Buying Bonds

Timothy Dalton
Which meant, to the producers, time to retool. The pre-title sequence of the first 1980s Bond film, “For Your Eyes Only,” includes Bond visiting the grave of his widow, Tracy, and finally killing the unnamed Ernst Blofeld. It was a startling return to continuity and sobriety after the light-comedic ’70s.

Unfortunately, the last Moore films are horribly uneven. In “Octopussy,” Bond is hunted, physically hunted, through a jungle, and there’s panic in his eyes; a second later he swings from tree to tree to the soundtrack of Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan call. In “A View to Kill,” he escapes killers on one ski down a mountainside to the refrains of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls.” The filmmakers didn’t know whether to be gritty or goofy, and went both ways.

With Timothy Dalton, they went gritty. Movie theaters were increasingly filled with action heroes in the Bond mould — Indiana Jones, Schwarzenegger and “Die Hard” — and Dalton’s Bond responded by becoming more like them rather than like himself. His tastes became pedestrian. He favors leather jackets rather than tuxes. In “License to Kill,” a girl orders a Bud with a lime and Bond, the man who thinks it’s a crime to drink Dom Perignon ’53 above 38 degrees, tells the waitress: “Same.” He made headlines by becoming, in the age of AIDS, monogamous (for him: one or two girls per film, instead of three), but the bigger story was missed: this Bond hardly flirted anymore. Dalton has a shy smile, and he employed it with women in his films. He was almost ... puppyish.

For some, it was about time. Broadly, Bond’s goals with both villains and women were the same — to infiltrate the seemingly impenetrable fortress, make things explode and then get away — and many feminists thought him a misogynist. Yet if you look at the early films, sex is one of the ways Bond differs from his villainous counterparts. The bad guys were either clumsy around women, like Goldfinger, or asexual beasts in starched Nehru jackets, sublimating their sexual desires by repeatedly petting cats. The meta-message was that sex was good. As soon as it was denied, well, you began thinking up ways to destroy the planet.

If there’s misogyny in the Bond films, it has to do with that middle Bond girl, the enemy agent, who, more often than not, defects to Bond’s side after he seduces her. She’s won over not by his cause (“Queen and country”) but by his sexual prowess. Men in the audience, identifying with Bond, cheered him on, but it also played upon their great fear: that a better lover could come along and take away their woman like that. It’s a small step from Bond convincing Pussy Galore to betray Goldfinger via a romp in the Kentucky haystacks to the raging, misogynistic paranoia of Sam Peckinpah movies, in which women always abandon weaker men to cling to the (usually ultraviolent) alpha male.

By the 1980s, mainstream movies didn’t allow themselves such thoughts. So how does the new, bashful Bond bring the beautiful enemy agent over to his side? In “The Living Daylights” he tells the girl the truth. And in “License to Kill” he’s just, well, a nice guy.

Nice guys and truth-tellers around the world are already shaking their heads. Yeah, that’ll work.

Pierce Brosnan
In 1995, Pierce Brosnan brought back the true cinematic Bond. In the first 20 minutes of “Goldeneye,” he 1) seduces a reluctant girl, 2) wears a tux, 3) plays baccarat in a French casino, 4) says “Vodka martini, shaken, not stirred” and 5) tells a lovely enemy agent his name is “Bond. James Bond.” No pussy-footing around here.

Arguments can be made that Brosnan is the most quintessentially Bond of all the Bonds. He has the intensity of Connery and Dalton, and the light comedic touch (although drier and more muted) of Moore. He’s even given a rationale for Bond’s playboy ways. This is a Bond who tries not to love, who tries not to care, because loving and caring get in the way of work. “How can you be so cold?” Natalya Simonova asks him in “Goldeneye.” “It’s what keeps me alive,” he responds, almost helplessly.

All of it worked. Globally, “Goldeneye” nearly doubled “Moonraker’s” previous Bond record, making $353 million, and audiences rose back to 1970s levels.

So it was throughout the Brosnan 1990s; but by “Die Another Day,” Brosnan was beginning to show his age, and the film, despite its boffo box office ($430 million worldwide), was uneven in the way of the last Moore films: shifting, with nary a blink, between the grittiness of North Korean torture to the video game improbability of surviving a gigantic, glacier-melting tsunami in Iceland by surfing to safety. Don’t even get me started on the “What took you so long?” dialogue.

So. Time to retool again.

Daniel Craig
With “Casino Royale,” they’ve done more than that; they’ve bitch-slapped the series. Bond, originally borne of WWII, and long steeped in the Cold War, is here remade as a post-9/11 secret agent who never knew the Cold War. The film begins in stylish black-and-white with the two kills that make Bond a double-0 secret agent, and it never stops. Neither does Craig. His Bond is physical and relentless. He bulldozes past everything. Sometimes literally.

The action scenes are torrid. In Craig, the series has something it hasn’t had since Connery: a Bond believable as both roughneck and sophisticate. And while he doesn’t quite have the “wicked twinkle” that Honor Blackman attributed to Connery, he does have a good smoulder, which, as my girlfriend will tell you, is essential in a James Bond.

The film isn’t just grittier and bloodier than previous Bond movies; it’s deeper. All of those elements lampooned in “Austin Powers” (“All right guard, begin the unnecessarily slow-moving dipping mechanism”) are gone. No giant underground caves with steel elevators and monorails. No absurd women’s names. No bad puns after killing someone. No “Q.”

It’s an origin movie — a kind of “Batman Begins” or “Smallville” — and there’s small pleasures when familiar elements are introduced in unfamiliar ways: Oh, so that’s why the Aston-Martin. Ah, so that’s why the vodka martini. These small pleasures, coupled with the new-found grittiness, actually make the movie feel like the reality upon which all of those other, more cartoonish Bond movies are based. It feels like they took the adventures of this guy, the Craig Bond, and gave us those crazy Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton and Brosnan flicks.

Which is to say: http://www.danielcraigisnotbond.com/ got it completely wrong. Not only is Daniel Craig believable as Bond, he’s the most believable Bond ever.

Erik Lundegaard will return next month with the thrilling new article “Top 10 Scenes of 2006.” He can be reached at .

MORE FROM MOVIE OPINIONS

Oscar season nears, but where’s the buzz?

Oscar season nears, but where’s the buzz? Hollywood’s vampire obsession may bleed out Does ‘Precious’ stereotype big black women? Newsweek: The problem with ‘Precious’ When it comes to stardom, Clooney has smarts ‘Saw’ franchise creates buzz, but is it any good? Remembering concert documentaries that rock theGrio: ‘This Is It’ a final act fit for a king Best actress category looks slim for Oscars theGrio: Tyler Perry can’t do bad all by himself   Add Movie opinions headlines to your news reader: