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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The truth is that a lot of the great old spy movies aren't so great, but the sexiness and style of James Bond and the Avengers never gets old.
Jul 26, 2002 | While we all publicly claim to prefer substance to style, there's something to be said for rolling around naked on a revolving futuristic bed verdant with $20 bills or smashing around in a silver-gray Aston Martin D.B.5. Those are just a few of the pleasures that the '60s spy genre offers us -- vicariously. You can't have everything, especially a sports car with an ejector seat and a rear bullet shield.
For plenty of people who grew up in the '60s, as well as for anyone who has watched way too much TV or even simply seen an Austin Powers movie, the dozens of spy movies and TV shows of the era were more of a mood that stretched across the decade than a fleeting trend. The genre typifies the '60s like no other, probably because it made such a perfect canvas for the colors of the time: our vague (or specific) Cold War fears, our realization that pop culture could be its own kind of art, our belief that technology really could make our lives easier. That few of the movies and TV shows of the genre were really any good is irrelevant. These were movies and shows made for a world that felt it had everything to look forward to and no particularly good reason to look back. They represented better living not just through science but also through go-go boots, lavish subterranean bachelor pads, and cigarettes that killed with bullets instead of cancer.
That must be why the style of the genre has proved to be so resonant, repeatedly reinvigorated in pop culture ephemera (music videos and pinball games) and in movies like the three Austin Powers pictures, including the latest, "Goldmember," and Roman Coppola's '60s love letter "CQ." Yet so much of the '60s spy stuff was lousy, or at least vaguely inadequate: Television shows like "I Spy" and "The Saint" were reasonably entertaining, even if their plots often meandered (and in the former, the banter between Bill Cosby and Robert Culp was the thing to watch, anyway). The Matt Helm movies with Dean Martin ("The Silencers," "The Wrecking Crew") and the Derek Flint movies with James Coburn ("In Like Flint," "Our Man Flint") were campy spoofs that never seemed to realize they didn't have to work so hard to send up the objects of their ridicule, which were pretty broad to begin with. And the movies that put great-looking women in the leading roles, like the 1966 "Modesty Blaise" (with Monica Vitti) and the 1967 "Fathom" (with Racquel Welch), suffer from lazy carelessness, as if having a hot babe in the starring role rendered minor details like plot and dialogue insignificant.
But glaring insufficiencies rarely cloud the fond, hazy memories of those shows and movies. Even the ones too junky to defend offer little details and pleasures that have stuck: the red phone in "Our Man Flint" that blinks ridiculously and plays a little tune (borrowed by Mike Myers for the Austin Powers movies), or the opening credits of "I Spy," with their Colorforms graphics and syncopated theme music, an opening that's like a jolt of caffeine by itself.
And then there are the examples of the genre worth going back to time and again. Television shows like "The Avengers" (specifically, the seasons spanning the Emma Peel years, from 1965 to 1968) and, of course, movies like the Sean Connery James Bond pictures are just as familiar to Scottish grannies as they are to American college kids. Add to those a few oddball underground choices, like Mario Bava's fabulous 1968 action adventure "Diabolik" (which isn't technically a spy picture, although its pop stylishness suits the genre perfectly). Somehow, on the basis of a few well-conceived shows and movies that have aged well, and a whole lot of disposable stuff that hasn't, the '60s spy genre has kept on grooving.
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Who doesn't love the early James Bond movies? Plenty of people, it turns out. In Great Britain, there's a certain segment of the population (aged around 50 now) that doesn't think much of them, mostly because they're redolent with the ancient, moldering sexual politics they'd much rather leave behind (in addition to the fact that Bond was so devoted to queen and country and all that rot). And I've watched '60s Bond movies with audiences that hissed at what they perceived as sexually retrograde behavior -- like the moment in "Goldfinger" (1964) when 007 dispatches a bathing-suit-clad cutie by slapping her on the fanny.
But I think there's a much better defense for that fanny slapping (and other such naughtiness on the part of that classy rapscallion Bond) than a half-hearted, "Well, things were different then." If we look at the movies -- any movies -- as repositories of appropriate or desirable behavior, we're bound to be disappointed. Or, worse yet, bored. Bond's behavior makes sense for Bond. (At least, for Bond as he was reinvented for the movies; the Bond of the original Ian Fleming novels is something of a puritan when it comes to sex, and he's prone to feeling guilt and repulsion -- imagine! -- when he kills someone.)
Bond is certainly a spoiled boy when it comes to earning the attention and affection of women; they're so compliant you can almost see their skin melting under his fingers. What's more, there are so many of them fluttering around him (not one, that I can recall, with a gun to her head) that he has to brush them away like flies in order to get any work done. It's all part of the gag.
