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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
Maurice Binder's gorgeous, abstract, erotic openings to the classic 007 films captured the '60s pop revolution in its purest form.
Jul 29, 2002 | In the scheme of James Bond movies, Maurice Binder is the fifth Beatle. Just as there are several people associated with the Fab Four competing for that honorific (George Martin, Brian Epstein, Stu Sutcliffe, Pete Best), there's more than one person involved with the 007 series whose contributions to the spirit and success of the movies make them invaluable.
John Barry composed the sumptuous scores for most of the great Bond films; Monty Norman wrote the distinctive rumbling Bond theme; production designer Ken Adam conceived most of the cavernous villains' lairs in which Bond finally meets each episode's arch-nemesis. (Ian Fleming, who of course deserves credit for creating Bond in embryo, would not be in the running. It's shocking how much the movies improved on Fleming's flat, pedantic writing, transforming Bond from a puritan disgusted by sex and violence to a suave libertine sadist getting his kicks from them.) But for me the most invaluable Bond Beatle is Maurice Binder, who designed the title sequence for the first Bond film, 1962's "Dr. No." He went on to design (after leaving the credits for "From Russia With Love" and "Goldfinger" to Robert Brownjohn) for every Bond film from 1965's "Thunderball" to 1989's "License to Kill," 14 in all.
The best source of information on Binder is in a short documentary included on the DVD for "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (and let's take a moment to salute MGM/UA for the loving care with which it's packaged the films on DVD). Binder was born in New York in 1925: In his youth he was an art student and later he became the head of advertising for Macy's before eventually going into movies. He was an art collector, a lover of women, a lifelong bachelor. He died of lung cancer in 1991. The details are sketchy. What all the friends and colleagues interviewed for that documentary agree on was that Binder was a charmer and also a very private man. One friend describes going to his funeral, seeing many people she knew, but having no idea that they too were friends of Binder's.
What we can deduce from Binder's title sequences is that his sensibility was a perfect match for Bond's. They are the work of a sensualist connoisseur who went about his work with a naughty sense of play. It's amazing how many nude women Binder was able to work into PG and PG-13 films by shooting them in silhouette or keeping their naughty bits tantalizingly obscured by the credit titles. That visual striptease is an equivalent of the double entendres that stud Bond's witticisms (and given such character names as Pussy Galore and Holly Goodhead, Binder's work is often a lot subtler).
I think that to appreciate the flavor of Binder's work we first have to acknowledge that there were always two 1960s. There was the decade summed up by a National Lampoon bit as "the protests, the marches and, most of all, the music," and there was the pop '60s. Now, when the entire culture seems to be nothing but pop, when deconstruction and iconic tomb-raiding and ironic self-consciousness is the order of the day, when oldies have replaced Muzak in the supermarket, when it's no big deal to see comic books made into movies, when the culture seems nothing but pop, it may be hard to remember the kick of having fashion and pop music and graphic design invade the sensibility of mainstream entertainment.
The most incongruous moment in any Bond movie occurs in "Goldfinger," when Sean Connery complains that drinking Dom Perignon unchilled is like "lish-ning to the Beatlesh without earr-muffsh." That line would seem to draw a barrier between the two '60s, between teenagers and their parents, between hipsters and swingers, between Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! and dooby-dooby-doo, between the Evergreen Review and Playboy, between the pot smokers and the martini drinkers. But the line doesn't work, because Bond movies inhabit the same pop universe as the Beatles.
I understand why veterans of the decade's political struggles or the decade's military veterans may recoil from reducing the '60s to pop. But to many of us too young to have participated politically in the era, or people who weren't even born then, the freedom of the '60s was experienced primarily as the pop explosion. My knowledge of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement, of Bob Dylan and "The Armies of the Night," came later. The '60s, as I experienced them, were "Batman" -- In Color, Petula Clark, "Shindig," the flip hairdos my female cousins wore, "King of the Road," Ed Sullivan, "The Avengers," the Mattel line of secret agent toys and, above all, the Beatles.
I was too young to enjoy the Bond movies in the way that adults enjoyed them, as escapist fantasies of luxury and adventure and sex and travel. The pleasure that the Bond films continue to give me (and, I'd venture, my contemporaries) is partly the distinctive pleasure of finding out that something you responded to as a kid stands the test of time, giving you adult pleasure even as it recalls the thrill it originally gave you.
At its most basic, Binder's work was proof that squares could get a kick out of psychedelia, too. His title designs -- swirling neon fogs of color set against enveloping backgrounds of velvety black -- are all about freedom, not only the freedom of a filmmaker to work abstractly instead of narratively, but a metaphor for the sexy and liberating physical exhilaration of watching James Bond's adventures. You could say that Binder was to Isaac Newton what Blofeld was to Bond. His title sequences are three-minute refutations of the laws of gravity: Figures jump and bounce and run through the colorful voids, or simply luxuriate in midair as if the atmosphere itself had become the most inviting bed in the universe. The sequences are a distillation of the films to color and movement and sex.
