[Edit, 2021 – I came across this piece, which I had completely forgotten about, while sprucing the site up after a redesign. For a moment I was tempted to unpublished it, but that would be the coward’s way out. I am leaving it here as what, looking back, must be the worst take on the site.]
The news that Daniel Craig will take over the role of James Bond in the upcoming Casino Royale has been greeted with a brief flurry of perfunctory publicity, but what seems to be general apathy. It’s not hard to see why: as Jaime J. Weinman put it, “The Bond movies are basically the big-budget equivalent of an endlessly-running TV adventure show, and replacing Bond doesn’t mean much more than replacing Dr. Who.” Which, as a Bond fan, is sad but indisputably accurate.
What interests me most about the decision to axe Brosnan and use Craig is both its perversity and its eerie echoes of the handover from Sean Connery to George Lazenby for 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (hereafter OHMSS). Perverse, because Brosnan had been agitating for ages that he wanted to do a tougher, grittier, more Fleming-inspired take on Bond, and Quentin Tarantino has been advocating a “straight” adaptation of Casino Royale for a couple of years. Brosnan has been the best thing the Bond series has had going for it recently – he has been an excellent Bond in generally indifferent movies. Tarantino, of course, could have been just the shot in the arm the series needed. As I argued here when the Casino Royale idea was first floated, the Tarantino Bond film could have been done as a one-off “art Bond” project without upsetting the whole series, possibly as a farewell film for Brosnan. Instead, the producers have spurned Brosnan, rejected Tarantino… and then gone with the mediocre action director Martin Campbell, and Daniel Craig as Bond, to do a version of Casino Royale that is reportedly – you guessed it – a return to Fleming’s source, including making it an origin story a la Batman Begins. It seems to be all downside with no upside: they are taking the risk of “rebooting” the series, but not choosing to take advantage of the talents who had advocated taking that chance in the first place.
The parallels with the situation in 1969 are interesting. For those who haven’t read the books, Casino Royale is, like OHMSS, one of the key novels in terms of defining the character. In the case of OHMSS, this carried through to the film series. (I’m going to move into some spoilers here: while I’ll tread lightly on the events of Casino Royale, I’m going to reveal the end to OHMSS, on the grounds that it’s much more familiar to most filmgoers). In OHMSS, you’ll recall, Bond marries, but has his wife slain by Blofeld on his wedding day: it’s an event that is referred to occasionally in the subsequent films (most explicitly in The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, and Licence to Kill, but obliquely elsewhere) and which provides a tragic undertone that has forever informed the understanding of who Bond is. The entire arc of the 1960s Bond films (which work as a serial in a way the later films don’t) works up to this event, and OHMSS is one of a very short list of Bonds that stands as a film classic in its own right.
The irony of all this is that the series took this dramatic turn after Sean Connery had quit the series out of frustration. Connery was concerned about typecasting and wanted to branch out, and he announced that he was quitting during the filming of You Only Live Twice (1967), which was the film that defined what would become the worst aspects of the Bond series. The first of the series to completely discard Fleming’s source novel, it’s overlong, flabbily directed, and represents the start of the treatment of Bond as purely a fantasy figure (rather than a real character who enters borderline fantasy scenarios). Watching it, it is easy to see why Connery grew disenchanted – but as soon as he left, the producers went back to basics for the truly excellent OHMSS. The only weakness of that film is Lazenby, and watching it, you can’t help but wonder how Connery would have responded to the acting challenge of giving us a real, vulnerable Bond in love. For the next film they got Connery back – but made Diamonds Are Forever, a dreadful mishmash that totally ignored the events of the preceding film and built to a climactic scene of death rays from space. And Connery quit again.
It’s unlikely that Daniel Craig will be another Lazenby – while we won’t know for sure until the film comes out, he seems to have been chosen to put a “proper actor” in the role, a la Timothy Dalton in 1987. And that’s a promising sign going into Casino Royale, which turns on Bond’s relationship with a fellow intelligence worker named Vesper Lynd. In the novels, she is the other love of Bond’s life, and the conclusion of their relationship is another key moment in Bond’s history. I hope the producers do have the courage not to jazz it up too much (the later portions of the novel give way almost entirely to character based drama), and look forward to seeing Craig’s take on Bond.
But just like Connery back in 1969, Brosnan deserved a shot at it. Unlike Connery, Brosnan was ready and willing, which just makes it more puzzling. It has been rumoured that he asked for too much money, but it’s difficult to believe he wasn’t worth it. Brosnan isn’t an actor of the calibre of Connery (who was spectacularly good in the first few Bonds, before he got bored of the role) but he had managed the difficult task of being fully accepted by the public as Bond. That’s a tricky thing to do, and being good in the role isn’t enough: Timothy Dalton was an excellent actor, but he never caught the public’s imagination. That kind of identification between actor and role is a rare thing, and the series hasn’t enjoyed it since Connery. (Despite the length of tenure in the part, Roger Moore always violently divided opinion, and simply isn’t Bond to many: he’s just Roger Moore doing Bond schtick).
Those who fail to learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them, and something tells me that Bond fans will be left dreaming of the Brosnan Casino Royale in much the same way that they rue the missed chance of the Connery OHMSS.