Daniel Craig: Mysteries of the Reincarnation of James Bond

English Naval Intelligence officer Ian Fleming's fictional agent James Bond has always been a weird property since he made the leap to cinema in 1962. Franchise producers EON Productions and MGM/United Artists (the latter was recently acquired by a consortium comprised of Sony Corporation of America, Providence Equity Partners, Texas Pacific Group, Comcast Corporation, and DLJ Merchant Banking Partners, by the by) have managed to hold admirably tight control over the product, with only a handful of exceptions.

We'll set aside for the moment that all of the official films through Goldeneye were produced by a man named "Cubby" Broccoli. The exceptions all have weird little backstories and twists. Never Say Never Again is fundamentally a remake of Thunderball. The novel the latter was based on was adapted from a screenplay project author Fleming worked on in the 50s called Longitude 78 West which was never filmed: Fleming was sued over the appropriation of the work by one of his producing partners, English producer/writer Kevin McClory, who was awarded film rights over the story - rights which earned him involvement in the "official" EON production of Thunderball and gave him the power to make the retitled remake completely outside of the official Bond system. McClory muddied the waters further by securing the services of then-retired Bond stalwart Sean Connery for the role.

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The other exception is Casino Royale. Film rights to the first Bond novel were sold separately, prior to the package deal with EON, in the early fifties for a thousand dollars. It was first made into a reportedly unremarkable television special in 1954 as part of CBS Television's, I kid you not, "Climax Mystery Theater" just a year after the novel was published.

But the real gem is the 1967 Columbia Pictures adaptation by Charles K. Feldman (also responsible for the Woody Allen-scripted farce What's New, Pussycat?). The film featured Peter Sellers, whose diva-style demands of his role reportedly required multiple rewrites of a script that eventually featured three credited writers as well as script doctoring by a cadre of uncredited talent including Woody Allen, Joseph Heller and Billy Wilder. Among other features of confusion, multiple characters carry the James Bond identity in the movie, the result of a convoluted plot involving one "real" Sir James Bond (David Niven) and a host of Bond impersonators, Sellers among them. The film featured such heavyweights as Ursula Andress, John Huston and Orson Welles and is generally critiqued as an ambitious but sprawling and incoherent parody of the Bond movie canon, or more rarely as some sort of postmodern metafilm permeated by "the failure of modernity and a celebration of what Umberto Eco would call the postmodern 'crisis of reason' [not made up]".

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It's interesting because the novel Casino Royale is altogether a more straightforward construction, all but bereft of the gadgetry and self-reference that came to define the movie series. The suave manner and high style of the Bond character remains, but it is counterpoint to the mission-minded agent's ruthless attitude and casual violence.

So what's to be made of of the newly-acquired MGM/UA electing to adapt Casino Royale for the third time in its launch of new Bond face, English actor Daniel Craig? The project is reputed to be a reversal of over forty years of Bond Movie Canon, drawing more closely on the atmospheric spy intrigue of the original novel and largely abandoning entrenched serial plot elements like the pervasive spy gizmos and comic-relief characters Q and Miss Moneypenny. The most recent crop of deeply canonical, high-tech action vehicles helmed by Pierce Brosnan, while critically nondescript, have nevertheless claimed unprecedented box-office receipts. While this picture isn't black and white (as recent films' budgets have similarly swelled into 9 figure territory), the thematic move proposed for Casino Royale has to be seen as a risk.

So okay, you say, now I have this new perspective on some of the depth and convolutions of a strange cultural franchise. But where is the joke? What's the wry take on all this pomo cultural gak? Man, I don't know. Maybe I assumed it would lead somewhere. Did I mention, I'm quite ill. Imagine there was some sort of suggestion of a remake of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with, like, say Clive Owens as Caratacus Potts (you know, Dick Van Dyke)? And the title will be just Bang Bang? I know, it doesn't quite hold together. But it might just be permeated with the failure of modernity.

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