How Bond was born
“Man, I want to be smooth like James,” said Dallon Williams, a senior in parks and recreation, explaining how their local band, Smooth Like James, decided on a name from their shared admiration for James Bond’s uniquely cool image.
Reed Capenter, a senior in biology, said, “James Bond has all the one-liners and always gets the chicks.”
“Martinis, guns and girls” is the simple formula that James Bond has used successfully for 44 years, said Andrew Rhodes, a graduate of University of Whales Swansea and author of two academic dissertations about James Bond, in an e-mail interview with The Statesman.
Although other film series such as “Star Wars” may have been more popular, no franchise has had the longstanding success of the Bond franchise, according to Rhodes’ Web site, with an estimated audience of 3 billion viewers over the years. Today’s release of “Casino Royale” will be the 21st Bond film, which have been released on average every two years since 1962’s “Dr. No.”
Jay Anderson, a history and British studies professor at USU who was a fan of the original James Bond books by Ian Fleming even before the movies came out, says the Bond movies were “pure escapism” when they began. The Cold War was going on. It was a “scary, dangerous, time … and [we] didn’t want to think about the world,” he said. Bond fit in with the ’60s definition of “cool.”
The films began at the same time as the British Invasion of the Beatles was hitting the pop scene in music and, Anderson says, Bond carried the same “mystique of being British” in a different way. He was a suave, sexy, playboy type that excelled at everything, whether that was driving, playing poker, fighting or womanizing.
However, as the culture changed, the public’s attraction to Bond changed as well, according to Anderson. During the 1970s, a man driving the world’s most expensive cars and wearing the most stylish suits became less of an ideal. However, people still related to Bond’s anti-authoritarian outlook and sarcastic, cynical attitude. “He’s not a company man. The little guy can always identify with him,” said Anderson.
“Casino Royale” marks both a new beginning and a return to roots or sorts for the Bond franchise. To begin with, English actor Daniel Craig becomes the sixth actor to play Bond on film, taking over from Pierce Brosnan. Aside from being the first blond Bond, Craig brings a different dynamic to the role. Anderson mentioned that Craig has a history of playing ruthless and vicious characters in films, which he will likely bring to his portrayal of Bond as well.
Rhodes added that Craig has a “harder, edgier look that we have not seen since the franchise last tried to return to a Bond more like that penned by Fleming.” He says Craig’s Bond may be slightly more similar to Timothy Dalton’s brooding, darker Bond in the 1980s. “It seems Craig’s Bond will be the remote, harder, brusque modern man,” he said, “responding to the question ‘Shaken or stirred?’ with ‘Do I look like I care?'”
Overall, the film is a return to the roots of the Bond legend. “Casino Royale” was Fleming’s first Bond novel, written in 1953, and tells the story of Bond’s rise to “00” status and the beginnings of his work. Anderson said that returning to the roots of the series is a smart move; saying that it might revitalize the series like last year’s “Batman Begins” did for Batman.
-tliljegren@cc.usu.edu