Spies

Oh Bondage …

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An original Corgi edition of the ‘Goldfinger’-tie-in Aston DB5. About £750-odd now. I had one, when I was six. If only my parents had hidden it from me; a determined child can do a lot of damage with a hammer and a few fireworks.

‘Bond tensed in the darkness and reached for his teeth.’

The above sentence was written by the late Alan Coren and comes from a satire he wrote for Punch magazine in the 1980s, a meditation upon the fate of fictional heroes in later life. Coren’s piece came to mind whilst I was watching No Time To Die, the latest 007 saga and the final outing for Daniel Crag in the role. I confess that I only went to see the film out of a sense of duty, knowing that I was going to be writing this post, as I am not a big fan of the Eon/Bond franchise. However, I will also confess to having slightly enjoyed No Time To Die, against what felt like my better judgement. 

By way of prologue we get a seemingly endless pre-credit sequence – actually two pre-credit sequences, opening with the secret backstory of Bond’s girlfriend – detailing the carnage of Bond’s emotional life by means of a romantic trip to Italy interrupted by the usual chases and ultra-violence. This climaxes with Bond’s novelty Aston Martin DB5 transforming itself from vintage grand tourer into every schoolboy’s fantasy weapon. (How do you think Bond insures his various Astons? Can you imagine what his premiums are like? And the DB5 is a government vehicle, isn’t it? So why is he on holiday in it? Wouldn’t Accounts be asking why he didn’t hire a Fiat?) Anyway, after the credits we get to see Bond in retirement in Jamaica, a nod to Ian Fleming’s love of the island: a solitary fifty-ish gent who lives a simple life consisting of yachting, fishing, brushing his teeth under a waterfall, and meeting CIA and MI6 agents in local bars. And we’re off again. The screenwriting seemed improved this time; the addition of Phoebe Waller Bridge to the credits is clearly significant, as there are flashes of real wit that stand out from the standard lumpenbond dialogue (it would not be a Bond film without the odd line thudding on deck like a harpooned albatross). But the story is a strange mixture of elements; this time, SPECTRE threatens the world with a doomsday bioweapon stolen from a British government lab, picturesquely situated in a skyscraper in the middle of London, as opposed to hidden away in the depths of Wiltshire. This sinister nano-bot virus can be genetically tailored to target individuals or entire populations, inducing fatality – with grotesque physical symptoms – within moments. (This aspect of the plot reminded me of a similar device in The Satanic Rites of Dracula, wherein Christopher Lee – as he unhappily described it – played the lord of the undead as ‘a mixture of Howard Hughes and Dr. No‘.) This genuinely nasty idea sits rather oddly with the slapstick violence of the action set pieces, although Ana de Armas’s brief appearance in one of them, playing a  gauche spy, was an opportunity to exercise some of the aforementioned wit (especially Ms Armas’s nonchalant dispatch of the regulation vodka martini, a welcome acknowledgment of the absurdity of that fixture of 007’s world).

Daniel Craig in ‘Casino Royale‘

Daniel Craig’s fifteen-year turn as 007 has been an opportunity for the film-makers to give Bond sensitivity and depth, which is where the rot sets in. Of course, the entire 007 project is an adolescent fantasy. Ian Fleming made no bones about this. Fleming’s biographer Andrew Lycett suggests that Bond is the kind of agent Fleming would have liked to have been, rather than the largely desk-bound operative he was at the Admiralty during WW2. That said, Commander Fleming was uniquely positioned to research methods of covert warfare which he later elaborated upon in his novels. Contacts in the Ministry of Supply furnished him with details of gadgets issued to agents in the field: hollow golf balls or shaving brushes, gas pens, shoelaces that could be used as saws, and so on. The germ of Casino Royale appears to have been a visit to a casino in Estoril in 1941, whilst en route to a diplomatic meeting in Bermuda. Fleming was intrigued by the idea that it would have been quite something if the nondescript Portuguese businessmen he had played (and lost) against had really been Nazi agents. And elements of Thunderball were derived from his knowledge of the Italian Navy’s submersible operations around Gibraltar in 1942. As to Bond’s sexual predilections, these seem to have sprung directly from Fleming’s id. In The Spy Who Loved Me, Fleming puts these words into the mouth of his female narrator: ‘All women love semi-rape … It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made the act of love so piercingly wonderful.’ (And, it should be noted, there is a startling scene in the 1965 film of Thunderball where Connery’s Bond forces himself upon Molly Peters‘s masseuse, a rape treated as a bit of prurient/comic business). Fleming was, it seems, keen on sado-masochism, although the various desires recorded in his letters to Ann Rothermere, his lover and, eventually, his wife, sound comically suburban rather than genuinely perverse. Elsewhere he referred to Bond as a ‘blunt object’ and not a hero, although he seems to have been conflicted as to the true morality of his own creation. The fetishisation of good living in Fleming’s novels obviously reflects the author’s enjoyment of the high life; but Bond is a spy, so his catalogue of lifestyle snobberies makes him rather conspicuous, which you would have thought would been a liability in his profession. In the novels he drives a 3.5 litre ‘blower’ Bentley, which is almost as ludicrous as the fully weaponised Aston Martin DB5 Sean Connery drives in Goldfinger, and which has been resurrected for Daniel Craig’s use. But on the whole it is futile to pick holes in Fleming’s project, as it is Never-Never Land. John Betjeman, in a letter to Fleming, compared Bond to Sherlock Holmes: ‘The Bond world is as real and full of fear as Conan Doyle’s Norwood and Surrey and Baker Street. I think the only other person to have invented a world in our own time is Wodehouse.’ That makes sense but it becomes problematic when fantasy leaches into reality.

Ian Fleming

Personally, I cannot stomach the novels. I enjoyed them when I was twelve, but a recent attempt to read one I was unfamiliar with (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) ended at the start of chapter two. I quite like some of the films. For all the antediluvian sexism of Connery-era Bond the cartoonish nature of the enterprise was offset by the loving treatment of travel and high living, as well as the swirling gorgeousness of John Barry’s scores. By the 1970s, with Roger Moore essaying 007 as a man in a safari suit whose gait suggested a slight case of piles, the film-makers simply opted to parody Britain’s post-imperial delusions; hence Bond becomes the protagonist in a series of hi-tech pantomimes which, whatever their merits as cinema, seemed appropriate treatment for the material. I remember watching Octopussy in a cinema in New Orleans in 1983, and being the only audience member to get Roger Moore’s very British joke at the expense of BBC TV’s dog trainer Barbara Woodhouse. Moore’s 007 even dresses up as a clown at one point; one can’t imagine Daniel Craig’s special agent plumbing such depths. But Octopussy doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a joke (starting with its title). The trouble, it seems to me, is when the 007 franchise is adduced as indicative of national character: that Bond represents Britain. This was put into queasily explicit form at the opening of the 2012 London Olympics, when Daniel Craig was drafted in to play Bond alongside HM The Queen, who was playing herself. A funny idea, except … the absurdity seemed out of place. A piece of entertainment had fused with an idea of national identity in a way that now seems rather worrying. I write this at a time when the British Government’s position over the Brexit agreement re: Northern Ireland has moved into the realm of macho fantasy, a mendacious confection as absurd as the machine guns and bulletproof glass fitted to Bond’s Aston. No sane person would want to disinter Bulldog Drummond, the proto-Blackshirt forerunner of Bond, who worked off his post-Great War energies by beating up uppity foreign villains; but I can’t be alone in thinking that 21st Century Bond caters to a similarly delusional notion of British supremacy. We’re still celebrating VE Day in a world that no longer needs us.

There is one aspect of No Time To Die where the screenwriters missed a trick. The fiendish techno-virus was overseen and kept secret by Bond’s boss, M. Bond is certainly unhappy about this turn of events but it seems to this viewer that, rather than maintain the status quo, it would have been refreshing to have seen Bond going for M’s throat, then following the trail right to the top. After all, we currently have a Prime Minister who possesses many of the essential qualities of a Bond villain, and it would have been satisfying to have seen a ‘Borisfeld’ immolated in some suitably resonant context. Killed by his own hair, perhaps.

N.B.: A dry martini is made with gin, and is stirred, not shaken. (The drink goes watery if you shake it.)

See also: A Drunk At The Flicks

Tinker Tailor Soldier Soak

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‘Shall we start again with the bubbles?’ Smiley (Alec Guinness) not really enjoying his clubland lunch with Roddy Martindale (Nigel Stock) in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

With the sad passing of the great John le Carré, I thought I’d take the opportunity to reflect upon the role booze plays in the lives of his characters. This is a brief and personal survey, based on the books featuring George Smiley; to be more specific, on the books featuring Smiley that I have actually read; to be more specific, as I am away from home and my books at present, on the film and TV adaptations of same that I can remember. Alongside that Alan Partridge-like disclaimer, I should add that what follows contains spoilers: so read on at your peril.

The 1979 broadcast of BBC TV’s adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was my own introduction to le Carre’s world. I hardly need add that Smiley was played by the great Alec Guinness: a suitably autumnal performance, allegedly based on le Carré’s former boss Maurice Oldfield (the story goes that Guinness met Oldfield for lunch at the author’s suggestion and borrowed his mannerisms wholesale). As a 17-year old who was looking for a way of being an adult, it seemed to me that the life of a 60-ish, semi-retired intelligence operative with a full pension and a house in Chelsea was the one for me. I had no interest in working for the intelligence services in any capacity whatsoever, I just liked the idea of spending my days wandering about the West End in a crombie and a trilby, buying rare books and paintings from dealers in St. James’s, and drinking in private clubs with other old farts who felt they’d been passed over. I know that Smiley was supposed to be the anti-Bond but his life seemed impossibly glamorous to me: melancholy, yes, but quietly hedonistic all the same. And the exotic jargon of this world, all that stuff about lamplighters and scalp hunters and moles and so on, was a magical counterpoint to all the wintry afternoon drinking (it is always winter in Smiley’s world).

And there is a lot of drinking. Drink trays on office credenzas, cut glass tumblers, decanters, super-sized measures of pub gin, slowly poured vintages carefully consumed in discreet restaurants, and so on. (There is also a lot of smoking but that is outside my remit.) In Tinker Tailor one of the techniques Smiley employs to encourage his old Circus colleagues to open up is to bribe them with booze; this is not unlike the method Philip Marlowe uses to prise information out of reluctant witnesses in the great Chandler novels. For example, Jim Prideaux, the agent who was set up and exiled from ‘the firm’, was a Czech specialist keen on vodka. His decline, from the crisp operative being briefed by Control in the fusty office at ‘The Circus’ (Cambridge Circus, of course) to the broken schoolteacher living in a caravan parked by the playing fields, is emphasised by the way he drinks the bottle of vodka Smiley produces when he goes to see him. Likewise, heartbroken Circus operative Connie Sachs is forthcoming when Smiley turns up on her doorstep bearing a bottle of scotch. And Smiley finds Jerry Westerby in a Fleet Street wine bar, and he is is thrilled to reminisce to old George over a boozy lunch. The difference between Marlowe and Smiley is that the latter does not really indulge in these episodes, although he relaxes and drinks freely in the company of his trusted accomplice Peter Guillam. All this is neatly contrasted with the severe life of the Circus itself, the Holy of Holies from whence the likes of Smiley and Guillam have been exiled, yet which amounts to little more than a collection of drab offices connected by dingy linoleum corridors. (There is some excellent ‘office and corridor’ acting on show; it’s very hard to make office environments interesting on film, or to show people inhabiting such spaces in a convincing manner). At the summit of power, Control himself only drinks ‘filthy’ jasmine tea, although he offers Jim Prideaux scotch at the start of the series, during the fateful briefing that is to lead to Prideaux’s capture by the Soviets. Meanwhile, in pre-credit sequence to the same episode, suave Bill Haydon (Ian Richardson) displays elaborate fastidiousness with his cup of tea, a stylish bit of prop business that we recall in the finale, when he is revealed to be the spy ‘Gerald’. Discovered in flagrante with his Soviet handler, Haydon is given a split lip by an enraged Guillam; Haydon then asks for permission to finish his scotch and winces slightly as he sips it, rakish self-confidence evaporating as his exposure sinks in. Haydon was, of course, based on Kim Philby, narcissist, alcoholic and double agent. I am told by an impeccable source that Ian Richardson drew on his own Royal Shakespeare Company portrayal of Richard II as his model for Bill Haydon in disgrace. (I find it impossible to separate the character from Ian Richardson; fine as he is on his own terms, Colin Firth couldn’t match him in Tomas Alfredson’s 2012 feature film version of Tinker Tailor, although Gary Oldman was an impressive Smiley.)

Jerry Westerby (Joss Ackland) orders another bucket of gin and opens up to Smiley. The Spunky Backpack goes unmentioned. (If you have to ask you will never know.)

Smiley, of course, has his own reasons to drink: he is married to a serially unfaithful wife, Ann, who has been knocking around with other men right from the start, and who ends up in bed with the traitor Haydon. Smiley was introduced in Call For The Dead, 1961, which was later filmed as The Deadly Affair, starring James Mason as Smiley (renamed Dobbs) and Swedish siren Harriet Andersson as a badly-lip-synced Ann. This is worth a look as it is directed by the esteemed Sidney Lumet, has a catchy score by Quincy Jones, great cinematography by Freddie Young, and makes mid-60s London look believably dowdy (check out the interior of James Mason’s house). But this film betrays Smiley a little: the film is just too exciting, James Mason is too heroic for the part, and, despite Lumet’s and Young’s best efforts (fogging the film to dull Technicolor, etc.), all those grimy bits of London look terrific, and make this viewer achingly nostalgic for a vanished city. It is not so far from the world of Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer. But it does attempt to investigate the misery of Smiley’s marriage, even if it does not really convince on that score either. There’s real misery on show in Martin Ritt’s 1965 film of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, where Richard Burton plays the title role: a bitter spook asked to play a bitter spook so he can get recruited by the KGB. To this end he drinks a lot, beats up a shopkeeper, gets locked up, gets involved with naive fellow traveller Claire Bloom, and is invited to defect to east Germany. No laughs there. But Smiley only gets a walk-on part in the film, it isn’t his show; but he is memorably played by Rupert Davies, who had played Inspector Maigret on TV, and who feels like perfect casting for le Carré’s signature hero.

Rupert Davies as Smiley and Richard Burton as Leamas in Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, 1965.

Ironically, something came back to me as I was writing this piece, a memory of an incident almost thirty years ago when I was working on a journalistic assignment in Eastern Europe. I was with the resident staff at a British embassy in an eastern capital; they were holding a garden party for a visiting dignitary and I found myself chatting to a very charming young woman who was married to one of the diplomats. The young woman was slightly but endearingly tipsy and I had spent all of five minutes in her company when her husband appeared. I had encountered this man earlier the same day, at an ambassadorial briefing during which he had displayed impressive command of his department whilst reporting to the chief (a meeting held in one of those bug-proof rooms I’d only heard about in, well, John le Carré novels). But when he saw me in the company of his wife a look of tragic dismay came over his face. Looking back, there is something le Carré-ish about that encounter, and something of a young George Smiley about that junior diplomat. As for myself, at the age of 58 I fear my own transformation into Smiley is nearly complete. I have the right wardrobe, the right tastes, even some of the right regrets, I just wish I had the same pension and a house in Chelsea.

A Quick Valediction

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You don’t need me to tell you that there is a surfeit of news about. Your correspondent is eating tinned soup whilst ‘doomscrolling’ an assortment of feeds covering a smorgasbord of disasters: the terrorist attack in Vienna, Covid restrictions and government by headless chicken at Westminster, and – of course – the presidential election in the USA. Furthermore, domestic refurbishment has left my kitchen in pieces with no end in sight. If I seem a bit distracted today I think I may be cut some slack.

However, in a bid to offer some elegiac light relief, the clip above features the late Sean Connery as James Bond in Goldfinger, Guy Hamilton’s 1964 adaptation of Ian Fleming’s novel. This particular scene offers Bond the chance to offer some random insights into the mysteries of the distilling process, and acts as a knowing send-up of the 007 project as a whole. I offer this to mark the passing of Sir Sean and the passing of an era. I have been working on a dissection of Fleming and the Bond phenomenon but I will leave that for another time; to be honest, I’m finding it hard to concentrate at all, and I’ve just discovered that my boiler has packed up. And the latest news is that John Sessions has died of a heart attack … I will conclude this short and sad entry with this clip featuring the man in his element, telling a quick and dirty joke. RIP.