Cold War or terrorism: 007 is ready to fight

updated 6:03 p.m. ET Nov. 15, 2006

LOS ANGELES - “Christ, I miss the Cold War,” Judi Dench’s spymaster M mutters at the beginning of “Casino Royale,” the 21st James Bond picture and the most raw, intense film of the franchise.

Just as the superspy was created as a product of his times and thrived at the height of U.S.-Soviet tensions, so too is the latest Bond in the series. In his debut in the iconic role, Daniel Craig functions as a post-9/11 007, the enemies being terrorists from throughout the world.

Dastardly commands are given by cell phone text message, one of which involves blowing up a plane. And the ultimate showdown between Bond and the biggest bad guy of all, a crafty financier who invests terrorists’ money, takes place at a multimillion-dollar Texas hold-’em poker match — like something you’d see over and over on ESPN. (In Ian Fleming’s 1953 book “Casino Royale,” the game was Baccarat; the filmmakers changed it to poker to make the movie more contemporary.)

The foes may sound vastly different from the ones Sean Connery fought in 1962’s “Dr. No,” when moviegoers first met the sexy secret agent of Fleming’s novels. (Though “Casino Royale” is a prequel that introduces us to the character as he receives his double-0 status, orders his first martini and drives his first Aston Martin, it takes place now.)

NBC VIDEO Eva Green Nov. 7: Green talks about her role as Vesper Lynd in the new 007 movie, "Casino Royale." Today Show Entertainment

But even from the beginning of the series, Bond (with the frequent help of the CIA) never battled traditional enemies of the West “but rogue, aberrant, maverick villains who don’t represent communist governments, but often seek in their own way to make the Cold War worse for both sides,” said Stephen J. Whitfield, author of “The Culture of the Cold War.”

“Even though Bond is a Cold War hero, he transcends the official conflict by dealing with villains who are even more salacious or devious than the KGB or communist China,” said Whitfield, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University. “In my take of the films — the earlier films, the films that Sean Connery starred in — what they’re really trying to say is, they tend to make the actual communist adversaries seem less hostile and less dangerous.”

NBC VIDEO Daniel Craig Nov. 6: "Today" host Matt Lauer talks with the actor about his role in the latest 007 movie, "Casino Royale." Today Show Entertainment

In 1963’s “From Russia With Love,” for example, Lotte Lenya’s character is a former KGB agent who has broken off on her own, which makes the KGB seem less menacing by comparison. In that sense, Whitfield added, the longtime enemies in the Bond world are similar to the bad guys in the real world today.

“Osama bin Laden, he is the realization of what Ian Fleming had imagined of the billionaire who is both a crackpot and truly dangerous in the scale of his ambitions of violence,” he said. “It’s very, very different from a Khrushchev or a Brezhnev, different certainly from the conventional communist foes that America was supposed to be very, very wary about.”

The evolution of Bond
Glenn Yeffeth, editor of the essay collection “James Bond in the 21st Century: Why We Still Need 007,” said the enemies during Connery’s years tended to be ruthless supervillains. Under Roger Moore’s subsequent tenure, the bad guys grew sillier and had ridiculous plans to kill everyone on the planet, as in 1979’s “Moonraker.” During the more recent Pierce Brosnan movies, they fell somewhere in the middle; their schemes were elaborate but the figures themselves weren’t as interesting.

AP The original Bond Sean Connery was more misogynistic and ruthless than the actors who came after him.

Yeffeth argues that villains and themes changed with each actor playing Bond not necessarily because of anything happening politically but rather to reflect shifts in the cultural landscape.

“If you look at Sean Connery, the original James Bond, he was completely ruthless. He was misogynistic, he was almost sociopathic. He was happy to throw a woman into the path of a speeding bullet, he was happy to kill, he had the license to kill,” he said. “The context was the Cold War and the stakes were very high but James Bond was always about internal morality. Sean Connery was fairly emotionless when it came to wreaking havoc on the men and women around him, good or evil.

“If you look at how he evolved moving into the feminist movement of the ’70s, the producers decided he was too intense, too serious. We can be heartless but you have to have a smile on your face, and that was Roger Moore,” he continued. “Roger Moore could also be fairly misogynistic, he could also be heartless, but he was tongue in cheek. He wasn’t playing it so seriously and as time went on he became more of a self-parody.”

George Lazenby played Bond in just one film, 1969’s “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” between Connery and Moore. Timothy Dalton, who only made two — “The Living Daylights” (1987) and “Licence to Kill” (1989) — “was a flop but I thought he was actually quite good,” Yeffeth said. “But he was very intense, very gritty, he had some of the self-hatred that belonged to the original James Bond and that really didn’t fly. It wasn’t a good fit for our times.”

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But the next Bond, Brosnan, was just right because “he was a little more serious than Roger Moore, but what was different with Pierce Brosnan was that he was not a misogynist anymore. Women were taken seriously in those movies.”

Yeffeth pointed to Michelle Yeoh in “Tomorrow Never Dies” (1997) and Halle Berry in “Die Another Day” (2002) as examples in which the women were Bond’s equals, or close to it.

“With Sean Connery, that wouldn’t have worked. Sean Connery lived in a man’s world and women were props,” he said. “You couldn’t see (Brosnan) throwing a woman in front of a bullet.”

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