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Home , Barbara Carrera, Irvin Kershner, Jack Whittingham, Kevin McClory, Never Say Never Again, Philip French

Accepted manuscript version of: Schwanebeck, Wieland. “License to Replicate: (1983) as 007’s Lesson in Adaptation Studies.” Uncovered, edited by Jeremy Strong, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 163–84.

Wieland Schwanebeck (Dresden)

Licence to Replicate:

Never Say Never Again (1983) as 007’s Lesson in Adaptation Studies

Traditionally, the James Bond franchise existed outside the jurisdiction of adaptation studies,

where the prestige of canonical literature frequently continues to overshadow the merits of

film, especially popular blockbuster cinema. Though no-one working in adaptation studies

would voice this attitude, the prevalent opinion still seems to be that cinema, as a ‘hot

medium’ (Marshall McLuhan), “requires a less active response from the viewer” (Gjelsvik

256). Some go so far as to speak of a general “bias in favour of literature as both a privileged

[…] and an aesthetically sanctified field”, which may account for adaptation studies’s

reputation as “fundamentally conservative” (Leitch 2008: 64f.) More recently, they have

widened their focus and have gradually become more inclusive, investigating ‘lowbrow’

fiction and transmedial processes.1

Admittedly, this new inclusiveness entails certain dangers for the objects of their studies.

Leaving popular franchises like James Bond out of adaptation studies certainly smacked of

elitism and disdain, but it allowed them to retain a notable advantage which films that we

more commonly perceive as literary adaptations don’t enjoy: they were treated as films in

their own right, not as secondary (inter-)texts which come with the alleged flaw of owing their

very existence to literary forerunners. Thomas Leitch argues that adaptation scholars tend to

view films as carrying “the single function of replicating (or, worse, failing to replicate)” a

given source text, and that they often treat an adaptation as “an intertext designed to be looked

through, like a window on the source text.” (2007: 17) The Bond films may have been

subjected to all kinds of critical attacks (most notably with regard to their sexism and their

misogyny, their exoticism and neo-colonialist politics, or their near-fascist contempt for the

1 value of human life), but they usually don’t come under fire for somehow ‘falling short’ of the literary merits of . After all, the latter’s qualities as a writer are debatable; right from the beginning, Bond scholarship was taken with the structural and formulaic aspects of the Bond novels more than with their stylistic qualities or their psychology.2 Even Fleming’s admirers occasionally sound somewhat tongue-in-cheek when singing the author’s praises:

Kingsley Amis’s Bond Dossier famously introduces Bond as “the man who is only a silhouette” (11), which characterises his abilities as a spy as much as it does the character’s lack of substance.

The prestige traditionally bestowed upon literary texts arguably puts certain restraints on studying film adaptations. As a consequence, one may well assume that the Bond films don’t have much to gain from being viewed as adaptations, just because they are (or rather: used to be) based on a series of novels which have long been eclipsed by the success of the films.

However, the Bond films deserve a place within adaptation studies, even though this should not lead us up the blind alley of assessing how ‘close’ or ‘faithful’ the films are to Fleming’s novels.3 What I propose instead here follows recent forays into the ‘adaptation industry’ (e.g. the work of Simone Murray) in order to clarify how the Bond series continues to invoke Ian

Fleming as its point of origin, and how this process is complicated both by the franchise’s necessary emphasis on continuous renewal (exemplified by an obsession with uncanny doppelgangers, death and resurrection in ’s Bond films), and by legal wrangles behind the scenes. I will conclude with a case study of Never Say Never Again (1983), a kind of ‘bastard child’ of the Bond franchise whose existence problematises the series’ official adaptation policy.

1. James Bond’s Adaptation History

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Though my analysis will neither adopt the tools nor the rhetoric of fidelity criticism in order to assess the Bond series, it does make sense to briefly look into the franchise’s adaptation policy and to take note of its overall tendency to emancipate itself from Fleming’s source texts ever since the Eon series’ inception in 1962. While the Bond series is usually classified in terms of decades (‘the 1960s’, ‘the 1970s’), of actors (‘the years’, ‘the era of

Pierce Brosnan’), or of contemporary geopolitical developments (‘the Cold War era’, ‘the post-9/11 world’), it makes sense to roughly distinguish between three periods when it comes to Bond’s adaptation history.

(I) 1962-1973: For about the first decade, the films tended to respect the plots of Ian

Fleming’s novels. It has been argued that, starting with (1964), the producers abandoned quite a few of the key elements of Fleming’s milieu, ditching the conventions of in favour of sheer spectacle and producing variations on a tested formula, with a number of characteristic components (including the villain, the girl, the exotic location, the

MacGuffin) remaining in place (Sellers 165-170). True, the film series largely ignores

Fleming’s chronology: as the rights to (1953) were not available, they first adapted Dr. No (1957), the sixth Bond novel, and would subsequently produce the Blofeld trilogy not in Fleming’s order. However, readers of the novels will still recognise most of the major elements and characters when watching the films. Unlike the 1964 novel, the film version of You Only Live Twice (1967) neither features a traumatised Bond nor does it end with him sustaining a head injury and suffering from amnesia, but it is still a story about Bond going after Blofeld in Japan, aided by members of the Japanese secret service and posing as a

Japanese fisherman. Similarly, the film adaptation of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

(1963/1969) retains the essence of ‘Operation Bedlam’, Blofeld’s biological warfare plans and his castle in the Alps, as well as the marriage plot;4 (1954/1973), while dropping the novel’s treasure hunt and Mr. Big’s connections to SMERSH, features

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Fleming’s main plot about Mr. Big’s Harlem associations, his interest in Voodoo and his personal fortune-teller, Solitaire.

(II) 1974-1987: starting with The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), the films begin to liberate themselves more and more from the source texts. Though they retain the titles of Fleming’s novels and short stories, their plots and characters bear little to no resemblance to them. Roger

Moore’s tenure as 007 has been labelled the most pronouncedly silly and campy period of

007, though the films are, in fact, just silly and outlandish in different ways than Fleming’s books: unlike its subsequent film adaptation, Fleming’s novel The Spy Who Loved Me (1962)

– the most singularly ill-received book in the whole series (Chapman 2015: 16) – neither features a megalomaniac villain who plans to erase humanity in order to populate the Ocean nor a gigantic henchman named Jaws who uses steel-capped teeth to bite his victims to death, yet its homodiegetic narrative, told from the point of view of a young woman who secretly desires to be raped, is certainly no less outrageous. Up until the mid-1980s, Fleming continues to provide the kernel of the stories, and the production apparatus fleshes them out, substituting characters, adding topical elements of the day and, of course, gadgets, with the effect that readers of the novels may sometimes struggle to recognise Fleming’s material. No doubt this is partly due to the chameleon-like qualities which 007 exhibits during this period, a form of adaptability which allowed the franchise to successfully absorb cinematic trends: no sooner had launched the modern science-fiction blockbuster (, 1977) than

Bond went into space (, 1979),5 and when neo-colonial exoticism and global location-hopping became cinematic virtues again with the success of the Indiana Jones franchise (, 1981), Bond conquered India (, 1983), courtesy to a script co-written by George MacDonald Fraser, author of the popular Flashman adventure novels. The fact that Bond had, by this time, long shaken off his literary ancestor, is testified to by a small but telling alteration in the films’ credit sequences: starting with The

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Spy Who Loved Me, the credits for the films no longer announced Sean Connery or Roger

Moore ‘as James Bond 007 in Ian Fleming’s ...’, but they presented the respective actor ‘as

Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007 in ...’, thus emphasising that Fleming was the creator of Bond, but not of the story about to unfold on screen (Schwanebeck 510).6

(III) 1989 to present: Starting with (1989), we are fully into the post-Fleming era. Some notable exceptions aside,7 most of the Bond films since then, while constantly referencing the Fleming canon and turning increasingly into pastiche films brimming with self-referential quotations, have been based on original scripts, many of them written by Neal

Purvis and Robert Wade, with prominent screenwriters like Paul Haggis or John Logan making occasional guest contributions. From a legal stand-point, these ‘original’ Bond scripts still count as adaptations, even though the “franchise character” they are based on “float[s] free of any specific novelistic incarnation” (Leitch 2014b: 91).

We can thus observe a movement from ‘traditional’ adaptations of best-selling novels towards what Leitch calls secondary imitations, that is, sequels to adaptations, where the entire plot develops around a character that has “the ability to generate continuing adventures.” (Leitch

2007: 120) Interestingly, the series continues to invoke Ian Fleming as its point of origin whilst liberating itself more and more from his writings. This points to an interesting conservatism inherent in the franchise: though they have long turned to producing their own original material, the Bond producers have at the same time paid lip service to the idea of protecting Fleming’s legacy, which has resulted in a considerable author fetish and cult surrounding Fleming. After all, none of the numerous post-Fleming novels which have appeared with some degree of regularity since 1968 have been adapted for the screen so far, as though the authorised Bond gospel had to be defended against apocryphal texts.8

It would be easy to mock this near-religious belief in the creator of the (Bond) universe, if it were not for the tendency in Bond scholarship to uncritically adopt it. For the most part, Bond

5 scholars limit their studies to Fleming’s writings and to the Eon films. Neither the post-

Fleming novels nor the non-canonical (i.e. non-Eon) films, like the two adaptations of Casino

Royale which preceded the highly successful reboot starring (2006), are often considered in Bond scholarship. Tellingly, the last non-canonical Bond film to be released so far, Never Say Never Again (with which my subsequent analysis is going to deal), is hardly mentioned in any of the standard introductions to Bond,9 though it is one of the few Bond films to address issues like Bond’s aging or Thatcherite politics, and until Casino Royale put

Daniel Craig on the shortlist for a BAFTA award for Best Actor, it was the only Bond film ever to be nominated for a major acting award.10

Strangely, this kind of refusal to acknowledge non-canonical material is most frequently attributed to the fans, yet Bond scholars (who have frequently been accused of practicing “a glorified form of fandom”) exhibit just as much of it (Comentale/Watt/Willman xviii). The prevalent attitude seems to be that the study of Bond should be limited to material that comes with the ‘official’ seal of approval, which is now granted by the Broccoli family (Albert R.

Broccoli having handed over the family business to his daughter Barbara in 1995), who pride themselves on protecting Ian Fleming’s legacy (“IAR Exclusive”). This undiminished allegiance to Fleming is another symptom of how the adaptation industry “disguises its own operations” by invoking romanticised notions of the author (Murray 27), and it constitutes a significant difference between 007 and other cinematic universes like Star Wars or Star Trek.

Their fans are strongly divided into different camps, some of whom have turned against the universes’ respective founding fathers, with the result that a transition of creative control into other hands could be facilitated.11 No such schism exists amongst Bond fans and critics: they continue to remind us that this is Ian Fleming’s Bond, and anybody who is new to the table had better acknowledge it. Gary Giblin, author of a book on Bond’s travel routes, admits right from the beginning that he is biased against the non-canonical material:

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I happen to believe that, regardless of whatever merits they may possess, the non-Eon

films are not ‘true’ Bond films; they do not command (or merit) the interest and

devotion accorded the ’ series. With apologies to Fleming’s literary

successors, I believe the same holds true for the novels. Ian Fleming is the creator of

James Bond, plain and simple. What he said, or wrote, is gospel; anything else is

apocryphal. (Giblin 13)

Robert A. Caplen similarly excludes everything from consideration that is “not part of the

EON production series” (8), without adding any reasons for this decision. The firm belief in

Fleming’s authorship as an organising principle makes for an interesting contradiction: on the one hand, the films gradually dispose of Fleming’s source material; on the other hand, they proclaim their devotedness to him as their point of origin, and as a signifier of gritty realism and alleged ‘purity’ – especially these days, in the era of Daniel Craig’s tough-as-nails, swearing and bleeding approach to the role of 007. Fleming tends to get invoked whenever the series has allegedly ‘gotten out of hand’ and needs to be brought back down to earth.

Following the camp orgies and spectacle excesses of (1985) and Die Another

Day (2002), the last Bond films to star Roger Moore and , respectively, the producers announced their intention to go for a more realist, ‘Fleming-esque’ Bond again, casting younger men (who both came with undisputed street credibility as versatile actors) in the role of Bond and breaking with the overall adaptation policy I’ve sketched above: both

The Living Daylights (1987) and Casino Royale (2006) are relatively straightforward adaptations of Fleming stories.12

What we are witnessing here is Foucault’s ‘author-function’ in practice: something that regulates the “existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses” (Foucault 286).

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According to an argument Simone Murray puts forward in her remarkable study, The

Adaptation Industry (2012), the liberation of the text promised by poststructuralist critics like

Barthes and Foucault has not occurred. What we witness instead is that “the largely stable and unitary book of Gutenbergian print culture” has been fractured into “a panoply of intellectual property (IP) rights” (Murray 30), though Barthes and Foucault, in their seminal texts, pretend that there is no material reality to the romanticised, ideologically dubious author concept.

Murray concludes that it was “not so much meaning that multiplied infinitely, but the legal regimes to prescribe and control authorised use of book-derived content” (30), an idea that is very much supported by analysis of James Bond’s adaptation history.

2. “Hobbies? Resurrection.”

When Bond, during an interrogation scene in his anniversary adventure (2012), is asked about his hobbies, he offers a rare glimpse into his soul by answering, “Resurrection.”

His reply is more than just a cocky witticism; it is a meta-reflexive commentary on the franchise’s adaptation history that, initially, appears to be untrue: after all, how can Bond claim to possess the Christ-like (and vampiric) ability to come back from the dead when his most fundamental characteristic as a screen icon is his sheer refusal to die, no matter how big the explosions, how dangerously close the bullets, and how overwhelming the odds against him? Then again, Bond (as a franchise consisting of dozens of books and films) has frequently proven that he is capable of resurrection, both on the level of diegesis and outside it. This man knows how to stage a comeback, having regularly adapted to new directors, actors, and geopolitical environments. Though it was certainly not preceded by a commercial failure, Skyfall was widely hailed as a return to form and became the first Bond film to crack the billion dollar mark at the box office.13 Moreover, the film’s narrative addresses the

8 question of how much strength there is left in a grizzled hero past his prime – only to conclude with him being more powerful than ever.

No other Bond actor has performed ‘resurrection’ as continuously as Sean Connery. All of his

007 adventures bear testimony to a strange preoccupation with death and rebirth. Several episodes not only suggest Bond’s mortality but also the idea that Bond may give way for another Bond, and that Her Majesty’s most reliable ‘blunt instrument’, like the Pod People in

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), is prone to replacement with alter egos and doppelgangers. The second Bond film, From Russia with Love (1963), opens at night with

Bond seemingly pursued and killed by “Red” Grant in a garden, only for the assassin to remove a mask from the dead man’s face so that the viewers realise they have merely witnessed Grant’s ‘trial run’ for killing the real James Bond. Tellingly, this scene – the series’ first pre-title sequence – not only manages to playfully lay down the ground-rules for the subsequent Bond films, but (as the framing of this first Bond sequel) it also summarises the serial pattern which is to follow: each new instalment a small resurrection (‘He was gone – now he is back.’), Bond symbolically dying and being reborn through the paratextual birth canal of the gun barrel sequence, the pre-credits sequence, and the credits themselves. Though the third film, Goldfinger (1964), does not emphasise this thought (at least not with its opening sequence14), Connery’s Bond keeps toying with the idea of his own death. The first shot of (1965) shows a coffin with a mourning band marked “J.B.”, so that the viewer is encouraged to entertain the idea of Bond’s passing, only for the camera to tilt upwards, revealing 007 to be alive and well. You Only Live Twice (1967) spells out this subtext in an even more explicit fashion, for it opens with Bond staging his own assassination and funeral in Hong Kong, and divers intervening to resurrect him from his watery grave. The scenario is revisited in Connery’s final outing as 007 within the official Eon series, Diamonds

Are Forever (1971): having killed diamond smuggler Peter Franks in Amsterdam, Bond

9 switches their identity cards, prompting fellow smuggler Tiffany Case to cry, “My God!

You’ve just killed James Bond.” Given Connery’s well-documented struggle with the role, this is a borderline meta-reflexive commentary somewhat indicative of the Camp style which was to dominate the subsequent Bond films of the 1970s: Tiffany’s outrage, paired with

Bond’s wide-eyed reply (“Is that who it was? Well, it just proves no-one’s indestructible.”), implies not only that everyone considers Bond un-killable, but also that he has attained some kind of celebrity status, even within the fictional universe.

The fourth wall had already been broken in the previous film, On Her Majesty’s Secret

Service (1969), which – due to Connery’s retirement from the role and the producers’ attempts to install as his successor – was the first film which had to address the polymorphic nature of the Bond character. What is Lazenby’s oft-quoted quip, on seeing a young woman run away from him (“This never happened to the other fellow!”), if not a candid admission that Bond has entered the laboratory of reduplication,15 and that from here on, originality and authenticity are very much relative values? Two years before, MGM’s big- budget parody of Casino Royale (1967) had already toyed with the idea of 007 being cloned, with MI6 re-naming all of its agents ‘James Bond 007’ in order to throw the enemy off their scent,16 which was not only a fitting nod to the sheer multitude of copycat Bonds (like Derek

Flint or Matt Helm), but also somewhat prophetic for the Bond franchise itself, which would see three different actors tackle the role within the next six years.

The preoccupation with death and resurrection is notably absent from the Bond series in the post-Connery years, though. With the exception of shooting a mannequin version of Roger Moore in the pre-credits sequence of The Man with the Golden Gun (1974),

Moore’s Bond seems terribly untouched by the possibility of death, his light-footed performance constantly rendering Bond blissfully unaware of his own mortality, though he was to age visibly in the role over the next decade. Sean Connery’s return to the role after a

10 twelve-year hiatus in 1983 allowed the producers to address both this paradox and the legal quarrels which surrounded their production of Never Say Never Again.

3. An Attorneys’ Game: The Making of Never Say Never Again

Never Say Never Again (NSNA) is a cinematic double-take, not just because it allowed the

British press to announce 1983 as the year of the “Battle of the Bonds” (its release came only three months after that of Octopussy, the ‘official’ Eon Bond for this year), but also because it is a remake of a previous Bond film, Thunderball. NSNA thus does not just depict Connery facing old age, but also battling at least three intertextual ghosts: that of the canonical 007 series; that of his own legacy in the role; and, more particularly, that of the previous film version of the same story, also starring himself. The reasons for this rather unique situation can be found in NSNA’s complicated production history, which has been well-documented by

Robert Sellers in his meticulous book, The Battle for Bond (2007).

Before there ever was a James Bond film series, Ian Fleming himself had been working on making Bond a presence on the screen. Some of these attempts predate even the first Bond novel (see Jonathan Bignell’s chapter in this volume), others began as soon as the first few books had been published. Initially, the plan was not to adapt one of the novels, but to write an original script featuring 007. As Fleming was without any previous experience as a screenwriter, several collaborators got involved, including his friend Ernest Cuneo (who provided a plot outline about Bond going after a stolen atomic bomb), film producer Ivar

Bryce, screenwriter (hired to add more action to a rather dialogue-heavy script), and Kevin McClory, an aspiring Irish filmmaker and former assistant of .

Together, these men collaborated on a script which, at various points, ran with titles like

James Bond of the Secret Service and Longitude 78 West (Sellers 57 and 64), and which went through development stages that were a far cry from the successful franchise we know today:

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McClory, at one point, envisioned the film as a family adventure in the spirit of Around the

World in 80 Days (1956), featuring celebrity cameos; Cuneo wanted Bond to go undercover amongst actors and entertainers, meeting the likes of Noël Coward and

(Sellers 21 and 223f.). More importantly, their script was a joint venture containing ideas that would later feature prominently in the Bond canon, including supranational terrorist network

SPECTRE and the deferred revelation of the master villain’s identity (though Blofeld himself is arguably Fleming’s own invention). The film never went into production; instead, Fleming struck a deal with Eon, the production company owned by and Albert R.

Broccoli. Following the release of their first two Bond films, Whittingham and McClory sued

Fleming. Not only had the author sold McClory the rights to produce the first James Bond film (which was in direct contradiction to his Eon deal), but Fleming had plagiarised their script when working on his eighth Bond novel, Thunderball (1961), which is dedicated to

Cuneo (Fleming 2004: v). In his affidavit, McClory asserted that much of Thunderball’s plot was “derived from one or other of the scripts, of which I and Whittingham claim to be joint authors.” (qtd. in Sellers 96)

As it had become apparent by 1963 that Bond was a valuable property, McClory not only sued for ownership of the novel, but also for the right to produce his own Bond film. The court case, as reported by Sellers (102-115), makes for fascinating reading. Essentially, it is applied adaptation studies, with the similarities and differences between the different sources turning into criminal evidence. Having made their cases with lists of ‘original’ versus ‘stolen’ plot devices, the parties reached a settlement in December, 1963. Fleming retained ownership of the novel (though from now on, it had to be sold with a disclaimer informing readers that the story “was based on a film treatment by K. McClory, J. Whittingham and Ian Fleming”,

Fleming 2004: iv), and McClory was granted “the exclusive right to re-produce any part of

12 the novel in film” plus “the exclusive right to use the character James Bond as a character in any such scripts or film of Thunderball.” (Sellers 114)

Eon then struck a deal with McClory so that Thunderball could go into production, a film that was now officially “based on a novel that was itself based on another screenplay” (Sellers 99), with screenwriter fusing the older, unproduced script with Fleming’s novel.

It would become the most profitable Bond film to date, and settled Bond’s fate as a gadget- obsessed Superman.17 This is a significant point when it comes to assessing Fleming’s legacy as the creator of Bond, in that it challenges the idea that Fleming can legitimately claim sole authorship of the Bond franchise, because the novel and film which cemented the formula bear traces of plagiarism or, at the very least, of multiple authorship. Ironically, Thunderball is considered the quintessential Bond adventure by many, including , who argues that this one, more than any of the other books, exhibits the “Fleming effect” (111).

Fleming survived the trial and the legally sanctioned acknowledgement of the ‘death of the author’ by a mere nine months. The court case established Bond not as the exclusive brain- child of his autonomous creator, but, in ’s words, as “a child of undetermined parentage. And you don’t need a dictionary to know what that makes him.” The settlement allowed McClory to produce his own version of the Thunderball script after a hiatus of ten years, and he managed to get it off the ground in 1983, having overcome all kinds of delaying tactics on behalf of Eon: “an attorney’s game” in the words of NSNA’s director

(qtd. in Sellers 181), “an epic in which lawyers had their names above the titles” in

Deighton’s. The writing process reportedly involved regular conference calls with insurance companies “because the makers were running scared of being sued. [...] The scope for any creativity to blossom in such a situation was almost zero.” (Sellers 187)

Though legal wrangles meant McClory could not use many of the franchise’s trademark elements like the gun-barrel logo, he scored one major coup when he coaxed Sean Connery

13 into starring. It is not unusual for a director to revisit one of his own past films,18 and actors frequently play the same character in sequels or throughout different films set within the same fictional universe, but seeing the same actor tackle the same part in the same story makes for a doppelganger effect to which we are not used as cinemagoers.19 Whereas remakes, as a rule, are expected to offer the same pleasures afforded by the original yet to give the material a unique spin so as to justify their existence – by relocating the story to a different setting (The

Departed, 2006), by inventing an epic back-story (Halloween, 2007), or by switching the gender of the protagonists (Ghostbusters, 2016) –, NSNA’s marching order was to do the same without deviating from the source material. The film would thus fit Harvey Roy Greenberg’s category of “the acknowledged, close remake” (qtd. in Verevis 9), though not out of reverence for its predecessor, but because of legal obligations. Its close proximity to Thunderball is not, as Penninger (112) suggests, proof of the latter’s flawless structure, but simply the result of the adaptors working within very narrow legal confines.20

As a result, it is easy to dismiss the film, as indeed many critics have done,21 as a mere exercise in repetition without any distinctive merits whatsoever, and as a film which follows

Thunderball so slavishly that it even replicates its mistakes, including the extremely slow underwater showdown or a degree of sexism which, in context, had to look like an unapologetic throwback to the heyday of 1960s culture. These cinematic double- takes, however, make NSNA a double-layered experience and a unique case in adaptation studies – as this brief case study will demonstrate, the film offers far more meta-cinematic pleasure than it is usually given credit for.

4. When the same thing happens to the same guy twice: Never Say Never Again

From the first scene of NSNA, Sean Connery’s Bond is back in his old element: dying and being reborn. The film starts with Bond failing a training assignment, at the end of which he is

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‘stabbed’ by the hostage. As though to drive home the point, the scene (one of the few sequences in the film not to be carried over from Thunderball) is immediately replayed on a small screen in ’s office – funnily enough, though the footage on M’s screen is somewhat grainy, it is the exact same, professionally edited movie sequence which the viewer has just seen, a mise-en-abyme that makes M seem more like a movie critic than a professional supervisor when he reviews Bond’s performance. His verbal put-down, directed at Bond

(“You should have studied the plot more carefully!”), certainly echoes Eon’s attorneys, who hovered over every move of McClory’s team. Bond’s reply shows just as much meta- reflexive awareness and sounds like Connery’s defiant attempt to reclaim his role: he nostalgically recalls the past, complains about M having sent him into semi-retirement, and openly admits to missing the adrenaline rush of working in the field. As in all previous incarnations of the material, Bond is then sent off to a health farm in order to be purged of toxins and to get into shape again. In the novel and in the first film version of Thunderball, the Shrublands episode is essential to the plot as it puts Bond on SPECTRE’s tracks, but here, the sequence seems somewhat out of place – in fact, as Penninger has pointed out (112),

NSNA shows a remarkable lack of continuity, as it fails to clarify how Bond comes across

Largo and just why the film suddenly relocates to the Bahamas,22 though viewers are unlikely to pick up on this gap, particularly if they know Thunderball (or the arbitrary logic behind all of Bond’s location-hopping, for that matter). Still, Bond’s stay at the health clinic is integral to NSNA’s agenda, as it not only re-starts the cycle of death and rejuvenation (“Each triumphal moment is followed by a letdown”, Miller 295), but it also presents many opportunities for the viewers to scrutinise Connery’s aged body, which is subjected to the torments of physiotherapy and constantly faced with the abject reality of its own decay

(tellingly, Bond temporarily blinds an assassin with his own urine sample). As Bond arrives at the clinic, he is complimented on his old Bentley (“They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.”),

15 a self-referential nod to the pre-Aston Martin era of the first two Bond films, where Bond drives such a car. Bond rhapsodises that the Bentley is “still in pretty good shape”, and he uses the exact same phrase to refer to his body in the following scene, in spite of the doctor’s insistence that there is “enough scar tissue for an entire regiment” here – it remains one of the very few lines in the script to indicate that his age may be catching up with Bond, even though

NSNA provides the extremely rare constellation of Bond facing an opponent (played by Klaus

Maria Brandauer) who is several years his junior.

As the film abstains from overly exploiting this subtext on aging and opts rather for a more playful approach, NSNA, then, does not so much stress the idea of Bond’s mortality as emphasise that Bond (and, more importantly, Connery’s Bond) holds the exclusive privilege of indestructibility and rejuvenation, a ‘fountain of youth’ subtext tailor-made both for the film (with its considerable intertextual baggage) and Connery’s powerful star persona. NSNA is the last film where the actor appears without the grizzled beard that was to become his trademark: a mere three years after his last Bond film, a bald and bearded Connery would appear in The Name of the Rose (1986), his character William of Baskerville (the aged, wise, and celibate man of letters) a deliberate antithesis to Bond and indicative of how the final stretch of Connery’s career would renegotiate many Bond tropes. Connery went after the secret of eternal youth in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), and his film career concluded with the image of an African tribesman performing a reanimation rite over his grave in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), Connery’s last film. This quasi- adolescent fantasy of eternal youth and virility carries over into the tone of NSNA, which is dominated by light-hearted banter and innuendo in picturesque holiday locations. Like Roger

Moore’s Bond of the mid-1980s, whose advanced age is never acknowledged in the films,

Connery’s Bond is having one last great party before the dawn of AIDS. Tellingly, NSNA is one of only two Bond films where 007 sleeps with more than three women, the other one

16 being A View to a Kill, the swansong of 57-year-old Roger Moore. The image of Bond as senex amans who appears a little too emphatic in his insistence that he is more virile and agile than during the 1960s subliminally tells us that the idea of adaptation-as-repetition is but an illusion. Linda Hutcheon identifies “repetition without replication”, that is, the idea of enjoying both the familiar and “the delight of surprise and novelty” as a key feature of adaptation (173), and NSNA’s most valuable lesson may well be that exact repetition without novelty inevitably results in uncanny effects. Adaptation’s repetitive gestures undoubtedly have a soothing effect (“adaptation as repetition is [...] in itself a pleasure”, Hutcheon 114), yet the repetitive adaptation model as exemplified by NSNA with its key handicap (the contractually committed eschewal from difference and innovation) reveals a considerable degree of ambiguity. NSNA is not a shot-by-shot recreation of Thunderball, but the comfort

“of knowing what is about to happen next” (Hutcheon 114) also borders on the uncanny, for

“what was once well known and had long been familiar” can also frighten us (Freud 124), as the mechanical replay of well-known gestures, situations and appearances betrays the unnatural qualities of waxwork figures and automata.

It is not surprising, then, that Connery appears relaxed yet also seems to be on autopilot throughout the film. Having already grown bored with the role throughout the 1960s

(according to one critic, Connery spends most of Diamonds Are Forever “listen[ing] to

Blofeld’s scheme with all the concern of a man wondering if he can grab a swift nap between takes”, Williams), he sleepwalks through his part, constantly fighting his (and the audience’s) feeling that he has been here before: in a role he mastered 20 years previously, in a plot he has already enacted once, and surrounded by some of the same crew members in some of the same locations (Sellers 195). This Bond appears so utterly uninterested in his assignment (the usual run-of-the-mill threat to Western civilisation in the shape of stolen nuclear warheads) that you cannot help but feel that he is in the same position as the audience: the spectator of an

17 adventure whose outcome he knows perfectly well – because he has already lived through it once. When M sends Bond off to the health clinic, he correctly guesses at his destination

(“Shrublands?”), suggesting not only that he has been there before and is thus experiencing a déjà vu, but that NSNA remains acutely aware of its pretexts. When read as a meta- commentary and as a tongue-in-cheek statement on the processes of reduplication at work in the adaptation industry, NSNA’s paradoxical mission (being legally bound to do the same and nothing but the same) appears prophetic of the cinematic déjà vu syndrome which really took off in the second half of the 1980s, “as screenwriters grappled with the same task – providing the same movie but different – and decided that up-front shamelessness was by far the most honest tactic.” (Shone 159) Cue massacring his way through several instalments of the Rambo series, or Bruce Willis taking on yet another bunch of terrorists as roguish cop John McClane in the Die Hard films. McClane’s bewilderment at getting involved in one hostage situation after the other (“How can the same thing happen to the same guy twice?”) in Die Hard 2 (1990) provides the tagline for this phenomenon, and NSNA clearly foreshadows it – its own title having turned into a kind of shorthand for the belated sequel which materialises even though you thought everything was over.23

Consequently, NSNA can never shake off its subtext of reduplication and its association with the uncanny in Freud’s sense: “the constant recurrence of the same thing, the repetition of the same facial features, the same characters, the same destinies, the same misdeeds, even the same names” (Freud 142), and the film oscillates between its over-emphasised, lighthearted message of ‘Relax!’ and a multitude of memento mori. Symptoms of decay are scattered throughout the film: the protagonist has visibly aged (and, in one scene, contemplates writing his memoirs), and the mise-en-scène treats him accordingly. Bond is placed next to vultures and skeletons, and branch is suffering from a Thatcherite headache of budget cuts, bureaucracy, strikes, and computers having replaced manual labour.24 Ironically, this longing

18 for the ‘good old days’ is much more in line with Ian Fleming’s constant distrust of this

‘brave new world’ than any of the other Bond films,25 and it also resonates as a meta- commentary on the behind-the-scenes struggles. Bond is only brought back into the game when M reluctantly reactivates the Double-00 program, and there is a touch of MI6 regaining some of its old glory as he does so. Q cheerfully quips: “Now you’re on this, I hope we’re gonna have some gratuitous sex and violence”, and Connery’s Bond certainly delivers on this promise, thus stressing that the ‘real’ Bond is back. In the eyes of Bond purists, this Bond may be an illegitimate, unacknowledged part of the family, yet it is these very qualities which allow NSNA to claim its place in the gallery of doppelgangers from which Bond emerged: the franchise’s very own family ghost, a which haunts the series with various unacknowledged truths about its adaptation history.

Filmography

Around the World in 80 Days. Dir. Michael Anderson. United Artists, 1956.

La Ciociara. Dir. Vittorio De Sica. Titanus, 1960.

La Ciociara. Dir. Dino Risi. Canale 5, 1988.

Curse of the Pink Panther. Dir. . MGM, 1983.

Death at a Funeral. Dir. . MGM, 2007.

Death at a Funeral. Dir. Neil La Bute. Screen Gems, 2010.

The Departed. Dir. . Warner, 2006.

Die Hard 2. Dir. Renny Harlin. 20th Century Fox, 1990.

Funny Games. Dir. Michael Haneke. Concorde-Castle Rock, 1997.

Funny Games. Dir. Michael Haneke. Warner, 2007.

Ghostbusters. Dir. Paul Feig. , 2016.

Halloween. Dir. Rob Zombie. MGM, 2007.

19

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Dir. . Paramount, 1989.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Don Siegel. Allied Artists, 1956.

Jason Bourne. Dir. Paul Greengrass. Universal Pictures, 2016.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Dir. Stephen Norrington. 20th Century Fox, 2003.

The Man Who Knew Too Much. Dir . Gaumont-British, 1934.

The Man Who Knew Too Much. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Paramount, 1956.

The Name of the Rose. Dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud. 20th Century Fox/Columbia, 1986.

Nattevagten. Dir. Ole Bornedal. Thura, 1994.

Nightwatch. Dir. Ole Bornedal. Dimension Films, 1997.

Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Paramount, 1981.

Spoorloos. Dir. George Sluizer. Argos, 1988.

Star Wars. Dir. George Lucas. 20th Century Fox, 1977.

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Dir. George Lucas. 20th Century Fox, 1999.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Dir. J.J. Abrams. Disney, 2015.

The Vanishing. Dir. George Sluizer. 20th Century Fox, 1993.

Works Cited

Amis, Kingsley. The James Bond Dossier. : Jonathan Cape, 1965.

Anthony, Andrew. “Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass: ‘We’ll Never Say Never Again’.” The

Guardian 17 July 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/17/matt-damon-

paul-greengrass-jason-bourne-interview.

Barnes, Alan, and Marcus Hearn. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang! The Unofficial James Bond Film

Companion. London: Batsford, 2001.

Bennett, Tony, and Janet Woollacott. “The Moments of Bond.” Lindner 2009, 13-33.

20

Bruhn, Jørgen, Anne Gjelsvik, and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, eds. Adaptation Studies: New

Challenges, New Directions. London et al.: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Caplen, Robert A. Shaken & Stirred: The Feminism of James Bond. Bloomington: Xlibris,

2012.

Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Literature on

Screen. Cambridge: CUP, 2010.

Chapman, James. “A Short History of Bond: The Texts of Casino Royale.” The Cultures of

James Bond. Eds. Joachim Frenk and Christian Krug. Trier: WVT, 2011. 11-23.

---. “‘Women Were for Recreation’: The Gender Politics of Ian Fleming’s James Bond.”

Funnell 2015, 9-17.

Comentale, Edward P., Stephen Watt, and Skip Willman. “Introduction.” Ian Fleming &

James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007. Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana UP,

2005. xi-xxiv.

Deighton, Len. James Bond: My Long and Eventful Search for His Father. 2012. Amazon

Kindle eBook.

Eco, Umberto. “Narrative Structures in Fleming.” [1966] Gender Language and Myth: Essays

on Popular Narrative. Ed. Glenwood Irons. Toronto et al.: U of Toronto P, 1992. 157-

182.

Fleming, Ian. Thunderball. [1961] London: Penguin, 2004.

Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” [1968] Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed.

David Lodge. Harlow: Longman, 2007. 281-293.

French, Philip. “Thunderball Recycled.” 18 Dec. (1983): 31.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. [1919] Trans. David McLintock. London: Penguin, 2003.

Funnell, Lisa, ed. For His Eyes Only: The Women of James Bond. London; New York:

Wallflower Press, 2015.

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Giblin, Gary. James Bond’s London. Dunellen: Daleon, 2001.

Gjelsvik, Anne. “What Novels Can Tell that Movies Can’t Show.” Bruhn/Gjelsvik/Hanssen

2013, 245-264.

Hewett, Richard. “Canon Doyle? Getting Holmes Right (and Getting the Rights) for

Television.” Adaptation 8.2 (2015): 192-206.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York; London: Routledge, 2006.

“IAR Exclusive Interview: Producer Barbara Broccoli Talks Everything or Nothing: The

Untold Story of 007 and Skyfall.” I Am Rogue 5 Oct. 2012,

http://www.iamrogue.com/news/interviews/item/7420-iar-exclusive-interview-

producer-barbara-broccoli-talks-everything-or-nothing-the-untold-story-of-007-and-

skyfall.html.

“James Bond 007.” , n.d.

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“James Bond Box Office Totals.” 007 James, n.d.

http://www.007james.com/articles/box_office.php.

Leitch, Thomas. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The

Passion of the Christ. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2007.

---. “Adaptation Studies at a Crossroads.” Adaptation 1.1 (2008): 63-77.

---. “Hitchcock the Author.” Hitchcock and Adaptation: On the Page and Screen. Ed. Mark

Osteen. Lanham et al.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014a. 3-19.

---. “Adaptation and Intertextuality, or, What Isn’t an Adaptation, and What Does It Matter?”

A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation. Ed. Deborah Cartmell. Chichester:

Wiley Blackwell, 2014b. 87-104.

Lindner, Christoph, ed. The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader. Manchester:

Manchester UP, 2009.

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Miller, Toby. “James Bond’s Penis.” Lindner 2009, 285-300.

Murray, Simone. The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary

Adaptation. New York; London: Routledge, 2012.

Penninger, Johannes. “Im Geheimdienst Ihrer Majestät: Sean Connerys Rückkehr als James

Bond in der Thunderball-Neuverfilmung Never Say Never Again.” Maske und Kothurn

43.4 (2000): 89-132.

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Anglia 134.3 (2016): 506-520.

Sellers, Robert. The Battle for Bond. Sheffield: Tomahawk Press, 2008.

Shone, Tom. Blockbuster: How Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer.

New York: Free Press, 2004.

Verevis, Constantine. Film Remakes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006.

Williams, Max. “Why Octopussy Is the Best (and Possibly Worst) James Bond Film.” GQ

Magazine 16 February 2015, http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/louis-jourdan-

octopussy-james-bond-007-kamal-khan-roger-moore.

1 See the articles gathered in Cartmell/Whelehan or in Bruhn/Gjelsvik/Hanssen. 2 According to Umberto Eco, Fleming’s strength as a writer lies in his formalistic method which consists of varying some elementary ‘play situations’, with the effect that “suspense is stabilized curiously on the basis of a sequence of events that are entirely predetermined.” (Eco 165) Eco goes on to observe that in spite of the abundance of stock figures and racist overtones, there is intellectual pleasure to be gained from this pattern, allowing for “the appreciation of more sophisticated readers” (159). Fleming, in Eco’s view, is not an artist, “yet he writes with art” (170). 3 The question does not seem entirely relevant when the prestige of the source text is not in the same category as that of a Shakespeare play or a Dickens novel, no matter what you make of Ian Fleming as a writer. In his discussion of Alfred Hitchcock’s authorship, Thomas Leitch notes that in the absence of a strong identification between the film’s themes and its director’s reputation, “the franchise trumps the director” (Leitch 2014a: 7), and this clearly applies to the Bond series (which Hitchcock, interestingly, at one point flirted with but never committed to). 4 James Chapman calls On Her Majesty’s Secret Service the most-straightforward adaptation in the whole series (2011: 20). 5 The credit sequence of the previous film, The Spy Who Loved Me, indicates that For Your Eyes Only had been the next planned instalment, but the success of Star Wars led to a quick alteration of these plans. The gamble paid off immensely; Moonraker was to remain the most successful Bond film until GoldenEye (1995). 6 Moonraker is an exception from the rule in that it resorts to the former arrangement. 7 Casino Royale is the first adaptation of Fleming’s novel within the canon; its successor, (2008), uses the title of a Fleming story but none of its plot elements. 8 There is some overlap between the Bond films and the post-Fleming novels, though. John Gardner and Raymond Benson not only wrote new Bond novels, but also produced several of Bond films. 23

9 For example, only two articles in Christoph Lindner’s critical reader on James Bond mention Never Say Never Again (Bennett/Woollacott and Miller), and neither of them subjects the film to a detailed analysis. 10 , who plays demented assassin Fatima Blush, was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Supporting Actress for her performance. Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott credit NSNA for its innovative villainess (30), but the character is suspiciously absent from the two existing comprehensive encyclopedias of Bond’s women (Caplen; Funnell). 11 The most famous case is, of course, that of George Lucas, whose frequently derided Star Wars prequels (1999- 2005) have inspired all kinds of critical responses from the fans, including the ‘Phantom Edit’ (2001) of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999). Lucas’s removal from the franchise paved the way for The Force Awakens (2015), which met with near-universal acclaim from fans and critics alike. 12 is structured around the kernel of one of Fleming’s short stories and significantly expands the plot from there; Casino Royale reworks Fleming’s novel into the more conventional blockbuster paradigm, yet it is the first Bond film since Dr. No (!) to confidently assert that it is “based on the novel by Ian Fleming” in its credits (Chapman 20). 13 When taking inflation into consideration, Skyfall is the most successful Bond film ahead of Thunderball and Goldfinger (“James Bond Box Office Totals”). 14 However, the iconic motif of Bond strapped to the table, a laser beam approaching his genitalia, has clear overtones of the Passion of Christ, and it ends with Bond being shot – with a tranquiliser gun. 15 According to popular Bond folklore, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’s original script would have seen Bond undergo plastic surgery at the beginning in order to justify his altered appearance (Barnes/Hearn 83). 16 There is some kind of intertextual cinematic logic at work here: The list of Bond doubles in Casino Royale includes , who was doubled in the posthumous Curse of the Pink Panther (1983) by Roger Moore. 17 “Thunderball has been singled out as the moment when the makers lost touch with Fleming’s literary hero and the special world of the novels, when Bond as a character became a push-button superman.” (Sellers 141) Len Deighton credits Whittingham with adapting “the sad-eyed Bentler-driver” of Fleming’s early fiction and refashioning him into a “sexy acrobat.” 18 Alfred Hitchcock famously shot two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 and 1956) and thus set the template for what still happens quite frequently: Foreign directors are invited to Hollywood to adapt their successful works for the American market. See George Sluizer’s two adaptations of Tim Krabbé’s novel, Het Gouden Ei (Spoorloos, 1988; The Vanishing, 1993), Ole Bornedal’s two versions of Nightwatch (1994/1997), or Michael Haneke’s two versions of Funny Games (1997/2007). 19 In the early days of sound film, it used to be common practice to shoot the same script simultaneously in various languages with some actors substituted and some retaining their roles, but it is extremely rare for actors to revisit the same role in remakes: Sophia Loren starred in two adaptations of Alberto Moravia’s 1957 novel, La ciociara (1960/1988); Peter Dinklage appears in both versions of Death at a Funeral (2007/2010). 20 When he hired screenwriters to work on NSNA, McClory allegedly gave them the following objective: “I need someone who will write something that is within my legal rights.” (qtd. in Deighton) The fact that adaptation is dominated as much by legal concerns as it is by industrial and artistic ones has gradually been acknowledged in the field: “film remaking is both enabled and limited by a series of historically specific institutional factors, such as copyright law” (Verevis 2). Recent work in the field includes Hewett’s assessment of rights ownership in the history of Sherlock Holmes adaptations. 21 On Rotten Tomatoes, NSNA has the worst rating out of all the Bond films starring Sean Connery (“James Bond 007”). Reviewing the film for The Observer, dismissed it as “Thunderball Recycled” (French 31). 22 This is, in part, down to the many cuts which were applied to the film. Some scenes which add desperately needed exposition were reinstated for the BluRay release in 2013. 23 Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon have cited the line in an interview to promote Jason Bourne (2016), a sequel that came nearly a decade after their last Bourne collaboration, which was supposed to be the final one (Anthony). 24 This, too, is indicative of the hands-on approach favoured by John Rambo and John McClane in Reaganite action cinema. These heroes typically face not only their foreign opponents but also annoying bureaucrats who prove absolutely useless in the field. In NSNA, Bond and Largo not only poke fun at the cowardice of “armchair generals”, but Bond also constantly ridicules a clumsy Foreign Office employee played by , the aptly-named Nigel Small-Fawcett. 25 This subtext is present throughout Fleming’s novel, Thunderball: Not only does Bond, together with his CIA colleague , bemoan how the tourism industry rips off its customers (151f.), he also reveals himself as a reactionary when he disapproves of a “foxy, pimpled young man” who chauffeurs him and leads Bond to muse on “the cheap self-assertiveness of young labour since the war” and a generation of young men like him, who “despises his parents, and would like to be Tommy Steele.” (9) In Shrublands, Bond has a horror vision of

24

himself losing his killer’s instinct and becoming “[a] soft, dreaming, kindly idealist who would naturally leave the Service” and “march with the H-bomb marchers” (33).

25