Plenty of Time to Die

So, we actually LIKED the new Bond, NO TIME TO DIE. Probably enjoyed it more than any of this series since GOLDENEYE (but haven’t seen them all), the first Brosnan, which didn’t hold up particularly well over time but seemed like a great gain in confidence/competence back then.

The new one is by a proper director, Cary Joji Fukunaga, who made a fine film of JANE EYRE and helmed the first season of True Detective. So I was expecting an impressive long take, and was not disappointed.

Of course, the epic running time and delusions of seriousness and meaningfulness are a drawback. But the moviemakers have remembered to have some fun, too. The middle of the film gets lighter, and there’s an adorable turn by Ana de Armas as a novice CIA agent which really lifts the movie. Bond needs real people around him if he’s to seem human at all, and Lea Seydoux, the marvellous Jeffrey Wright (I want to see him given more starring roles), little Lisa-Dorah Sonnet, and Billy Magnussen all help enormously. Daniel Craig is a gifted actor, but I think he made a mistake, essentially, in starting his Bond off so dour way back in CASINO ROYALE. As the filmmakers’ pile trauma upon trauma, he seemed to have nowhere to go but down, into some masklike inexpressive roboticism… Giving him a proper, sort-of convincing relationship helps some.

The attempts to get some fun into it come with one hitch: Craig is given more quips than before. For whatever reason, this gifted thesp cannot sell a quip, not in character. There aren’t any good ones, they’re all dreadful dad jokes, but you never feel that this version of Bond would even attempt them.

The real humour comes from believable-ish (we’re always modifying our expectations according to this genre and franchise) professional banter from Killing Zoe’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I mean, I’m assuming she’s the author of the biological warfare lab gags, they totally sound like her. What’s amusing is that nearly all the film’s byplay is bitchy, feminine — and Craig does this well, along with everyone else. It’s only when he’s paired off against Ralph Fiennes as M that the dialogue becomes hypermasculine, in a rather hilarious way, like a certain Fry & Laurie sketch…

I mean, this is how men talk, right?

Anyway, the whole thing looks spectacular and beautiful. Maximum scenic value extracted from a range of locations, including my native land… I think it was probably a mistake to use a forbidden island for the climax, too much like that Sam Mendes one, whichever it was.

The other big flaw I think was in the baddies. David Dencik is a very enjoyable creep. But Christoph Waltz as Blofeld and Rami Malek as “Lyutsifer Safin” (pwahahaha) should have coordinated, to prevent them from giving the same rather flat perf. Neither can touch Donald Pleaasence’s unblinking, low-affect turn in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, which he did on short notice in just a day or two of filming. And the writer’s haven’t thought nearly enough about Safin’s motivation. The villain’s motivation in these kind of things is far more important than the hero’s — Bond just wants to do his job, maybe protect a loved one or two — Safin is out for revenge, but not after anyone in particular, it seems. Even in the very first sequence (the pre-pre-credit sequence, since according to this movie’s bloat we need two before the usual dreary song and overblown CGI titles), he’s a bit swithery. Can’t stick to his purpose. He talks a lot but he seems vague about why he’s doing what he’s doing. A good supervillain can have a plan that makes no sense, like Thanos, but if we believe it makes sense TO HIM the movie can just about get away with it. What does the Penguin actually WANT in BATMAN RETURNS? Something different in every scene, it feels like. That won’t do at all.

The movie walks into some hilarious cliches without flinching — there’s the megadeath weapon intended for peaceful purposes —

Thanks to regular Shadowplayer Simon Kane for nailing that one in advance.

And there are the weird quips, which don’t work with the new grim-visaged Bond —

Since nobody’s asked, here’s my advice for how they should tackle the next Bond:

They could call it 007. Why not? Instant brand recognition. The poster could say INSERT NAME HERE *IS* 007.

The character should start out lighter. You need someone compellingly tough to do the lightness well, the way Connery did. The quips could be black humour, a man dealing with an unpleasant situation, the way cops and paramedics use unpleasant gags to deal with the strain. As your series goes on and Bond gets abused and traumatised more, the quips can become grimmer, the character crueller. The efforts to extend a one-note character like Bond, giving him some kind of ARC, that extends through five looong films, has really been a strain. It might, actually, be nice to give up on the idea of an arc for Bond. Keep him consistent, let everyone else change (mostly by killing them, obvs).

The only successful Bond arc was Lazenby’s, and he only played the bastard once.

Connery’s arc was putting on weight and a toupee. He was definitely the best Bond though, for his first three or four outings: his machismo and grit gave an interesting underpinning to the flippancy. With Roger Moore you get ONLY flippancy, with Craig you get ONLY machismo (yet there are moments of physical humour in his performance this time… interesting). The series is never going to top GOLDFINGER. Partly because of the obsession with applying a character arc to such a one-note cartoon figure and universe.

Alex Cox used to express an interest in doing a Bond film, saying that the series was refreshingly free of the tiresome good-versus-evil paradigm. Bond is just a ruthless soldier, using technology and muscle and nerve against official national enemies. The movies can try to make the bad guys seem bad, but the hero is a professional killer… Then, they can have the villain claim that he and Bond are much alike (this goes back to GOLDEN GUN, and Roger Moore’s retort to Chris Lee, “When I kill it’s on the orders of my government…” is pretty thin as moral arguments go.

Actual line from the novel Goldfinger: “Bond had never liked going up against the Chinese. There were too many of them.” This is not great art.

I really hope Fukunaga doesn’t make another one — he’s proven he can do it. I hope this gives him the clout to make his own things. (He’s a writer on this one, though, so it’s not purely a job-for-hire.) I want to see what he wants to make next.

NO TIME TO DIE stars Benoit Blanc; Charlotte LaPadite; Freddie Mercury; Maria Rambeau; Lord Voldemort; Paddington Bear; Frances Barrison / Shriek; Lord Lucan; Roebuck Wright; Col. Hans Landa; Marta Cabrera; and Dr. Mabuse.

Shoe Leather

My week-long adventures on Shadowplay always overrun, don’t they? Don’t worry, not too much spying left to do.

Superspies go east in both MISSION TO TOKYO aka TERROR IN TOKYO originally ATOUT COEUR A TOKYO POUR OSS 117 and Koroshi, a feature-length edition of the show Danger Man AKA Secret Agent. The latter is really just two episodes of the show cobbled together. Cobbling and cobblers are much in evidence throughout.

The French movie is part of a series produced by Andre Hunebelle, he of the unfunny FANTOMAS films of the sixties, which could have played like Francophone DIABOLIKs, but were instead almost complete cobblers. There were eventually eighty-eight OSS-117 novels, By this point in the adventures of Hubert Bonnisseur de la Bath, who started off as Ivan Desny, became Kerwin Matthews, but was soon Frederick Stafford (who would get headhunted for Hitchcock’s TOPAZ, with underwhelming results), with John Gavin and Luc Meranda later stepping into his shoes for one outing each. At this point in the rather logey series, there seems to have been a realisation that an infusion of genuine Bondian derring-do was needed, so they’ve hired Terence Young as co-writer.

This was, arguably, misguided, for a couple of reasons, and amusing for a couple more. Firstly, Young was more a director than a writer (though he did have a surprising number of early writing gigs, and maybe had a hand in DR. NO) so it’s uncertain whether they’d have been better off with, say, Richard Maibaum. Secondly, I don’t know how good his French was. The whole situation amuses me because of how little loyalty Broccoli & Saltzman earned from their 007 team: Young had just directed his third Bond picture, but apparently thought nothing of working for the competition. The hilariously awful Bond knock-off OK CONNERY aka OPERATION KID BROTHER managed to dragoon not only Sean Connery’s non-actor sibling Neil, but M and Moneypenny and Tatiana Romanova and Professor Dent/Blofeld AND Largo.

With Young advising, this OSS entry gets off to an action-packed start, but it’s just a car chase. The action soon shifts to Tokyo, and they really went there, for once. Unlike the exotic orientalism of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (still in Bond’s feature) the environments are pleasingly ordinary, like an Ozu film stretched into widescreen and peppered with punch-ups. It’s all quite low-key and lived-in, even in its culturally-specific quirks — there’s a scene at a kind of photography bar where strippers pose for raincoated salarymen — Our Man Hubert is issued a camera at the door. Everyone looks like a tourist in their own land.

An assassin takes aim at Hubert through a spyhole built into a bit of ad signage, a detail which would turn up, modified, in BRANDED TO KILL, a genuine Japanese movie, the following year.

Stafford is paired with a proper actor as leading lady: Marina Vlady. Her backstory is that she’s been drugged, date-raped and blackmailed into working for some unknown enemy power — after one scene, though, she’s over any trauma and is flirting cheerfully with OSS 117. I don’t blame Vlady, I blame the writers. But it IS nice the way she’s not too impressed with her dashing master-spy.

Even in a desultory and dubbed spy caper (the Japanese roles are voiced in a markedly more racist way in the English dub, as opposed to the French and German versions), a good actor can make a difference. Vlady and Jitsuko Yoshimura from ONIBABA are fine, but when Henri Serre, Jim from JULES ET JIM, shows up, things improve. Serre should have played the lead, he’s incredibly refreshing. The uncanny Valery Inkijinoff (magnetic in Duvivier’s LA TETE D’UN HOMME), who spent most of his latter years playing yellowface, quite convincingly owing to his genuine Asiatic appearance, is also valuable.

Michel Boisrond directs; the plot involves miniature fighter planes — drones, avant la lettre; the fights are actually well-staged, with Hubert proving a master of turning furniture into weapons, Rudy Rassendyll style. The music, by Michel Magne, takes a back seat too often. This kind of adventure should be brassy vamping from beginning to end.

The real problem with all this is that, with fewer and smaller action scenes than a Bond romp, Hubie’s work seems mostly to be of the leg variety — strictly shoe-leather. He pads amiably about from one scenic locale to another, The Mikado cabaret to neon-dappled boulevard, ryokan hotel to picturesque temple, in his winkle-pickers, slipping them off to go indoors of course, asking questions, looking a bit wry. At one point, avoiding a dart gun, he substitutes himself with an inflatable dummy, and though it would be unkind to say you don’t notice any difference, the ruse is worryingly successful.

Frederick Stafford

Stafford isn’t bad — he’s just David Farrar. Agreeable but dull. And. without the panther prowl and ironic sang-froid of Connery, or the bizarro pop art trappings, the going becomes a touch turgid. Still better than Coplan FX-18 or, God knows, the wretched Kommissar X films. OSS-117 has enjoyed a more recent revival, though, as the spoof series with Jean Dujardin, which isn’t exactly great but IS pretty funny.

I get the same disengaged feeling from Danger Man’s eastern adventures. The show’s makers didn’t even pay up for foreign travel — zero views of Mount Fuji here — they just hired Burt Kwouk and some background plates. A fair bit of yellowface too. But the show is oddly appealing — if I were a dope-smoker I could undoubtedly chill out to it. Watching Patrick McGoohan go into rooms and ask questions would be entertaining enough. The show always looked nice, maybe even more so when it was in B&W. And it did give us The Prisoner, which took the elements of pop art, op art, surrealism and cod-expressionism that were creeping into Bond and his many imitators, and put them front and centre with a touch of Kafka and existentialism and all that good stuff.

The first episode that makes up Koroshi features Amanda Barrie, a wonderful actor who ought to have been a massive star — but in what? Amazingly funny in Carry On Cleo, she apparently didn’t fit in with producers’ plans, and only became a fixture in soap opera land later, where she outclassed everyone around her.

The second episode, Shinda Shima, is graced with future Prisoner co-stars Kenneth Griffith and George Coulouris, who has a machine gun built into his desk (“Hit me with a sled, will you?”)and is directed by Peter Yates, a good action director who seems like he SHOULD have been shoehorned into the Bond films but somehow never was. Yoko Tani appears in both episodes, as different characters.

MISSION TO TOKYO aka TERROR IN TOKYO originally ATOUT COEUR A TOKYO POUR OSS 117 stars Andre Devereaux; Kate Percy; Kichi’s Wife; Radek; Jim; Alexandre Dumas; and Rear Adm. Chuichi Hara.

Danger Man AKA Secret Agent stars Number Six; Leader of the Lystrians; Cleopatra; John Bray; Kato; Pennyways; Adolf Hitler; the Duchess of Argyll; Walter Parks Thatcher; Assassin in Bedroom; and Capungo.

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Great Brain Robbery

RIP Jean-Paul Belmondo.

We had just watched Michael Crichton’s best film, THE FIRST GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, which I’d been surprised to find on DVD in a charity shop (movies from 1978 or earlier are rare, except the very obvious ones), and then Belmondo’s passing prompted me to dig out THE BRAIN/LE CERVEAU (1969), a big-budget splashy caper comedy by Gerard Oury (who had just scored a massive hit in his homeland with LE GRAND VADROUILLE). And since the Brain, international master-criminal extraordinaire, is played by David Niven, it tied in with our weekend viewing of A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.

So, Crichton first. his Victorian heist movie was called simply THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY in America, heedless of Edwin S. Porter, but had a FIRST interpolated in the UK to avoid confusion with the 1963 robbery of the Glasgow to London Royal Mail train, which was still a legendary job here. And, funnily enough, that real-life robbery is credited to the Brain in Oury’s film, even though several of the actual thieves had been nabbed by ’69.

Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland and Leslie-Anne Down are Crichton’s conspirators, briefly aided by Wayne Sleep, master of parkour (in reality a dancer who enjoyed a burst of fame just after this movie). The target is gold bullion used to pay the British troops in the Crimea. the The gimmick is that nobody at this this time had robbed a moving train.

With Geoffrey Unsworth shooting it, the film looks dandy, with Irish locations (Dublin mainly) augmented by skillful matte paintings and the whole thing is elevated hugely by Jerry Goldsmith’s jaunty score — the man understood the romance of steam trains and put that romance into musical form very purely. And the climactic sequence, with Connery doing a lot of his own stunts on top of a locomotive, is everything it needs to be.

It’s interesting to reflect that Crichton’s odd career — medical doctor, novelist, film director, then back to novels (which regularly became films by other people) — culminated in an even odder spree as climate change denier, in which Crichton tried to parlay his medical experience into some kind of expertise in a field he knew nothing about. (The only thing that could have made Crichton’s life odder is if Nic Roeg had followed up his first impulse to cast the very tall 6″ 9 non-actor as Thomas Jerome Newton in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH. Crichton also created the TV show E.R., an early example of prestige television which it seems nobody now talks about.) This is vaguely relevant here solely because T(F)GTR is a very mercenary film, and I recall Crichton being asked by an interviewer about the consequences for our children if he was wrong, and global termperatures WERE being forced up. He replied, strangely, by asking in turn what if he were right, and we lost a lot of money by trying to tackle climate change? Which struck my as a really strange thing to put in the balance, as if greater wealth were as important as survival.

“All you care about is money,” says Leslie-Anne Down.

“All anyone cares about is money,” says Connery.

There’s a thesis to be written about the popularity of the heist movie in the swinging sixties — the genre slowly gathered steam from THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, THE KILLING and RIFIFI, but became almost ubiquitous in the flower power era, even though the unrestrained capitalist impulse would seem incompatible at first glance with free love and all that. Evidently it was VERY compatible. I guess you have the demise of the Hays Code, so “crime must not pay” goes out the window; you have a generation questioning authority; and law and order thrown into disrepute by a second prohibition, that of recreational drugs. And the hippies were not indifferent to money, just hostile to the rat race. And so now we have Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and the muppets.

Anyway, Oury’s THE BRAIN posits two rival gangs after the same target, the secret wealth of NATO. France had temporarily dropped out of NATO, it seems, so Belmondo, energetic and optimistic as ever, sees nothing wrong in pilfering from the remaining nations, and his dour compatriot Bourvil is persuaded to join him.

(If you want a triple-bill, the third entry should be Melville’s THE RED CIRCLE, with Bourvil as a cat-loving detective and yet another train heist, this time staged with Thunderbirds-style miniatures.)

Meanwhile Niven’s Brain is secretly the officer in charge of security and is planning to filch the sacks of cash himself. This being the sixties, he lives in an opulent mod apartment and keeps a pet leopard. He briefs his team with an animatic showing how the robbery will work. Fiona: “I love that he’s gone to the trouble of making an animated film!” Me: “It’s rotoscoped, so he’s gone to the trouble of shooting it all in live action and then animating on top of it!”

Complications, as they say, ensue: Sicilian money-launderer Eli Wallach wants a bigger cut, and his virginal young sister Silvia Monti wants Niven. This film is silly. There’s a lot of very broad slapstick. The train robbery is mostly covered via process shots, so Belmondo doesn’t perform many of the incredible Keatonesque/Jackie Chan stunts you can see in THE MAN FROM RIO, LES TRIBULATIONS D’UN CHINOIS EN CHINE, FEAR OVER THE CITY, LE CASSE, but it’s all very lavish and undemanding. The opening title sequence drops every sixties special effect on the cutting room floor and tramples them into a fine paste.

THE FIRST GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY stars James Bond; Klute; Dr. Eileen Flax; Master Shallow; Lord Hibbott – Wedding Two; Night Porter; Miss Moneypenny; Esther Waters; Drogue; Lady Felicity: The Palace; Professor Bernard Quatermass; and Mr. Sugden.

THE BRAIN stars Louis-Dominique Bourguignon alias Cartouche; Sir James Bond; Un drogué; Tuco Juan Maria Ramirez, known as The Rat; Miss Milbanke; Lord Henry Wotton; and Le Sergent Mac Fish.