It’s official – Martin Campbell is to direct the next Bond film. It is to be Casino Royale. Brosnan is almost certainly out as Bond.
james bond
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Dr No (Terence Young, 1962)
(Note: This review started out as part one of a planned seven-part essay on the 1960s Bond films, consisting of an essay on each film and a seventh part that would explore Bond’s journey since the 1960s. That project became so overwhelming that I have had to move onto other things, but I thought the first part would be of interest. It was republished in the 007 Magazine Archive Files, pictured at right, in May 2011.)
It’s hard to watch Dr No and not see it as the start of something. This isn’t just a product of hindsight – the popularity of the Bond novels meant the film was understood as the first of a series even on its initial release. As a result, it is usually discussed more as a template than a movie. Analysis of it tends to either emphasise those aspects of the film that foreshadow the series to come, or those aspects of this first entry that appear aberrant in light of the later entries. Such an approach is valid, and I won’t avoid it either. Yet Dr No, paradoxically, works as the originator of a series because it stands so well on its own. It was in the sixties that the best Bond movies were film classics in their own right.
Mike Moore winning the Palme D’Or? It seems so bizarre that it is hardly surprising that in all the stories about Fahrenheit 9/11 preceding the festival, nobody had really suggested this as a possibility, despite the film being in competition. I can’t wait to see the film: I loved Bowling for Columbine, and am sympathetic to all but the most outrageous of Moore’s politics. Yet I also fear it may be terrible. Columbine I thought stood head and shoulders above Moore’s other work because he successfully reigned in many of his worst impulses. Moore has a weakness for hyperbole and half-truths that has brought down many of his other films and books, but despite the best attempts of the right to discredit Columbine, nobody really poked any serious holes in it. There is plenty of scope for a really devastating attack on George W. Bush without bending the truth, but I fear Moore’s anger and the praise heaped on him post-Columbine may have gone to his head. I can see Fahrenheit 9/11 descending into hysteria, conspiracy theories and factual error. Let’s hope I’m wrong: for all his faults, Moore popularises the left and has the kind of cross-cultural reach that usually only the right can achieve.