Sixty-Six Years After Casino Royale

In 1953 the "international man of mystery"-type spy was an old, well-worn, frankly stale tradition. It had already been a half century since William Le Queux introduced the type in Secrets of the Foreign Office (1903), where Duckworth Drew trots the globe (this week Paris, next week Constantinople and perhaps St. Petersburg the week after that) on assignments mixing the glamour of high life and the intrigue of high politics with a certain amount of physical danger including death-by-improbable gadget. Most of its variations and innovations were only a little younger (with Fu Manchu and Bulldog Drummond the genre already having its supervillains and freakish henchmen and good girls and bad girls and the rest). And the same went for the genre-subverting drama and parody of the improbable material (which, in the hands of literary masters like Maugham and Ambler, was to frequently be a good deal more memorable than the work off of which they played).

Ian Fleming managed to update that material in a number of ways, extending even beyond the dressing of the technology and geopolitics of the moment (atomic and jet-type and rocket-type things that Fleming was in cases to treat with more rigor than his predecessors, Soviet rather than German nemeses). There was the bureaucratization of intelligence (owing more to Maugham than Le Queux). There was the cynicism and brutalization of a society that had been through two world wars and a Depression and the beginnings of the break-up of Empire, while that process had as yet not gone so far as to end all illusions for Britain's moment as a great power being stretched by American dollars and sheer "knack for the game," which made for a more ruthless, violent adventure (the more so for its coloring by harder-edged American crime fiction, just one way in which this universe was being Americanized). There was the acknowledgment of sex and sexuality and the indulgence of fantasy about them to a certain extent, in that breathing space between Victorian prudery and the Sexual Counter-Revolution. There was a certain reimagining of glamour reflecting post-war Britain's mix of privation and comparative egalitarianism (Bond only gets to be a guest at a club like Blades, the luxury on display not aristocratness but, as Kingsley Amis put it, "backdoor semi-aristocratness"), and the redefinition of what even the most flamboyant luxury would look like by post-war consumerism (the use of brand names much remarked). There was, in Fleming, even a readiness to mix the straight adventure stuff with an element of the parodists' irony.

By the 1960s all of this soon enough stood in need of yet another update for film audiences, with the conservative politics and the bureaucracy played down, the luxury and sex and violence played up--with the help of the technique of the TV commercial, all but inventing the "high concept film" and the action movie as we know it, while the producers invented the practice of marketing blockbuster (a publicity blitz of a movie easily promoted in a commercial because it's a commercial-for-itself anyway, leading up to an ultra-wide release, accompanied by a colossal merchandising offensive), the series' real pop cultural legacies (merely extended and Americanized by George Lucas and co., not created by them).

A half century after that the significance of those three innovations (high concept, action film, blockbuster marketing) still stands as remarkable. But that is not enough to make the Bond films unique. Rather the result is the opposite--the Bond films are now comparatively ordinary, because the things that made them unique have become standard. Meanwhile, those things that make Bond different--the idea of British agents still traveling the globe on missions, for instance--seem out of time. Thus Bond today, older in our time than Duckworth Drew was in Fleming's as he sat down to pen Casino Royale, appears both commonplace and anachronistic, and not for lack of trying. Almost since the end of the '60s filmmakers, and from the start of the '80s, new novelists, have tried to update the update, and arguably the results have been less than totally satisfactory to a critical eye, even as the franchise has gone on raking in money. The most recent print efforts have been especially so, veering wildly between the purely contemporary and the totally retro (sometimes in the same book). Anthony Horowitz's typically and atypically twenty-first century effort at an official prequel to Casino Royale, Forever and a Day, only reaffirmed that impression on my part--discussed here for what it is worth.