Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (Cinema and Society) [Paperback]

This is a review of the second edition of 2007, the book originally appearing in 1999 and forms part of a series on `Cinema and Society'. However daunting this may sound, it is actually written in a non-academic style with a refreshing lack of jargon. James Chapman informs us that he writes "both from the perspective of a film historian and as a Bond fan." In his acknowledgements, though, he mentions that, "Most of the illustrations in this book were provided by ..." Be warned: there are no illustrations!

The author was eight years' old when he saw his first Bond movie, `The Spy Who Loved Me'. I too was eight when I saw mine, although it was `Live and Let Die'. But I do not rate Roger Moore's first Bond film as high as I do the author's choice, Moore's third, and so I felt immediately some kind of sympathetic engagement with the author who had the eye of the 1970s rather than that of the previous decade.

In his introduction, Chapman asks why we should take Bond seriously, since Ian Fleming thought we should not take him seriously at all. Chapman argues that those who disregard the views of Bond's creator are either "Fleming purists who have little time for the films", or the film fans who have rarely read the books. He naturally concentrates on the films - "sexist, heterosexist, jingoistic, xenophobic and racist" - but his book is not "yet another account of the production histories ... It is, rather, ... a cultural history ... I shall seek to place the Bond films in the contexts of British cinema history and film culture."

In the first of nine chapters, Chapman looks at Fleming's novels through the eyes of 1950s-1960s Britain with reference to critiques by the likes of Kingsley Amis, Umberto Eco, and David Cannadine. He points out that the 1954 US TV film of `Casino Royale', "for all its Americanisation, ... remains the most `authentic' adaptation of a Fleming novel", and also draws attention to the influence of Hitchcock's `North by Northwest' in Bond's transition from the page to the cinema screen.

The remaining eight chapters group together the films in chronological order. The second chapter, `Snobbery with Violence', tries to pinpoint what it was that made the first three movies a success in Britain. Chapman sees Bond in `Dr No' as "the last imperial hero", whilst `From Russia with Love' is "the most political of the early Bond movies ... and the most old-fashioned." In the next chapter, Chapman looks at the concept of Bondmania in the context of the 1960s's cultural regeneration where "youth, sex appeal and modernity" took hold. He also looks at why `On Her Majesty's Secret Service' did not perform so well. Long "unfairly neglected and under-valued", its reputation has grown "to the extent that many aficionados ... number it among their favourite Bond films."

Chapter four sees `Bond in Transition', not just from Connery to Moore, but "gimmicks and visual jokes become more pronounced ... at the expense of narrative logic and characterisation." Action thrillers become action comedies. Whilst Chapman rightly challenges the Blaxploitation of `Live and Let Die', he is quiet about the homophobia of `Diamonds Are Forever', a movie that he describes as `camp', although I don't think it really fits the bill as such; see Umberto Eco's definition in `On Ugliness'. In the fifth chapter, `Keeping the British End Up', Chapman sees visual spectacle as the primary feature of `The Spy Who Loved Me' and `Moonraker': "The narrative is reduced virtually to a travelogue."

`Cold Warrior Reborn' is the title of the sixth chapter, alluding to the Thatcher and Reagan years of the 1980s. But whereas Bond was "once seen as an embodiment of progressive modernisation", Chapman perceptively argues that the films "had now come to represent a heritage industry construction of British culture." Timothy Dalton's movies are analysed in the seventh chapter, `Continuity and Change'. Dalton was a darker Bond who did things that the relatively lightweight Roger Moore would never have done.

The penultimate chapter reviews Bond in the form of Pierce Brosnan. But here feminism rises to the top of the agenda in the shape of Judi Dench as M. But Goldeneye's "strategy for incorporating feminist discourses is not to alter bond's attitude towards woman, but rather to alter the attitudes of the women ... to Bond himself." As an aside, I was amused by Chapman's reference to the car camouflage overstepping "the rule of plausibility"; doesn't every bond film?

And so we come to Daniel Craig's Bond and `Casino Royale'. Chapman is right to describe it is a reboot of Bond, but his definition is more akin to a re-invention. A reboot, rather, is a return to the beginning of a concept so that it can again work well, and here, as an example, Bond "for the first time, is seriously seen to bleed". Another example is the way how Bond is no longer necessarily a likeable `chap'; the harder he is, the more dislikeable he becomes, the more realistic the film, the more respectful we become of the production.

There are seventeen pages of endnotes, a full filmography that covers eighteen pages, a bibliography, and an index. This is a marvellous book that opens the Bond series of movies to new interpretations and new cultural contexts.

First Serious Book to look in to the Critical,socilogical impact the 007 films have made on society,though,the book takes nearly 60 pages to really get started it is a unbiased,kowledgeble book highly recomended for all serious Bnd fans

Most books on Bond and the 007 phenomenon fall between two camps. On the one hand, there's the utterly pretentious tosh churned out by the likes of Umberto Eco and Simon Winder, and on the other there are the big, glossy books with lots of pictures but not much serious analysis of what Bond is about.

This cultural history of Bond in film falls somewhere between the two, to be honest. It's a workmanlike, thorough assessment of all the films (the new edition covers up to Casino Royale) but a tad dreary at times, and almost a minute disection of things which goes too far in its attempt to add academic rigour to what is really just a big entertainment franchise concerned with making popular films and lots of money.

But if you can get paid to watch, and re-watch the entire canon of Bond films and then write about them with some degree of wider perspective, then I guess you're doing something right with your career. The danger of course, is that the subject matter just isnt worth the level of investigation in the first place. Ian Fleming was typically British and upper class in his dismissal of his own work as something to read on the train as escapist fiction; but film buffs tend to take themselves a bit more seriously than that. For all the points made here, the book overlooks a couple of essential points about Bond in the cinema - firstly, the films are little more than "Carry On Spying" with double entendres and stunts; and secondly, the series has been recycling itself with less and less orginality since 1964's "Goldfinger". Spinning the analysis beyond this is impressive, but largely irrelvant in any disection of a film series that, at its heart is: empty, dated, sexist claptrap.