Have some Phuyuck ’74
Sonic Charmer takes a look at The Man with the Golden Gun, and he’s less than enthralled with the man who has to take him down:
James Bond, if you think about it, is a pretty terrible and inept secret agent: he never really fools the bad guy for one second, and he almost always gets caught at some point. Heck, Goldfinger is considered by most (albeit not by me) the best Bond film of all and Bond spends a good chunk of the movie imprisoned by the bad guy, sitting around doing nothing. Here, the ol’ He Gets Caught But For Some Reason The Bad Guy Doesn’t Just Kill Him trick is used mostly to shove Bond into a kung fu’sploitation movie. (Another classic Bond schtick: shoving him into whatever other movie trend is all the rage at the moment; the previous movie Live And Let Die had already done blaxploitation…) There’s an amusing bit where Bond, in a foreshadowing of the Indiana Jones maneuver, kicks the honorable karate dude in the face as he’s bowing to start the match. At the end he’s rescued by two karate girls in schoolgirl outfits, in a scene that must have made a huge impression on eleven-year-old Quentin Tarantino.
That I don’t doubt.
But that’s not the major objection raised:
I think few realize just how many James Bond movies have at their heart fundamentally lefty, “progressive” premises, because most at least do a better job of hiding them beneath the glittery women and action-packed travelogues.
James Bond, in the books, is supposed to be a British spy, and his archenemy is Smersh — the Soviet agency whose name is an acronym for “death to spies”. The movies changed this to SPECTRE, some sort of unaligned, non-governmental-organization of terror, and invented Blofeld (a Belgian, like Dr. Evil?) to be his nemesis. So almost from their start, James Bond movies made a sort of “progressive” attempt to tone down the cold war and coach their audience into a “détente” mode of thinking.
Also notice how virtually half of James Bond plots involve made-up, cartoony supervillains trying to get the major powers to fight wars against each other — and thus Bond, for all his licence-to-kill violence, is essentially cast in the “make love, not war” role of inevitably trying to stop international misunderstandings and war.
Then again, SMERSH really existed. Ian Fleming had no trouble mentioning it, but the Bond films managed to avoid it. (In From Russia with Love, Bond believes he’s fighting SMERSH, and only later finds out he’s dealing with SPECTRE.)
There is an entanglement with the Russians in For Your Eyes Only, but it ends with a stalemate. “That’s détente, comrade. You don’t have it; I don’t have it.”
I do, however, like the phrase “non-governmental organization of terror.” Some of those NGOs are pretty damn scary these days.
Da Goddess »
14 October 2009 · 2:21 am
UNGOT…that’s scary.