Some Bond memes in Archer

Better late than never, I’ve finally got round to watching Archer, the animated spoof espionage series featuring the suave, irresponsible, and misogynistic secret agent, Stirling Archer. Naturally, the whole series draws very heavily on the James Bond films for inspiration, and H Jon Benjamin, who voices Archer, reveals in an interview with MI6 Confidential that his performance is based to some extent on Sean Connery’s Bond. Apart from referencing Bond in a general sense, the series alludes more specifically to the films, and I noted a few of these references while watching season one.
 
The ninth episode, ‘Job Offer’, in which Archer takes a job with a rival agency, Archer and Lana, his colleague and former lover, are tied on a metal table and threatened by a laser beam, à la Goldfinger. ‘Skytanic’ (episode 7) has an airship that brought to my mind A View to a Kill. The sixth episode, ‘Skorpio’, in which Archer rescues Lana from an arms dealer, features Archer in frogman mode and involved in an underwater battle that could have been taken from the storyboards of Thunderball.
 

A scene from 'Skorpio', Archer, season 1

James Bond is name-checked a couple of times in the series, and the cover of the season one DVD clearly derives from the poster of Live and Let Die.

Fictional spies of earlier vintage are not forgotten either. In ‘Dial M for Mother’ (episode 10), Malory Archer, agency chief and Archer’s mother, has a copy of Greenmantle by John Buchan beside her on her bed. The episode title is especially interesting. It references a Hitchcock film, of course, but it takes on extra significance in the context of James Bond: M was Ian Fleming’s nickname for his mother, Eve, and according to Fleming’s biographer, John Pearson, Eve provided some of the inspiration for James Bond’s chief.
 

A scene from 'Dial M for Mother', Archer, season 1

Issue 25 of MI6 Confidential has an excellent article on Archer, which includes interviews with the cast and the creative team, and is well-worth reading. Meanwhile, I’ll get on with catching up on the remaining seven series.

When James Bond went cruising

Over the decades, James Bond has been used to advertise a range of products, among them clothes, shoes and tea, that have had no official connection to the books or films. In 1963, James Bond was used to advertise cruises.
 
A supplement to Tatler magazine in May 1963 included an advertisement for Union-Castle cruises. The advertisement, ‘No pistol packing for James Bond’, features an illustration of James Bond by a swimming pool on board a cruise ship and in the company of a bikini-clad woman. The accompanying text reveals that they are on the Windsor Castle, a cruise ship on its way to Cape Town, and that M is sending Bond there for rest and recuperation. The woman, called Orchid, is an agent too, as she confesses to Bond that M ‘sent me to keep an eye on you’.
 

Union-Castle advert in the Tatler, 29 May 1963 (c) Illustrated London News Group

Published after the film version of Dr No was released, the advertisement inevitably contains nods to the film. James Bond resembles Sean Connery, and from the text it’s clear that Bond has consumed ‘vodka martinis at shipboard prices’. The books have not been forgotten either; another activity that Bond has enjoyed is ‘bridge at 1d-a-hundred’, the copywriter presumably being aware of the bridge game in Moonraker. 
 
The second advert (‘Holiday with pay-off for James Bond’) was published in the Tatler in October 1963. This time, Bond is holidaying on the Blue Lagoon beach near Mombasa, having travelled on the cruise ship the Kenya Castle. Later, Bond will travel on to Durban via Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam and Beira. Bond’s holiday is again courtesy of M, apparently to thank Bond for his efforts on ‘the Klemanski case’. Bond again has female company, a blonde, bikini-clad woman (not Orchid, it seems). ‘James, promise me you haven’t brought any weapons on this holiday,’ she asks. ‘Only for fishing…,’ he replies as he suggestively clasps a spear-gun.
 

Union-Castle advert in the Tatler, 16 October 1963 (c) Illustrated London News Group

Again, Bond resembles Sean Connery, and while the advertisement doesn’t include other obvious references to Dr No or From Russia With Love, which had been released in the same month, the scene curiously prefigures the beach scene in Thunderball (1965), in which Bond is with female company (in that case Domino) and armed with a spear-gun.
 
The Union-Castle advertisements were published at a time when exotic travel was becoming more affordable and cruising was gaining in popularity; the film Carry On Cruising, which poked gentle fun at the industry and its passengers, was released in 1962.
 
The advertisements also remind us of the part that the novels played in generating James Bond’s advertising power. Over time, the films would come to dominate, and the tropes or memes presented in advertising featuring Bond would derive largely, and probably exclusively, from the films only (though of course these contain memes that can be traced back to the books). In 1963, however, the books were still influential.
 
After all, the cruise advertisements were published, as they acknowledged, ‘with a bow to Ian Fleming, author of the excellent ‘James Bond’ books, published by Jonathan Cape: and to Eon Productions, whose film ‘Dr No’ is the first of a series based on these books’.

James Bond, as featured on birthday cards

Anyone looking for birthday cards in WHSmith or a similar purveyor of greetings cards is likely to have seen those cards which picture some of the events in the year of the recipient's birth. If you're after that sort of thing for a James Bond fan, then you might be interested in the 'Time of Your Life' range of cards.

Like most cards of this type, the 'Time of Your Life' cards are adorned with images of newspaper headlines, key events, and stars of stage and screen relevant to a particular year, but what is especially interesting is that James Bond is well represented.

The card for 1965 includes a photo of Sean Connery, no doubt reflecting the fact that one of the biggest films of that year was Thunderball. Roger Moore is pictured alongside Britt Ekland and Maud Adams on the card for 1974, the year in which The Man With The Golden Gun was released, and he appears again on the card for 1979, when Moonraker hit the screens. A publicity shot of Timothy Dalton and Carey Lowell from Licence to Kill is shown on the card for 1989, while the card for 1995 boasts a picture of Pierce Brosnan in GoldenEye mode.
 

The Time of Your Life range featuring James Bond

The card series ends in 1999, so there's no picture of Daniel Craig's Bond, but remarkably Ian Fleming is not forgotten. The card for 1953 includes the newspaper-style headline: 'Ian Fleming writes Bond novel Casino Royale.'

With James Bond referenced so prominently, the cards might well appeal to the Bond fan. More generally, though, the cards attest to the enormous success of the Bond films and their lasting impact on popular culture. With over 50 years of the Bond films, each one a blockbuster, the card makers were certainly spoiled for choice.

Who is the best James Bond?

A recent poll conducted on behalf of CBS News by SSRS revealed that Sean Connery remains America's favourite James Bond. Fifty per cent of respondents went for Connery when asked who was the best Bond. Pierce Brosnan was second with 12%, closely followed by Roger Moore, who polled 11%. Daniel Craig was third with 8%, while George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton brought up the rear with 1% each. While the margin of error of plus or minus 3% suggests that the differences between Brosnan, Moore, and probably Craig, are not statistically significant, Connery's place at the top is clear enough.

The poll reminded me of the 'Pint of Milk' interviews that feature in Empire magazine. Each month, a well-known actor, writer or director is asked a series of quirky questions largely unrelated to their latest release or career in film. The questions vary between interviews, but all interviewees are asked, “how much is a pint of milk?” Another question asked on a fairly regular basis is, “who is the best James Bond?” Looking through an archive of classic 'Pint of Milk' interviews on Empire Online, I was interested to see the responses to that question. As with the respondents in the CBS poll, the film-making community seems to favour Sean Connery.

All the interviews available online appear to have been conducted during the tenure of Pierce Brosnan, who consequently gets an honourable mention from most interviewees. So, on the question of the best Bond, Peter Ustinov thought that nobody could touch Connery, but considered that Brosnan had developed into 006 at least. Dan Ackroyd similarly thought Connery the best, but conceded that Brosnan was doing a wonderful job. Michael Keaton admitted he wasn't particularly familiar with the film series, but said that he liked Connery. Though he hadn't seen any of the Brosnan films, Keaton thought Brosnan looked natural in the role. Kyle MacLachlan went with Connery as the best Bond, with, unusually, Roger Moore a close second. Brosnan, he thought, was suave, but lacked the element of danger. Tim Robbins, in response to the question of the best Bond, answered “Mike Myers”.

Judging by these surveys, Sean Connery's position as 'best Bond' is unassailable. Quite how we measure the notion of best Bond is debatable to say the least, but the responses nevertheless point to certain important qualities. Two of them appear to be danger and toughness, which are strongly associated with Connery's portrayal. These are evidently not enough, however, as Timothy Dalton, who took a gritty approach to the role, is at the bottom of the CBS poll, while Daniel Craig, a tough, muscular Bond, only manages a middling position. Possibly a perceived lack of humour in Dalton's and Craig's Bond, certainly when compared with the Connery, Brosnan and Moore eras, is a factor here.

The Empire interviews suggest that being the current Bond boosts the ranking of that actor. Had the interviews taken place more recently, the interviewees might have placed Daniel Craig second. On the other hand, the results of the CBS poll pointed to an age factor to the responses. Respondents over the age of 45 tended to pick Roger Moore as second best Bond, while those under 45 went with Brosnan, suggesting that people tend to regard the Bond they grew up with or first saw as their (second) favourite Bond.

As for Connery, there is a remarkable consensus among all respondents that Connery is the best Bond. I wonder, though, whether the view has become so well established in popular culture that it is now almost a natural response given without much consideration or critical thought. Like any meme that is successful by being long-lived, widespread and oft-repeated, the view or meme that Connery is the best James Bond (along with the opposite meme that Lazenby is (usually) considered the worst Bond) is somewhat self-perpetuating. Connery is likely to remain on the top spot for a while yet, no matter how well the Bond films of Daniel Craig and his successors do at the box office.

How would James Bond vote in the Scottish independence referendum?

George Lazenby as James Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)

Sean Connery is a well known supporter of Scottish independence, and come the referendum on 18th September, we have no doubt how he will be voting. But what about the character for which Connery is most strongly associated? How might James Bond, another Scot, vote? A trawl through Ian Fleming's novels provide a few insights into Bond's perception of identity, nationality, and duty which offer some pointers to what his voting intentions might be.

James Bond's Scottish heritage was introduced late in Fleming's series of adventures. For much of the series, Bond was an Englishman. In Casino Royale (1953), Mathis, Bond's French ally, describes Bond as “the Englishman from Jamaica”. Bond, who is there with Mathis, does not correct him. In From Russia, with Love (1957), Soviet spies hatch a plot to destroy James Bond, the 'Angliski Spion'. And in The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), the heroine, Vivienne Michel, looks “appealing at the Englishman.” Meanwhile, Sluggsy, one of the villains, asks Bond, “From England, huh?” “That's right,” comes the reply.

It is possible that England in these references is synonymous with Britain and does not necessarily imply English origins, but Fleming appears to provide no hint of any Scottish identity, and readers up till this point would not have thought Bond as anything other than English.

This changed with the publication of On Her Majesty's Secret Service in 1963. At the College of Arms, Bond meets Griffin Or, a herald at the college. Inquiring into Bond's origins, Griffin Or tells him, “No doubt, with a good old English name like yours, we will get somewhere in the end”. Bond replies, “My father was a Scot and my mother was Swiss”, adding that his father came from near Glencoe in the Highlands. This information is repeated in the next novel, You Only Live Twice (1964), in Bond's obituary.

It is said that Fleming gave Bond Scottish ancestry when Sean Connery was cast in the role of James Bond for the film of Dr No (1962). This is plausible, given the chronology, and the reference to “Ursula Andress, the film star” in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. But given also that Fleming himself had Scottish ancestry – his grandfather, Robert Fleming, was from Dundee, and Ian spent time during his childhood at Glenborrodale Castle in the Highlands – the casting of a Scot as James Bond was a coincidence that Fleming found impossible to resist.

Even so, James Bond continues to talk about England, rather than Britain or Scotland, in You Only Live Twice. “England may have been bled pretty thin by a couple of world wars...but we still climb Everest and beat plenty of the world at plenty of sports and win Nobel Prizes,” he tells Tiger Tanaka.

However, in Fleming's last full-length Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), Bond has a much stronger Scottish identity. Composing a telegram, he rejects an offer of a knighthood with the words, “Eye (sic) am a Scottish peasant and will always feel at home being a Scottish peasant.” That is not to say that the rejection is because of any anti-British or anti-English feelings. Bond admits that he likes the idea of the knighthood, if only because of “the romantic streak of the SIS – and of the Scot, for the matter of that”.

Returning to the question of the Scottish independence referendum, while Bond appears to embrace his Scottish identity by the end of Fleming's novels, his continued reference to England, and his still generally very patriotic and pro-British outlook suggests that he would vote 'No'.  Would Bond be able to vote anyway? Given that he lives in London, Bond is presumably listed on the electoral register in London and therefore would not be entitled to vote in Scotland. The cinematic Bond, on the other hand, might have a vote. His home at Skyfall Lodge, as seen in Skyfall (2012), might qualify him, although quite what happens when the building is blown up is another matter.

Newspaper reviews of Solo: some observations

After I finished reading William Boyd's Solo, I caught up with some of the newspaper reviews of the book, which I had been avoiding. The reviews were the usual mixed bag – some were positive towards Solo, others negative, some I enjoyed, and felt offended (as a Bond fan) by others – but as I read them, I noted a few points of interest that made me think about the relationship between the film and book Bonds.

Let's start with basics confusions between Fleming's Bond and the Bond of the cinema. To my knowledge, the worst culprit was Robert Crampton, who wrote a review for The Times. The headline of his piece, “Neither shaken nor stirred”, summed up his opinion of the book, but perhaps he would have been better disposed to the book had he not expected it to be a novelisation of a Bond film. Crampton bemoaned the absence of 'sexual banter' between Bond and Moneypenny, and thought Bond's falling in love with 'one of his conquests' (doesn't Bond want to marry his companion at the end of practically every adventure?) and his feelings of ambiguity towards his mission (you mean, as expressed in Casino Royale, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and You Only Live Twice?) were a sop to modern values. In fairness, Crampton hasn't been the only one to complain that the villain, Kobus Breed, is more of a henchman than a Bond villain, but hollowed-out volcanoes, death rays and minions in pyjamas, the sort of things which Crampton would have liked to have seen, are hardly a staple of Fleming's novels. And Crampton also spoke of the 'regulation two shags', which also owes more to the films than the books.

But Robert Crampton hasn't been the only reviewer confuse the books and the films. Sarah Warwick's review of Solo in The Northern Echo mentions that Q is “present and predictable” (but not in Fleming, of course), and Jon Stock, writing in The Telegraph, lists Bond's meeting with Q as one of the standard Bondian tropes that would “satisfy Bond aficionados”. (Mind you, it has to be said that Boyd's Quentin Dale of Q Branch – and for that matter, John Gardner's Ann Reilly – would probably not have existed had there not been a Q character in the films.)

Something else I noticed was that if Jeffery Deaver's Carte Blanche, the last continuation novel before Boyd's effort, was mentioned at all in the reviews of Solo, it was usually mentioned in neutral or negative terms. This is surprising, because a trawl through the reviews of Carte Blanche in the main UK newspapers reminded me that Deaver's novel was generally received positively, more so, it seems, than Solo has been. But I wonder whether this reflects uncertainty about what reviewers (and perhaps other readers) expect from a continuation novel. Should it be modern-set and updated like the films, or a period piece to follow on from Fleming's last novel? The consensus appears to change with each new continuation novel. Deaver's novel was widely lauded on publication, then dismissed as an oddity after the publication of Solo. But then reviewers of Solo have criticised Bond as a character out of place and out of date, who should be resurrected no more. Continuation authors can't win. As David Leigh says, the authors have a thankless task.

One other observation concerned the use of images to accompany the reviews. Most reviews of Solo that I read were illustrated by an image of the cover, or were not illustrated at all. Where images of Bond actors were used, however, these were either of Sean Connery or Daniel Craig. I thought newspapers missed a trick by not using images of George Lazenby, whose tenure as Bond dates to the same period in which Solo is set, but evidently there was a trend for selecting images of the first and current Bond actors. The reasons are obvious enough. Connery's Bond – or at least certain traits or memes associated with him – is so firmly embedded in popular culture that he has become a fixed point of reference. Daniel Craig's Bond also has cultural prominence, but the absence of previous Bond actors suggests that this will decline; any review of a continuation novel published during the tenure of Craig's successor is likely to feature images of that actor along with those of Connery.

The reviews of Solo have been entertaining, and occasionally annoying (just like the book itself, perhaps), but they have revealed that the literary Bond cannot be completely isolated from the cinematic Bond, and with the use of film series memes in the continuation novels themselves, the Bond of those novels has to some extent become a hybrid of the two Bondian traditions or species. The reviews have also suggested that Sean Connery's Bond continues to loom very large in the popular perception of the character.

Women want to be with him, men want to be him – and other phrases

A feature on Vincent Cassel in the Sunday Times magazine of 23rd April 2012 began with the words: 'Vincent Cassel is married to Monica Bellucci, loves his kids and can afford to turn down any film he's offered. Women want to be with him, men want to be him.' The final sentence is a phrase associated with James Bond, and encapsulates Bond's attraction to both men and women. That the feature's writer, Stefanie Marsh, used the phrase, whether knowingly alluding to the world of Bond or not, is testament to its success as measured by its longevity and spread into wider popular culture.

The phrase is often attributed to Raymond Chandler ('Every man wants to be James Bond and every woman wants to be with him'), which potentially dates it to 1959 or earlier, but it certainly appeared in print in 1963. In a review of On Her Majesty's Secret Service published in the Sunday Times in 1963, Raymond Mortimer wrote, 'James Bond is what every man would like to be, and what every woman would like between her sheets.'

It is possible that Raymond Mortimer had adapted Chandler's line [but click here to read an update and further discussion about the origin of the phrase], but more likely the writers were expressing variants of a phrase already current in cultural space, and since the 1960s, there have been many more variants expressed. Sean Connery, for example, said in Playboy in 1965 that 'Bond is the invincible figure every man would like to be, every woman is excited by, and is everyone's survival symbol.' Even Ian Fleming had his own version. He told Jack Fishman in c 1963, 'Bond is the kind of man every girl secretly dreams of meeting and leads the life every man would like to live if he dared.'

More recently the phrase was used in Austin Powers (1997), in which Mrs Kensington, played by Mimi Rogers, said, 'Women want him, and men want to be him'. And the response from Bond directors John Glen, Martin Campbell and Michael Apted at January's CES 2012 in Las Vegas when asked why people want to see Bond films was that men want to be Bond and women want to go to bed with him.

Another phrase strongly associated with Bond that does not derive from lines in the Bond books or films is 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang'. Around the time of Thunderball (1965), Bond was known in Italy (and/or Japan, depending on one's source) as Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and as a result, John Barry composed a piece with that phrase as the title for Thunderball. As with 'Men want to be him...' type phrases, however, 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang' was probably already well established in popular culture. Fleming had used it himself. He also told Jack Fishman, 'I admit that Bond is...the feverish dream of the author of what he might have been – bang, bang, kiss, kiss – that sort of stuff.'

We may also add to our list the phrase, 'martinis, girls and guns', which Cheryl Crow used in her song for 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies. What these examples suggest is that memes such as phrases, which are often attributed to a single origin, may already have existed in some form in cultural space, and because of that, whether knowingly or unknowingly, they are expressed in reviews, interviews, articles, films, or song lyrics.

References:

Fishman, J, 1965 007 and me, by Ian Fleming, in For Bond Lovers Only (ed. S Lane), Panther
Jarman, C M, 2009 Licence to quote, Blue Eyed Books

Almost Bond

The actor Mark Greenstreet screen-tested for the role of James Bond in The Living Daylights in 1986 when Roger Moore retired from the part after completing A View to a Kill (1985). He came very close to winning the role, but it ultimately went to Timothy Dalton. In 2006, I spoke to Mark about his brush with the world of 007.

Mark Greenstreet rose to prominence in the BBC TV series Bret Farrar. This English country-estate-set crime drama, broadcast in 1986, starred Mark in the title role of a man persuaded to pretend to be a long-lost son to help claim a family fortune, but is then implicated in the murder of the man he impersonates. The drama was a hit in the US, and Mark soon drew the attention of producer Cubby Broccoli. Some may have considered Mark, then 25 years old, to be a little young for Bond, but Mark saw the influence of the teen-orientated ‘Brat Pack’ films and its large fan-base in Broccoli’s interest.

After watching all the Bond films to prepare himself, Mark was interviewed at EON’s Mayfair office by Barbara Broccoli, Michael G Wilson, and associate producer Tom Pevsner. Then it was off to the costumer to be fitted with the regulation dinner suit, and to be supplied with the spy’s essential accessory – a gun holster.

The screen test took place at Pinewood in front of Cubby Broccoli, director John Glen, and the main film crew. For tests, Glen always recreated scenes from Dr No and From Russia With Love. As Bond, Mark shot the duplicitous Professor Dent and seduced Tatiana Romanova (played by Fiona Fullerton) in a steamy bedroom scene. He also had to do some fighting and order breakfast. If only for a day, Mark was James Bond. Time enough, though for a surreal meeting in the toilets with Michael Biehn, who was at Pinewood filming Aliens and also in character.

The test went well, and Mark had a lovely time, but there his involvement with Bond ended. A case, perhaps of so close, and yet so Farrar. But if he had won the part, what would Mark Greenstreet’s Bond have been like? Mark thought that the later films were missing a hard edge. ‘When Connery slapped a woman, you felt like she wanted it’, he told me. Chances are, then, that Mark’s portrayal would have been closer to Sean Connery than Roger Moore. The actor who did become Bond, Timothy Dalton, took a similar approach, and his performance in The Living Daylights (1987) was lauded. It seems that after the Moore years, a relatively serious portrayal was inevitable as a trend to return to the roots of Fleming’s James Bond began to hold sway.