The James Bond films took place in the context of the Cold War, but were really about the women, the glamour and the villains.
I realized that while watching the 007 marathon on TNN over Christmas Break. Few of the Bond films ever directly addressed the tensions between East and West.
The Soviets were perceived as a threat, of course, but more often than not, the bad guys were megalomaniacs who had a bone to pick with society and their own personal reasons for wanting to take over the world.
Anyone who's seen a couple of 007 films knows the formula. Plots are almost immaterial. The bad guy is going to make the mistake of inviting the British superspy for a drink, laying out his entire scheme and proceeding to unsuccessfully try to kill him. An extravagant stunt sequence usually ensues, in which he blows up the villain's lair, saves the world and gets the girl.
The Bond movies are absurd, but they're also fun.
The villains have a comic-book quality to them. Why would anyone with enough money to build himself an opulent hiding place (like the underwater dome in 1977's "The Spy Who Loved Me") and equip a small army of henchmen to protect it, hatch a plot to wreak havoc on a global scale, at great risk to himself, when he could simply retire to a chateau on the French Riviera, sipping fine wines and basking in the company of pretty women?
The villains' ambition always gets the best of them. That's why they insist on slicing Bond in half with a laser (like in 1964's "Goldfinger"), giving him plenty of opportunity to escape instead of just putting a bullet in him.
One can't get too hung up on such matters (though they did make the series ripe for parody in the Austin Powers movies). What separates 007 from so many other mindless action heroes is that the filmmakers know better than to take the material too seriously. Like the "Lethal Weapon" and "Die Hard" pictures, the 007 movies rely heavily on farce.
You can almost hear a sort of childish joy in Bond's delivery when he makes a witty remark after killing a bad guy ("Shocking, absolutely shocking," he says with a slight grin after electrocuting an assassin in a bathtub in "Goldfinger").
Some purists are critical of the Roger Moore era (which spanned across seven movies from 1973 to 1985) because of its frequent forays into slapstick. One scene in 1983's Octopussy even featured him in clown make-up.
Though Moore never had the suave panache of his predecessor Sean Connery, he realized - more than any of the other four actors to don the spy's tuxedo - the ridiculousness of the concept and had fun with it. He winked at the audience to remind them it was all one big charade. It's qualities such as those, but with more of an attitude that made Vin Diesel so enjoyable in "XXX."
Bond stands alongside the Beatles as one of England's great cultural exports of the 1960s. He's a Cold War hero, but one more concerned with picking out an expensive vodka or chatting with a beautiful woman than settling geopolitical disputes. The Cold War was but a minor distraction.
Write to Robert at rclopez@bsu.edu
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