Stephen McGinty: Nearly 50 years on, James Bond is still hitting the target with fans

“DO YOU expect me to talk?” said James Bond, as he lay strapped to a metal gurney and watched as the laser beam crept ever closer to his crown jewels. “No. Mr Bond,” replied Goldfinger, who had clearly been taught by his mother that a monster should have manners and that a victim on the verge of smouldering castration still warranted a more formal style of address. “I expect you to die.” Well, it has been 47 years since the eponymous villain with his beady eye on all the bullion bars in Fort Knox thought he could consign the star of Britain’s secret intelligence service to mere bit parts. And they are trying still. On-screen, his enemies have come after him with bullets and bombs and poison, stiletto-knifed toes and sharks, but the dapper Mr Bond evades them all, but off-screen it has been quite a different matter.

Just as in the case of Al Capone, who was felled not by a bullet, but a bill (he was eventually jailed for tax evasion), so, for a while, it seemed like red tape and financial restraints would spell the demise of 007. Filming of the new movie was set to begin in April, 2010 but was cancelled due to the financial problems of MGM, which owned the distribution rights to the series. However, when MGM filed for bankruptcy in November last year, EON Productions, which makes the movies, struck a new deal with Sony Pictures which will now ensure, as they announced this, week that the new movie Skyfall opens in cinema’s worldwide on 26 October next year.

Yet no sooner has Mr Bond introduced the world to his new leading ladies and welcomed back, we hope, Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the shape of the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, than the same questions have been raised as to the relevance of a character who 50 years ago this week it was announced would be played by Sean Connery.

What is more curious is why his suitability has now been questioned. Eight years ago, when Daniel Craig was announced as the sixth actor to play the role in the film series, which is soon to notch up its 23rd outing, he was viewed as having to face stiff competition from an American. Jason Bourne, as personified by Matt Damon, was the secret agent then on everyone’s lips. A former CIA operative with a background in “wet work” (bloody assassinations) Bourne was the antithesis of James Bond, instead of working if not for Queen and Country then as a loyal President’s Man, he was toiling against his former bosses who now wished to wipe him out as a political liability. Where James Bond was a clothes-horse, Jason Bourne dressed in the utility gear of a protester and, regardless of the climate in which he found himself in, he always eschewed sunglasses. Even his initials, chosen by his creator, the late author Robert Ludlum, made it clear that he was a successor to 007. He also reached the cinema screen at just the right time, in the wake of the flawed intelligence that set us on the road to Iraq, the public were more supportive of a lone man fighting against the system.

You would have forgiven the producers of James Bond for having thought they might now have caught a break. First, they cleverly borrowed from The Bourne Identity, stripped James Bond down to the bare essentials, dispensed with the gadgets and even, more cruelly, some of the character’s most famous traits. In Quantum of Solace, Daniel Craig’s Bond asked for a vodka martini and the barman replied: “Shaken or stirred?” to which he snarls back: “Do I look like I care?” Then they watched as the Bourne movies, which looked like it was growing into a rival franchise, stalled when Matt Damon refused to make another movie without the director Paul Greengrass.

However, little did they envisage that another spy would step over Jason Bourne’s prostrate form and into the limelight usually reserved for 007. He is old where Bond is young, a cuckold where Bond is a satyr and a man whose only form of exercise is a few laps at the swimming ponds at Hampstead Heath, for which he resolutely refuses to take off his heavy-framed black glasses. George Smiley had duelled with James Bond once before, back in 1979 but not on the same field of play. While Smiley, then played by Alec Guinness, was mesmerising the nation over five weeks on BBC 2 in the adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, Bond wasn’t even on the same planet, for Roger Moore had exchanged his safari suit for a space suit and was orbiting the Earth in Moonraker.

This time around, Smiley has the potential to puncture Bond’s prestige. The success of the recent film, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, in which Gary Oldman picked up the heavy black spectacles, has led to plans for a sequel with the tantalising prospect of them going head to head next year.

THE irony is “James Bond” does, in a way, appear in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The character of Ricky Tarr, played by Tom Hardy, is a low-level intelligence stooge whose role is to seduce the wife of a Russian diplomat, and it is not hard to picture Bond working his way up the greasy pole at the “Circus” in a similar fashion. (Tarr also fits Ian Fleming’s description of Bond: “He was good-looking in a dark, rather cruel way”.) He will, however, never reach the top. For what was so compelling about Tinker, Tailor in both the TV series and the new film is that quiet tone, the idea of men in rooms thinking and brooding and figuring out how the chess pieces in this great game should be played. As Judy Dench’s M said of Bond: “You’re a blunt object.”

Despite his unfortunate love life, you would rather be George Smiley than James Bond, you would rather be sitting at the centre of the web than endlessly darting around the fringes, weaving in and out of trouble. In the end, despite the fact that George Smiley has been promoted to the big screen, any comparison between the two will collapse as they remain on different planets. James Bond, and I write this with great love and affection, is, and always will be a cross between “science fiction” and “fantasy.” While the producers may have brought him a little closer to earth in the past two movies, he remains an indestructible super-hero. Still, at least Skyfall (I’m not loving that title at all) will see him return to his Scottish roots.

After the casting of Sean Connery in Dr. No, Ian Fleming made reference to Bond’s Scottish background in later novels. His father was Andrew Bond, who hailed from Glencoe, while his mother was Monique Delacroix, from Yverdon in Switzerland. After the death of his parents in a car accident, young Bond was educated at Eton before being expelled for seducing a matron. He was, by accounts, required to finish his education at Fettes in Edinburgh. Over the decades, the Bond movies have returned again and again to Scotland, which first made an appearance in From Russia With Love. The submarine base at Faslane appeared in The Spy Who Loved Me, while the castle of Eilean Donan became MI6’s Highland refuge in The World is Not Enough. According to reports, Duntrune Castle, near Lochgilphead, will feature in the film’s finale, with filming scheduled to take place during January and February next year.

Evidence that, despite any spurious competition, we have not yet lost the taste for James Bond’s adventures after almost 50 years, can be found at the Argyll Arms Hotel where, in preparation for 007’s imminent arrival, a new menu has been carefully prepared featuring “Her Majesty’s Secret Sandwiches”, “The Man With The Golden Haddock” and “For Your Pies Only.”

“Do you expect me to diet?”

“No, Mr Bond. We expect you to eat.”