiences who see this new film may be seeing Fleming's Bond for the first time ever, and ironically they may well come away saying, "that guy doesn't seem at all like James Bond."
Still, it's yet another misconception about Bond that he's a physical superman of some kind, or at least a brawler. This seems to come from memories of Connery and Lazenby, and now Craig. But while the Fleming novels had a great deal of violence, Bond himself was hardly what you'd call a powerhouse. I seem to recall he was all of six feet tall (making him shorter than all his portrayers except Craig) and he weighed in at something like 170 pounds. That's roughly my own stats, and trust me I'll never be mistaken for Mr Universe. Yes, Fleming's Bond shot people in cold blood, stabbed them, kicked them down the stairs, whatever he had to do, but he would not have lasted long against the likes of Oddjob, for instance, or hit a guy over the head with a sofa(!). If the new movie has a lot of physically demanding battle scenes, which apparently it does, this is more in deference to modern audience expectations than a nod to Fleming. (I just re-read "Thunderball" recently and Bond comes off as a guy who fights tooth and nail when his back's against the wall, but without any great mastery of martial arts or anything beyond normal strength. He gets his clock cleaned by Largo at the end and is only saved by a timely intervention from the love interest. In fact he often ended up in the hospital at the end of his missions).
As far as being a "blunt instrument," I admit Bond was disgusted about something at the time he said that, and later might have felt differently. (Similarly, even though Vesper says Bond looks "rather like Hoagy Carmichael," in the next chapter he looks in the mirror and decides she doesn't know what the devil she's talking about. So ultimately all we know about Bond is that he is 6 feet tall, 170 pounds with dark hair, a tan and a faint scar on one cheek. Not much to go on).
Jimmy Stewart is a bumbling goof who was great at playing an idiot caught up in espionage, but I find the suggestion of him being Bond way off.
Actually I think his lanky build sounds more like what Fleming wrote. And he was good at pulling off terrified acts of desperation, which again is how I often saw Bond in the books. The problem with Stewart was that he'd have brought too much baggage as "the likable fellow." And that doesn't fit Bond very well, my affection for Roger notwithstanding.
Anyway, as I said in the earlier post, when Fleming said "James Stewart," he meant the British actor who changed his name to Stewart Granger.
Every time I see Moore in any role, it's obvious in real life the man wouldn't win a fight with a Barbie doll. Physically he's a non-entity.
As a kid, I had no problem with that, partly because in Moore's era Bond dispatched more people with weapons and gadgets than he did with his hands. But nowadays his fight scenes do come off pretty limp, with some notable exceptions (the running battle with Chang in the Venice glass factory in "Moonraker" is very, very good). What helps is that Moore's Bond, despite his avuncular air, is actually more of a conniving cad than any of them. He cheats to get his women and he cheats to win his fights. This works for me as his Bond is older and, one might assume, well beyond any interest in proving his masculinity or getting his blood pumping. He just wants to do his job and get back to the booze and broads, and for me that's okay. (One of my favorite scenes comes in "For Your Eyes Only" when Roger/Bond runs up the winding staircase and pumps the villain's car full of bullets, finally kicking it off the cliff. I always imagine he's thinking, "And THAT's for making me run up the stairs at my age, you young punk!"
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Still and all, I once saw "The Naked Face" with Roger as a psychiatrist who's in way over his head with the bad guys and gets beaten to a pulp by two or three of them, without getting in one decent lick of his own. That scene deeply disturbed me because it was the only fight scene he ever did that rang totally true. After that, I could never fully enjoy his Saint or Bond outings again.
davidelliott writes:The Moore Bonds were just really set-pieces strung together by a thread (which was intentional)
Here's what I find interesting:
As the Bonds became a franchise with no end in sight, each film had ideas that didn't make it to screen, but were shelved for the next film in the pipeline. So what you got was plotting sessions where the filmmakers said, "Hey, what about that stunt we designed where Bond falls out of a plane with no parachute? Can you set up a scene where that happens?" And thus the story becomes servant to the set-pieces.
On the other hand, at least all those stunts were possible, however implausible. Now you have the scriptwriters calling the shots and the stuntmen are asked to make it all work. So let's say the script says "Bond drives his motorcycle off a cliff, free-falls into the falling plane and flies it away." The stunt coordinator replies, "That is physically impossible, sorry" and the producers say, "Never mind, we'll do it all with special effects. Same with the para-surfing thingee in DAD. On the whole, I liked it better when the stunt guys were in charge.
I agree The Living Daylights was wonderful. Even the comedy worked for me, because it was pretty low-key. Too bad they erased it entirely from the next film, because Dalton was better at it than people seemed to realize...and you definitely need *some* in there.
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