The Books of My Life: Licence to Thrill

Though I was eight years old in 1962, the year the first James Bond film Doctor No, made by producers Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli and starring Scottish actor Sean Connery, came out, I never really became a James Bond fan or aficionado and have never been a fan or aficionado of the spy thriller genre, of which the James Bond novels, novellas, and short stories of Ian Fleming and the James Bond films are examples. I recall seeing most of the Bond films when they appeared on television in the 1960s and 1970s and I recall seeing all of them in their chronological order of release on television in Moscow in the 1990s while I was doing research in Russia. I recall, if memory serves, that the only Bond film I ever saw in the cinema was the Roger Moore Bond film--Moore replaced Connery in 1973's Live and Let Die--Spy Who Loved Me (1977) which I enjoyed but in a different way than I enjoyed and appreciated a Truffaut, a Godard, a Bergman, or a Makavejev film, films by whom I also saw in the cinema in the 1960s and 1970s. 

As a viewer I recall that I found the Connery and Roger Moore Bond films a pleasant if hardly earthshaking and earth shattering viewing experience. I recall, being fascinated by the seemingly little things in the Bond films, such as the crushing and compacting of the car in the third Bond film Goldfinger (1964) and thinking it was pretty cool. It was the first time I had ever seen one of those car smashers and compactors. Ah, the things we adolescents find intriguing. I recall thinking, from the vantage point of the Roger Moore Bond films of the 1970s, that I preferred the Connery Bonds to the Moore Bonds. I recall that by the 1990s my favourite of all the Bond films I had seen was the aforementioned Goldfinger. I recall enjoying the Pierce Brosnan Bond, the fourth Bond after Connery, Moore, and Timothy Dalton, The World is Not Enough (1999) and enjoying its parodying of media moguls like Rupert Murdoch and yellow journalists and media moguls who could start wars based on flimsy evidence like William Randolph Hearst and his twentieth century heirs. I recall watching the first Daniel Craig Bond--Craig replaced Brosnan as Bond in 2006--whom I had enjoyed in the television programme Our Friends in the North (BBC, 1996), Casino Royale (2006) and finding that film overlong and overblown in that typical adolescent Hollywood megablockbuster kind of blow it up way even if it did attempt to add more character development into the Bond film mix. As I write, I recal the fact that I would never place that or any of the Bond films in my pantheon of favourite films including Citizen Kane (1941), North by Northwest (1959), Jules et Jim (1962), Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970), Celine vont en bateau (1974), WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), and the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997-2001, UPN, 2001-2003).

Though I am not really interested intellectually or critically in the Bond films, I am interested in British cinema and British television. I am also a fan of and interested in the British TV show and cultural institution, Doctor Who. It was through my interest in Doctor Who that I became acquainted with the research and writing of James Chapman, whose admirable book on Doctor Who, Inside the Tardis (2013), I read and much appreciated. Given my appreciation of Chapman's book on Doctor Who it was almost inevitable that I would be drawn at some point to Chapman's book on James Bond, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (London: Tauris, second edition, 2007).

As he did in his book on Doctor Who Chapman does an excellent job in Licence to Thrill of exploring the broader political, cultural, and ideological contexts of the James Bond films released from 1962 to 2006 and the production contexts of each of the James Bond films from Doctor No to Casino Royale. Chapman places each of the Bond films in the changing historical realities that impacted each Bond film from twentieth century great power politics and their World Wars and cold wars, to the war on drugs, and to the war on terrorism. He explores the cultural history of the Bond films and notes the impact of the twentieth century spy thriller books and thriller films, particularly Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, apparently one of Fleming's favourite films, on the books and the movies, He explores the impact of racism (outright racism zig zagging to more "subtle" forms of racism) and sexism (zig zagging from eye candy and bed candy for Bond to the independent female who fights before she falls in bed with Bond) impacted the Bond films if limitedly. He explores the rather humourous notion that Engand is still a player in the Great Power politics game and the nostalgia of some for the imperial days when England did matter in the imperial game. He explores the production of each of the films with their American financing and largely British personnel, thanks, in part, to the Eady Levy.  He explores the ups and downs and downs and ups of the British post World War Two film industry, the impact of changing demographics on the Bond films, and the fluctuating and changing costs of and factors affecting film production. Finally, He explores how Bond, like Doctor Who, periodically reinvented itself thanks to its Bond regenerations and its interaction with the dynamics of culture, ideology, politics, and economics.

Like many books on film, I felt that the Chapman book would probably have benefited it it had been article length rather than book length since there is, if understandably, a degree of repetition in the book. I would like to have seem more archival research by Chapman, something he did in his book on Doctor Who, and less reliance by him on second hand interviews with those involved in the making of the Bond films including writers, directors, and editors, though this may have been impossible given problems associated with access to primary source documents ensconced in corporate vaults and to film celebrities and stars. Recommended for those interested in the spy genre, spy and thriller films, and British cinema in post-World War Two Britain and the United States. Kudos to Chapman for not fetishising the Hollywood linear and aesthetic tendency to represent more recent films as more profitable and hence aesthetically superior (commodity aestheticism).