The Spy Who Loved Me: New York, New York, USA and Moscow, USSR
Octopussy: "Feldstadt", West Germany*
A View to a Kill: Silicon Valley, California, USA
GoldenEye: London, UK**
Tomorrow Never Dies: Beijing, China
The World Is Not Enough: Istanbul, Turkey
*I assume there was a town around Feldstadt that would be caught up in the nuclear explosion.
**The GoldenEye device technically only destroys electronic circuits, but as was seen in the destruction of Severnaya, there's a hell of a lot of collateral damage which wouldn't have left London in a very good state.
The USA and Russia would have destroyed each other if Blofeld's plot in You Only Live Twice had succeeded, but there weren't any actual targets named. Hugo Drax also tries to kill everyone on Planet Earth, but the planet itself would be left behind, so that doesn't count.
I would argue that it's a good film, just not necessarily a good Bond film (they are two separate concepts). It's too violent, there are too many subplots (Heller's possible betrayal, the Orientals, Kwang and Loti) and it needs a lot more jokes. There are times when it flies - the action sequences are top notch, Pam is always fantastic, and Dalton is the best Bond and I don't care what you say - but it just doesn't work as a whole. What Casino Royale did in spades in 2006, Licence to Kill was trying to do in 1989, and I don't think the filmmakers - or the world - were ready for it.
However, even if the rest of the film were perfection itself, I could never love Licence to Kill unconditionally because of a flaw in the final scene. It's during the party at Sanchez' house, where everyone is celebrating that a drug dealer is dead by drinking champagne amongst the assets of his ill-begotten empire. I'm not sure how Lupe ended up with his house, anyway; they weren't married, and Sanchez didn't seem like the type to make a will.
Anyway.
There's a really annoying bit in that final scene that takes me right out of the film, every single time, and leaves me with a nasty taste in my mouth.
No, it's not Lupe looking straight down the camera. By that point in the film I've become immune to Talisa Soto's acting deficiencies. I'm sure this was take 49, and the sun was about to come up and Timothy Dalton had a dry throat and the crew were threatening to mutiny and they realised it was as good as she was ever going to get. At least she didn't bump into the potted plant.
No, it's not the winking fish either. Obviously, that's awful, but it's awful in a camp, cheesy way. It's a little bit of old school Bond that somehow snuck in; it's right up there with the double-take pigeon and the fish in the Lotus for good-spirited nonsense.
No, the worst part of Licence to Kill comes when 007 roguishly tugs Pam into the pool for the inevitable kiss under the closing credits.
Do you see it?
It's that tiny, irritating bit of dress on the back that doesn't get wet when she falls in. Bond dunks her under straight afterwards, but it doesn't matter. The damage has been done. That moment of imperfection jumps out of the screen at me, picks me up and slaps me about the chops and drives me insane.
That's all I've been able to see whenever I watch Licence To Kill, and no amount of Patti Labelle caterwauling can soothe my OCD rattled mind. It's almost completely soaked, but because it isn't, I can't stare at anything else. Did no-one else on set spot it? Could they not have painted it in during the edit? Did they just not care?
These are the questions that trouble my very soul.
I have a controversial idea. This might sound scary, but bear with me. I think there should be more French people in Bond films.
It's an odd deman, considering James Bond is a British icon. Despite the entente cordiale there's still a fractious relationship between the UK and France; we can't just look past a thousand years of attacking one another. They find us arrogant and rude; we find them, erm, arrogant and rude. The only thing we can properly agree on is that everyone else in the world is just awful.
However, here at Anya's Woolly Hat, we deal with facts, and the fact is, almost every time a French person turned up in a Bond film, the film was much better for it.
Leaving aside the brief hors d'oeuvres of Gallicism that was Mitsouko's Mme. La Porte, Thunderball delivered our first French dish in the form of Claudine Auger's Domino. Saucy, flirtatious, and seemingly incapable of wearing much more than a bikini, Claudine made a stunning impression. The fact that she wasn't burnt to a crisp by Fiona Volpe's hyper-awesomeness shows how good she must have been.
Moonraker, in 1979, was actually filmed in France, and in a manner that probably entitled the producers to tax breaks, the cast was filled with a certain ooh la la. Michel Lonsdale - or Michael, as he is credited in English-language productions; I'd love to go up to him and say "alright Mike?" and see how he reacts - took the part of Hugo Drax, and he was amazing. It's hard to convey how genuinely creepy and evil Drax is when Lonsdale seems to do so little. He manages to curl his tongue around the dialogue and twist it into a threat. "You appear with the tedious inevitability - pfft! - of an unloved season," is a pretty good line on the page, but that little snicker in the middle makes it terrifying. And his address to the perfect people aboard the space station is the greatest villain's speech in Bond movie history, bar none.
Filling out the lower ranks of the cast are a load of Euro-babes playing Drax's girls - I am slightly obsessed with the one with the perm - and Corinne Clery playing Corinne. As anyone who's read the excellent novelisation James Bond and Moonraker will know, this character was a Valley Girl called Trudi Parker in the original script. The casting of Ms Clery changed her into Ms Dufour, but nobody thought to change the dialogue, a source of frustration for Christopher Wood. He laments in his autobiography that Corinne was just too sophisticated for his dialogue, which makes me thankful we didn't see his original vision of a blonde bimbo bouncing around the chateau. It shows how casting a French actress can immediately add class and style to the most uninspired characters.
Carole Bouquet's Melina came next, an actress about as Hellenic as a croissant ("But I'm half-Greek," she purrs, in an accent straight out of 'Allo 'Allo). Bouquet's steely determination could have been off putting but her undeniable beauty and glimpses of humanity made her a great choice. She carried herself with intelligence and grace, convincing us that she was both an expert markswoman with a crossbow and also a highly qualified marine archaeologist (is marine archeologist an actual job?).
Fast forward to 1997 and we get Sophie Marceau's Elektra, and I have to reign myself in now from just typing "AWESOME" over and over. Marceau was sexy, frightening, provocative and disturbing - sometimes all within the same line of dialogue. "You can't kill me - you'd miss me," is delivered with a smirk and a flirt, even as she's calculating how to send Renard off to destroy Istanbul. I love Sharon Stone, the original choice for Elektra, but she would have been far too obvious in the part. Sophie Marceau keeps us guessing about her character's motives throughout, even after we've found out she's the super villain.
And then there's Eva Green as Vesper. I admit, the accent isn't great. She's just a little bit too English, while at the same time being a little bit too foreign. But her many other assets overwhelm this flaw. She's gorgeous, but in an unconventional way; for me she's at her best when she's not made up, in the "tuxedo" scene or on the beach with Bond. That's not to say she's not stunning when she strides into the Casino in a tight black dress. She's funny - never underestimate how hard it is to find a Bond Girl who can do comedy; just look at Halle Berry's eye rolling delivery in Die Another Day. She's clever, and she's heartfelt, and she's just wonderful. She does everything she needs to as Bond's first love.
Mathieu Almaric, our newest French villain, is very different to Drax. He's oily and weasly. I like that. I like that he's not all grand gestures and pontificating. I love the way he fights, all scrappy and desperate, grunting as he swings the axe at Bond, a bit desperate. Dominic Greene is not a great villain, but that's due to the script, not Almaric's performance.
Lastly, Berenice (Lim) Marlohe as Severine, and once again I have to hold back from gushing. She's barely in Skyfall, but she makes a hell of an impression - just that shot of her staring out of the apartment building, hair blowing in the wind, would blow you away, and then she turns up dressed as a dragon lady in Macao. It's all an act, and the way Marlohe lets the cracks show is wonderful. In a film full of great performances, this was the one that surprised me the most, and the one I was most grateful to have. Severine is the best "villain's girlfriend" in the series, and I wish they'd release the scenes she was cut out of - her excised entrance at the airport looks fierce as hell.
As you can, see there hasn't been a single incidence of a French person being in a Bond film where they haven't been eighty kinds of amazing (and before you say anything, Patrick Bauchau is Belgian). More French villains please. More French Bond Girls. It's a decision that no-one will regret. Not even Nigel Farage.
In my battered, 1990 paperback of Win, Lose or Die, it's on page 162. James Bond has been on a fairly thrilling adventure through the Mediterranean in pursuit of a terrorist organisation called BAST. He even got a promotion out of it. Now he's on board the HMS Invincible, which is taking part in a gigantic multinational naval exercise in the north Atlantic, and he's called up to the VIP Quarters.
Then this happens:
The Rear-Admiral stopped in front of Bond. "Prime Minister," he said to the almost regally dressed Mrs Margaret Hilda Thatcher. "I'd like to present Captain James Bond, who is in total charge of security for Steward's Meeting."
And at that point, the James Bond novels went shit, and never recovered.
It gets worse. George Bush (senior version) turns up. Then Gorbachev. Obviously they all end up getting kidnapped, and obviously, Bond rescues them. But they shouldn't be there at all. For Your Eyes Only (the film) ends with Margaret Thatcher talking to a parrot; it's high camp, ridiculous and sort of brilliant. It works in a film because it's so ludicrous.
It doesn't work in a book, and it definitely doesn't work in a James Bond book. Up until this point the Bond books were doing pretty well. The Fleming books are, of course, unimpeachable, even the crappy ones. Kingsley Amis a.k.a Robert Markham had a decent stab with Colonel Sun. And John Gardner was doing pretty well with his Bond novels of the Eighties; they were fun, and they were interesting, and they were easily digested. They didn't stay with you the same way, say, You Only Live Twice does, but they weren't bad.
Page 162 of Win, Lose or Die destroys all that. Having Mrs Thatcher turn up is uncomfortable and awkward. Win, Lose or Die is not a camp Bond novel; it's fairly serious, and has a lot of stuff with aeroplanes and aircraft carriers that's presented as being very important and realistic. It's not Moonraker, with its space shuttles and midgets falling in love with Jaws. It's not an environment you can put real people in.
Gardner had flirted with this situation in his previous novel, Scorpius; Bond manages to save the Prime Minister and the US President from assassination (Thatcher even mentions it when she meets 007). They're only referred to by their titles there, however, and Bond doesn't actually meet them. That's ok - that's the fantasy world of Bond.
The real world and Bond's world shouldn't mix. There's a beautiful Russian spy named Nikki Ratnikov in Win, Lose or Die - I'm fine with that. I'm less fine with her being in charge of protecting Mikhail Gorbachev. It jars.
After this, things went bad pretty quickly. Win, Lose or Die ends with the usual Gardner double/triple/quadruple crosses, and then a bit of a chase inside Gibraltar. His next few novels either saw him desperately trying to get away from the formula (Brokenclaw, The Man from Barbarossa) or simply turning out a terrible, terrible book that features a character named James Bond.
Death is Forever ends with a battle to save John Major in the Channel Tunnel. Seafire has neo-Nazis, the laziest villains possible (and a plot device Gardner had already used in Icebreaker). Cold takes a load of characters you thought you liked and makes them horrible. And Never Send Flowers features a magician trying to kill Princess Diana, William and Harry at EuroDisney. It is worse than cholera.
After Gardner gave up, they handed the keys to the Bond franchise to Raymond Benson, a lovely man and an acknowledged Bond expert who unfortunately couldn't write for toffee. Even when Gardner was at his nadir, he could still construct a couple of interesting chapters or characters or sentences. Benson couldn't do any of that. He was awful.
The regular James Bond continuation novels have finished now, and instead we get a well-known writer knocking out a one-off. Sebastian Faulks churned out Devil May Care, bragging that he wrote it in a fortnight or so and practically chucking it at the reader. Jeffrey Deaver tried to write an up to date Bond novel, all hi-tech and gleaming, but Carte Blanche is charmless and tedious; I still haven't finished it. And I've owned William Boyd's Solo since Christmas, and I still haven't cracked it open yet. I'm afraid. The Bond novels haven't been good since 1989. Perhaps we should just let them die.
I used to be a moderator on a set of James Bond forums, back in the mid Noughties. I was pretty good.
At first it was fun. It's always nice to chat about your hobby with other like minded people. Then it took a downturn.
It was around the time Daniel Craig was cast as 007. In 2014, this seems like a bizarre thing to write, but his anointment as the sixth James Bond was horribly controversial among fans. Things got really bad, really fast. You were either pro-Craig or anti-Craig, and you couldn't be on the fence.
I was on the fence. Years of watching Bond films made me trust the producers, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson (or Babs and Mickey, as they were fondly known). If they saw something in this man that said 007, then who was I to argue? After all, they'd seen his audition.
Throughout 2006 the battles raged, two diametrically opposed sides who refused to budge. The tiniest mention of something not even related to the new Bond could ignite a war of words. People went ballistic.
When Casino Royale came out - and was a triumph - you'd have thought the battles would end. They didn't. Both sides had spent so long digging themselves in they were stuck there. The anti-Craigs refused to admit they were mistaken; the pro-Craigs became unbearably smug. It was all deeply unpleasant.
I lost my spirit. I still posted, still carried on with all these people I'd been talking to for years, but my heart wasn't in it. The camaraderie was gone. It wasn't helped by a bunch of new people, turned on to the series by Casino Royale, suddenly appearing and saying things like, "hey, is it true there are James Bond books?"
After a while I just stopped visiting.
I miss being able to talk about Bond. I miss people who know what I'm talking about when I say "double taking pigeon" or "Dr No and a load of guano". I have nowhere to let out those stupid ideas and theories and complaints about this series that's been a massive part of my life for twenty odd years.
Hence this blog. Hence, Anya's Woolly Hat.
Why is it called Anya's Woolly Hat? Because of this.
Barbara Bach, in The Spy Who Loved Me, wears this woolly hat to the secret underwater base of the villain, and I think it's one of the greatest moments in the entire series. It's awful, yet brilliant. It's stupid, but fun. It's horribly ugly, but it's stuck on top of an astonishingly beautiful woman. It's ludicrous. It's fantastic.
It's Anya's Woolly Hat, and it deserves to be commemorated.
If you've read my other blog, Round the North We Go, or any of my posts over at the Coronation Street Blog, you'll have some idea what I'm going to write about. Minutiae. Diversions. Rants. Wild theories. Devotional love notes to Diana Rigg. Lots of rude remarks about Talisa Soto's acting. Pointless stuff.
