No Crying Shame
No Time To Die has prompted discussion about what is and isn't "Bond", and has provoked emotional responses from fans and sceptics alike. In this unflinchingly honest and beautiful piece, Craig Gent reflects on his childhood relationship to 007 and how Daniel Craig's final bow has given him the Bond he longed for all along.
Warning: contains major spoilers for No Time To Die.
“Anyway, you have given me a wedding present,” says Tracy Bond (Diana Rigg) to her new husband James (George Lazenby) in the final scene of 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The couple have just been discussing having three girls and three boys to start their married life together.
“The best I could have. A future.”
A moment later, she is shot dead by henchwoman Irma Burnt (Ilse Steppat) in a drive-by shooting, Bond's nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas) at the wheel. Through the cracked windscreen we see her face laced with blood from a single bullet wound to the forehead. In the next shot, 007 tells a passing policeman: “It’s quite alright...there’s no hurry you see, we have all the time in the world.” He buries his head into her white headscarf as John Barry’s instrumental ‘We Have All The Time in the World’ fades in before the film closes.
Famously, two versions of the scene were filmed. One in which James Bond, cradling his murdered bride, their future together extinguished, begins to cry. And one in which he does not.
Lazenby’s tears came naturally; whilst filming the scene he had, open in his lap, the corresponding pages of Ian Fleming’s 1963 novel, and his reaction to re-reading them was real. Speaking to the Daily Express newspaper in 2017, Lazenby said he had wondered whether the spy ought to be “allowed to shed a tear at the death of his wife.” In a fateful decision, Lazenby’s preference for the interpretation was overruled. “James Bond doesn’t cry,” so director Peter Hunt told the actor. And so it was.
For some years, I believed him. I was first properly introduced to James Bond around the age of ten, having been vaguely aware of the franchise through the James Bond Jr. series of the early 1990s. As I began ingesting the films, I came to understand the range of attributes that could plausibly fall under the 007 rubric. Across time and circumstance, Bond is suave, brutish, wry, silly, moody or measured, depending on where and when you look. It was part of the fun of getting to know the series, except when it came to Majesty’s.
“Hm, you won’t like that one,” my father told me. “It’s too emotional, it’s almost like a romance.”
I don’t blame my father for not understanding the sort of child I was. After all, we didn’t live together. Although he loved me, sometimes he would poke fun at me for being too sensitive (the reason I couldn’t be a vet, he once told me), and he was disappointed I didn’t like sports more, and I was too effeminate, even if he never said the words. But Bond was our thing, even if it didn’t click for him that, actually, a sensitive boy might appreciate a sensitive film. One year he organised for every member of the family to give me a Bond video for my birthday, so that I’d have the full collection, and I used to carry the entire thing with me in a record bag on family visits, and he would dutifully fall asleep to whichever one I put on.
But home was a different story. At the age of nine, my mother took me and my sister to a women’s refuge to escape her partner, a narcissistic and miserable man who made her life hell. Like most women who leave abusive men, she – we – went back to him a number of times in the following years. It was in this context that the world of the James Bond films became my fantasy and my escape – day in, day out. When my mother was out of the house, my stepfather bullied me for a number of perceived personal failings. When I was trying not to attract his attention, I could pretend I was creeping from room to room looking for secret documents, like Bond in Moonraker. When he made me believe I was obese, I could at least imagine growing up to be big and strapping like Emilio Largo in Thunderball. When he punched my arms and legs because I needed to be “toughened up”, I was Red Grant in From Russia With Love, absorbing Colonel Klebb’s knuckleduster slug to the gut as easily as breathing.
But when he bullied me for crying, and told me off for crying every day, and (who would have believed me?) made me report to him before bed whether I had cried or not, Bond had nothing for me. Each time I felt tears, I practised suppressing them. At first I failed. Then I got better at it, bit by bit, until – at last – I couldn’t shed a tear even if I wanted to. James Bond doesn’t cry.
Given the series has been going since 1962, James Bond necessarily regenerates, each actor expanding what we understand by the character a little more each time. It’s the reason audiences get so animated about speculation over “who will be the next James Bond” – there is an understanding that each Bond will not only look or sound different, but will be a different man to the one we already know. Accordingly, each Bond initiates a new generation of moviegoers into the series with a new tone, forever becoming “their” Bond – the one they grew up with, whether they like it or not. As an older millennial, Pierce Brosnan is my Bond. He’s by no means my favourite, but nonetheless his run from 1995’s GoldenEye to 2002’s Die Another Day was the contemporary filter through which I looked back into the series as a budding film fan, and the basis from which I understood what was possible within this cinematic fantasy – bigger, more outlandish, invisible cars, etc.
George Lazenby, with his sole film in the role, is nobody’s Bond. Upon its release, Majesty’s was maligned by moviegoers for being too emotional and too earnest for a Bond film. Bond might not have been allowed to cry, but burying his head into his dead wife’s headscarf, indulging her teasing about children, falling in love – it just wasn’t very “Bond”. As a result, this variation of the James Bond formula was seldom explored further, and the box office receipts hardly demanded it. At least, until Daniel Craig entered the franchise – a Bond for whom danger and grit was matched, really for the first time since Lazenby, with a fundamental tragedy and sense of loss. His strongest films play out, as my father might have put it to my younger self, almost like a romance. This tenor, first depicted by Craig in 2006’s Casino Royale, is raised to unprecedented heights in the newest film in Eon’s 007 franchise, No Time To Die, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga.
We meet Bond on the other side of Her Majesty’s Service, retired and in the early stages of building a new life with Dr Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux, given a role mercifully improved since 2015’s Spectre). A seeming betrayal calls back to Casino and splits the pair up, perhaps for good, and Bond retreats to Jamaica – where the character was brought to life by Fleming – until he is enticed into one last mission by encounters with his CIA ally Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright, rumpled) and new double-O agent Nomi (Lashana Lynch, cool).
So far, so familiar. Yet what unfolds is no regular 007 adventure. Bond reconnects with Swann, but it is tentative rather than triumphant. His reacquaintance with MI6 is offish, but he is deferential to his replacement rather than denigrating. It’s not, some have already said, very “Bond” at all. Swann reveals she has a daughter (Lisa-Dorah Sonnet), which we suspect is Bond’s, despite her claims otherwise. And although Rami Malek’s improbably-named Lyutsifer Safin (we get it) recalls blander villains from the series, he carries in his possession a vial of a biological weapon that, once spilled, will mean Bond, James Bond can never see his – whisper it – family ever again.
Unlike Spectre’s contrived nod and winks, No Time To Die pays homage to the Bond canon with a good deal of care. Borrowing elements from Fleming’s novel ‘You Only Live Twice’ (no volcano-dwelling rockets), the film wants to remind the viewer of Dr No, The Living Daylights, and, to the aficionado, a notably dark chapter from For Your Eyes Only (which, incidentally, Roger Moore hated). But it is by making peace with Majesty’s, over 50 years later, that the franchise wishes to mark the conclusion of the Craig era. John Barry’s score for that film is invoked by Hans Zimmer on numerous occasions, not at all subtly but affectionately nonetheless.
So far, so sweet. Yet now – just as in 1969 – the decidedly emotional swell of the film has led to condemnation and hostility from some quarters of the viewing public, not least a “long line of angry little men” (to borrow a formulation from the film) who are demanding apologies from producers and official Bond custodians Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson. Really.
This collective case of “male tears” was to be expected. After all, just as James Bond is a peculiarly (white) British national fantasy, he’s also the pinnacle of (straight) male wish-fulfilment within mainstream popular culture. Despite repeated and widely accepted insistences that the future success of the character will depend on the series’ ability to make Bond relevant to the twenty-first century, there have always been those who would prefer the franchise to be a time capsule, to revel in its anachronisms, and to remain – at its very core – the last bastion of a variety of masculinity wholly untouched by such “wokery” as leads to women – not least a Black one, as in No Time To Die – being granted their own licence to kill.
One of the consequences of continuing a film series for almost sixty years is that returning viewers experience a changeful relationship to it over the course of their lives. Like many fans of the series, Bond for me was not merely a childhood superhero, but has instead been a figure to grapple with over the years.
Times have changed since Dr No’s release in October 1962, and largely for the better. No, it shouldn’t be normal for Bond to sexually assault women to gain the upper hand anymore, as in Goldfinger and Thunderball. Nor should today’s Bond films imply African-Americans in the same neighbourhood are all operating as part of a shadowy network, as Live and Let Die did. In time, one hopes, facial disfigurement will no longer be used as lazy shorthand to denote a character’s menace. Alas, as of No Time To Die we still have a way to go.
Yet there’s no escaping that Bond will never be a searing social commentary because he only makes sense as fantasy. Even as a male fantasy. My introduction to Bond provided a welcome escape from a tumultuous home life. He was my male role model at a time when real-world ones let me down, and even as I grew up and became more conscious of the films’ “complexities”, the boy in me only ever wanted to see the best in 007.
As the canon continues past its diamond jubilee and speculation turns to candidates for Bond’s next regeneration, retrospectives on Craig’s run of films are bound to assess the hits and misses of the franchise’s first proper attempt at serialisation. But his real legacy is that he has broadened the scope of what Bond is allowed to be. His is not a “woke” Bond, and not a perfect Bond either, but an emotionally brave Bond who wears his imperfections on his finely tailored sleeve. At No Time To Die’s action climax, a continuous shot more reminiscent of Children of Men than A View To a Kill is lit up in contrasting hues of ochre and blue, Bond battling his way between them through an onslaught of anonymous combatants. He feels every blow. If Craig has achieved anything singularly, it is that he has captured the core duality and tragedy of the character: an orphan recruited as an assassin for the state, yet one who – deep down – longs for the promise of another life entirely.
Unable to trace original artist - please get in touch if it’s you!
In Craig’s final scene, Bond waits for imminent death. He has no quip, no clever gadget, and no time. He speaks to Madeleine Swann on the radio, telling her he has loved her and that their daughter is beautiful. Although his fate is secured, he is allowed to say the words another Bond in a different time never had the chance to. The moment before missiles rain down on his position, we only see James Bond from behind, but I like to imagine the gap between his last words and his last breath were filled with tears streaming down his bruised and smiling face.
At last, I cried too. I cried for the spy I loved and who loved me back, and for the young sensitive boy I knew who only wanted a role model, and who thought he more than anyone else in the world could really see the best in 007, forever following him from the torment of each day into the promised escape of every film.
I don’t blame some fans for holding a preference for the old over the new. But nostalgia weaves two ideas: nostos and algos; returning home, and pain. No Time To Die knows this. It surges with feelings of home and sorrow, understanding – like On Her Majesty’s Secret Service before it – that Bond’s cruelest fate will always be to walk the line between a hope realised and extinguished.
In doing so, No Time To Die finally allows Bond a masculinity that is honest but not intransigent, stoic but not granitic, and that – with Craig’s final bow – might finally allow him to mourn all that is and could have been. That’s no crying shame.
Craig Gent is a bisexual Bond fan and film writer based in Leeds, Yorkshire. By night he blogs at Alone on the Front Row and tweets at @aloneinthefront. By day he is a problem eliminator with Novara Media. He is currently writing a book on the politics of digital media (due 2023, Verso Books).
