Keeping the British End Up: Four Decades of Saucy Cinema

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For Roger, it made sense, “This is a famous spy--everyone knows his name, and every bartender in the world knows he likes martinis shaken, not stirred. Come on, it's all a big joke! So most of the time I played it tongue-in-cheek." He thought of Bonds as pure hokum, "People are always reading things into the films. We set out to make entertainment. There's no hidden agenda. They're just ‘Whambam-thank-you-ma'am! here comes a pretty girl, there goes a car chase, let's shoot a helicopter down.' That's as deep as they got." Moore also understood his audience, “We have very little brutality in Bond. As Cubby once said, we are sadism for the family. Most of the violence is mechanical, Disney violence.” After dinner, there will be an auction of items kindly donated by well known Bond brands, with all the proceeds going to Macmillan cancer support. We knew it had to be special. It just wouldn’t do to have 007GB’s 2023 centrepiece event at a run-of-the-mill location. James Bond is a Navy man, so why not a battleship? And not just any battleship: HMS Belfast.

Moore’s on screen talent was immense but made to look effortless, leading to the popular myth that he could not act. He was sometimes his chief detractor but explained, “Listen, if I say I'm shit as an actor, then the critic can't, because I've already said it! For years my agents would tell me, 'You've got to stop saying these things about yourself. People will believe you.' So? They may also be pleasantly surprised!"

Roger Moore was always destined to play 007. “As a matter of fact, Cubby [Broccoli] and Harry [Saltzman] tell me that when they first started making the Bonders, I was their first choice for the role. I don't believe them, of course. But that's what they say. They also said I was Ian Fleming's first choice. But Ian Fleming didn't know me from shit. He wanted Cary Grant or David Niven." Moore had been aware of the character, “I knew that the English newspaper, the Daily Express, was running a competition to find a James Bond. I’d developed a nasty habit, or continued a nasty habit, of gambling. I found myself playing at least once a week, across the table, with Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. They told me about it all and invited me to see Dr. No which, considering the low budget, was a great effort. I thought Sean Connery was marvellous. I started the The Saint around the same time.” Indeed whilst the first Bond film premiered in London on 5 October 1962, but the day before had seen the debut of what would go on to be a star-making vehicle for Roger as Leslie Charteris’ Simon Templar in the hit TV show, The Saint. It is with great sadness that the global James Bond fan community has learned of the death of Sir Roger Moore at his home in Switzerland at the age of 89. The England for which Bond is prepared to die, like the reasons why he’s prepared to die for it, is largely taken for granted. This differentiates it, to its advantage, from the England of most Englishmen. … Negative virtues are even more important in escapist than in enlightening literature, and not the least of the blessings enjoyed by Mr. Fleming’s reader is his absolute confidence that whatever any given new Bond may contain, it will not contain bitter protests or biting satire or even witty commentary about the state of the nation. We can get all of that at home.… Politically, Bond’s England is substantially right of center. As the title of the eleventh volume uninhibitedly proclaims, royalty is at the head of things. … An unwontedly emotional passage near the end of Doctor Noshows Bond … conferring in the office of the Governor of Jamaica and thinking of home. … ‘His mind drifted into a world of tennis courts and lily pads and kings and queens, of London, of people being photographed with pigeons on their heads in Trafalgar Square…’

A uniquely Bondian landmark location. VIP guests who are heroes to the Bond community. Fabulous food and drink. Brass Quintet from Q the Music. A spectacular event we will be talking about for decades to come. Join us in celebrating the 70th anniversary of Fleming’s Bond, honouring the work of director John Glen and toasting the inauguration of 007GB, The British James Bond Fan Club. Moore was in the frame to take over eventually, his friendship with Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman standing him in good stead, as he quipped “What better way for a potential Bond than to meet the producers.” Early on he established an attitude towards 007, "I tried to find out what Bond was all about, but you can't tell much from the books. There's the line that says 'He didn't take pleasure in killing, but took pride in doing it well.' So that's what I did.” The actor gave an insight into the additional pressures of being 007 “During filming, I gave more than 150 interviews to newspaper reporters, magazine journalists and the major television interviewers of five different countries. Normally, I don't mind talking to the press because it is part of my job. I'm very aware of the interest in James Bond but, finally, there is just so much you can say about him and the film you' re doing. And it doesn't stop when the filming does. There are photo gallery sessions, film festivals, movie premieres, publicity trips to the major foreign film markets. It begins to get to you when you hear yourself saying the same things, over and over, without meaning to do so." He developed standard quips. When asked if he did his own stunts, he responded, “Of course I do! I also do my own lying." Asked about the hardest part of being Bond, he joked, "The love scenes, of course." Our very special guest of honour will be John Glen, the man who directed every Bond film of the 1980s, from For Your Eyes Only through to Licence to Kill. John will be the recipient of the 'Bond & Beyond' lifetime achievement award on the evening. Glen’s films have brought so many of us so much joy and this will be an opportunity for us to show him our appreciation. Live And Let Die was a huge success resulting in a steady increase in global box office, reaching new and younger audiences and crossing generations.

SkyFall

Roger Moore and Barbera Bach in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). Photograph: www.ronaldgrantarchive.com Major Fleming] had that foundation of spontaneous and almost unconscious self-suppression in the discharge of what he conceived to be his duty without which happiness, however full … is imperfect. That these qualities are not singular in this generation does not lessen the loss of those in whom they shine. As the war lengthens and intensifies … it seems as if one watched at night a well-loved city whose lights, which burn so bright, which burn so true, are extinguished in the distance in the darkness one by one. Over the years Moore made Bond his own often acting with players from his past: he was at RADA with Lois “Moneypenny” Maxwell, had done TV with Robert Brown and Geoffrey Keen (M and Minister of Defence respectively), was good friends with David ‘Felix Leiter’ Hedison and had directed a number of other in episodes of The Saint, most notably Julian ‘Kristatos’ Glover. He had also gotten to know a number of the crew including the director of his last three Bonds, John Glen with whom he had worked on a slew of big, international action pictures in the seventies.

Moore’s method was effective: when confronting a villain, he imagined his nemesis had halitosis. "If you watch those scenes, you'll see I look mildly repulsed." He envied his colleagues hired to play the baddie, “Oh yeah, they’re the best part! Poor old Jim, all he does is stand around and say, ‘My name is Bond, James Bond,’ whereas a villain says ‘this is the end of the world, this is the end of civilization as you know it, Mr Bond!’” A self-confessed coward, Moore was bemused by his image as some kind of hero, “Ah, well that’s where the acting comes in you see! I look incredibly brave, but I’m very, very good at getting people to look like me.” The New York Times’s film review of “Live and Let Die” noted that the Bond movies hold a “certain insolence toward public pieties.” This certainly seems true. But why then are the films—like the books before them—so incredibly popular? The answer is that, like with any good spy, Bond has proven adept at creating a little misdirection here and there. Raymond Chandler famously suggested that Bond was “what every man would like to be and what every woman would like to have between her sheets.” This is generally perceived to mean that men want to be Bond because he daringly saves the world from megalomaniacal madmen while bedding women who lust after him because he’s dangerous. But what if all of this were just cover? What if men wanted to be Bond because secretly—or maybe not so secretly—they wanted to be less neutered, more decisive, more graceful under pressure, more accountable, and less postmodern? Sean Connery had created the role and had become a iconic cinema hero. Moore was unperturbed, “You don’t really think about that. How many millions of actors during the last 400 years have played Hamlet? They don’t worry about how the other fella did it—they just get on with doing it their way. And everything I do comes out exactly the same! I always sound like me.”

Bond Lifestyle

Commander James Bond, recruited to the British Secret Service from the Royal Navy. License to kill, and has done so on numerous occasions. Many lady friends, but married Admittedly, Brosnan’s Die Another Day quip was a blatant rehash of this Moore classic from the punniest of all Bond entries – the first of three from the film. To be honest, this barely qualifies as a double entendre: Tatiana Romanova complains about the size of her mouth, before our man gallantly comforts her.