Screening Geopolitics: James Bond and the Early Cold War films (1962–1967)

Abstract This paper seeks to extend the remit of popular geopolitics by considering the role and significance of places and their inhabitants in shaping the narrative structures of films. By using the example of the James Bond series from the 1960s, it is suggested that there is more complex series of geographies to be acknowledged. Arguably most of the trade press reviewers were largely content to argue that places were simply 'exotic locations'. With a detailed examination of screenplays from five Bond films, it is shown that United Artists and Eon Productions played an important and creative role in shaping the geographies of dangers and threats confronted by James Bond. Moreover, austere and or remote locations also played important roles in generating a sense of climax between the British secret agent and his enemies regardless of whether they were part of a criminal network or an evil genius. Finally, the paper concludes with an assessment of some of the outstanding challenges facing a popular geopolitics. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Matthew Jones and Jeffrey Richards for their comments on earlier versions of this essay as well as the participants at the Britain and the Culture of the Cold War Conference 12–13 September 2003 and the participants at the 'Geopolitics' sessions of the SGIR Conference, 9–11 September 2004. My thanks to Tim Cresswell and Marcus Power for their support and aperçus. Amy Cooper of the University of Iowa helped greatly with accessing some of the Richard Maibaum papers. Bridget Robison provided invaluable research assistance. David Newman and the referees attached to Geopolitics offered many useful suggestions. Notes Sir Nicholas Henderson interviewed by M. McBain, 24 September 1998, Churchill College Archives DOHP 32, p. 17. J. Cawelti and B. Rosenberg, The Spy Story (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1987) p. 128. For two recent if different examples on how International Relations scholars have explored how film might complicate our popular and theoretical understandings of inter-state relations, see R. Gregg, International Politics on Film (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner 1998) ; and C. Weber, International Relations Theory (London: Routledge 2002). Alternatively, on television programmes such as Star Trek see J. Weldes, 'Going Cultural: Star Trek, State Action and Popular Culture', Millennium 28 (1999) pp. 117–34. Weber (note 3) p. 9. In the sense that geographers have had a lengthy interest in the visual media such as M. Clark and W. Allen, 'Films: Cities via the Screen', Geographical Magazine 49 (1977) p. 341. Earlier work included G. Cons, 'The Geographical Film in Education', Geographical Magazine 32 (1959) pp. 456–66 and W. Harris, 'Using Motion Pictures to Illustrate Certain Aspects of Economic Geography', Journal of Geography63 (1964) pp. 72–3. For an important intervention in the field of geography and music see J. Connell and C. Gibson, Sound Tracks (London: Routledge 2003). Within human geography, there has been at least 20 years of scholarship concerned with the critical analysis of film and television. See, for example, S. Aitken and L. Zonn (eds), Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: The Geography of Film (Trenton, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield 1993). M. Heffernan, 'Balancing Visions: Comments on Gearoid O Tuathail's Critical Geopolitics', Political Geography 19 (2000) pp. 351–4. For example, J. Sharp, Condensing the Cold War (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 2001) ; and others such as E. Berg, 'Some Unintended Consequences of Geopolitical Reasoning in Post-Soviet Europe: Texts and Policy Streams, Maps and Cartoons', Geopolitics 8/1 (2003) pp. 101–20. Sharp (note 9). See, for example, T. Cresswell and D. Dixon (eds), Engaging Film (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield 2002). See, for example, L. Giannetti, Understanding Movies (Harlow: Prentice Hall 2000) pp. 66–70. M. Denning, 'Licensed to Look', in C. Lindner (ed. ), The James Bond Phenomenon (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2003) p. 66. F. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London: Verso 1998). L. Benton, 'Will the Real/Reel Los Angles Please Stand Up', Urban Geography 16 (1995) p. 160. Ian Fleming was married to Ann, the former wife of Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail. Despite their tempestuous marriage, his Jamaican home Goldeneye was an important hub in the Fleming's international social network and welcomed regular visitors such as Noel Coward. They also met, in Jamaica, the former British spy and internationally acclaimed writer Graham Greene. Most famously, Anthony and Clarissa Eden sought refuge at the house in the disastrous aftermath of the 1956 Suez Crisis. As Ann Fleming recorded in her letter to Evelyn Waugh on 24 November 1956, 'The departure of the Edens for Goldeneye was wrapped in mystery … Ian went to see Clarissa the night before they left, he found her practising with an underwater mask in her drawing room, no doubt part of the delusion that the Suez Canal was running through it'; see M Amory (ed. ), The Letters of Ann Fleming (London: Collins Harvill 1985) p. 189. See, for example, A. Lycett, Fleming (London: Phoenix 1995). On teaching James Bond and popular geopolitics, see K. Dodds, 'Reel Geopolitics', Media Education Journal 34 (2003) pp. 3–7. A point made by J. Black, The Politics of James Bond (New York: Praeger 2001), for example. In the 1950s and 1960s, sex and spies made for a heady combination and President Kennedy was not the only public figure to be fascinated by such a combination. Audiences more generally wanted, according to Cawelti and Rosenberg (see note 2), to be entertained by the heroic adventures of a gentleman spy rather than the cynical and clandestine missions penned by Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. But no assumption is made in this essay that audiences all interpreted the films in a similar manner. Moreover, no attempt is made to recover the original intentions of the author, Ian Fleming. If nothing else, such a gesture would seriously underestimate the role of screenplay writers and others in 'converting' the novels to celluloid. Despite his declining health, Fleming was the guest of the Kennedy brothers at a dinner in the Georgetown district of Washington. Over dinner, John Kennedy asked Fleming how the United States might tackle the problem posed by Fidel Castro's Cuba. The Kennedy administration was obsessed with the removal of the socialist president. According to Fleming, the use of 'ridicule' was deemed essential especially in a culture where only 'money, religion and sex' made an impression on Cubans (and perhaps the Kennedys as well). Fleming proposed that Kennedy should drop over the island thousands of fake dollar bills and leaflets declaring Castro to be sexually impotent. While his ideas were not followed up, Kennedy did order the CIA to investigate the possibility of producing either a poisoned cigar and or exploding shellfish that might be used to assassinate Castro. Allen Dulles, the then head of the CIA, asked without success to see Fleming before his departure for Jamaica. Dulles wanted to explore further his suggestions for the overthrow of Castro. In April 1961, the CIA's covert activities in Cuba were given a fatal blow as the proposed invasion by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs turned into a fiasco. Kennedy was later to be assassinated by the Bond fan, Lee Harvey Oswald. Kennedy never got to watch his ninth favourite novel translated into film, because From Russia with Love was not released in the United States until April 1964. For some important academic interventions relating to the political and cultural trajectory of James Bond see Lindner (note 13). T. Shaw, 'The Politics of Cold War Culture', Journal of Cold War Studies 3 (2001) p. 59. E. Thomas, Robert Kennedy (New York: Simon and Schuster 2000) p. 119. President Clinton apparently liked to watch the film High Noon (1965) whilst occupying the White House. I owe thanks to Gertjan Dijink for this observation. There is a substantial literature on Bond including major monograph length treatments such as T. Bennett and J. Wollacott, Bond and Beyond (London: Macmillan 1987) ; J. Chapman, Licence to Thrill (London, I. B. Tauris 1999) ; and Black (note 19). Others such as Umberto Eco have explored in great detail the narrative structures (Manichean divisions between Bond and the villain for example) underpinning the James Bond novels. David Cannadine has noted that Britain was often described as a 'nation in decline' as evidence accrued of imperial dissolution in the tropical and temperate empire on the one hand and a much debated relaxation of public morality and probity on the other hand. As Bond retorted to his Japanese colleague, Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice: 'England may have been bled pretty thin by a couple of World Wars, our Welfare State politics may have made us expect too much for free, and the liberation of our Colonies may have gone too fast, but we still climb Everest and beat plenty of the world in plenty of sports and win Nobel Prizes … But there is nothing wrong with the British people – although there are only fifty million of them'. The impetus for such a stout defence of post-war Britain had been provided by an earlier aside by Tanaka on the implications of the 1956 Suez Crisis, which witnessed the political and financial humiliation of Britain at the hands of the Eisenhower administration. As a consequence, British prime ministers from Macmillan onwards sought a 'special relationship' with the United States in an attempt to restore a sense of national prestige and international purpose. It was, as Cannadine contends, an ideal moment to write about a character who would offer the reader a heavy dosage of 'great power nostalgia, imperial escapism and national reassurance'. see D. Cannadine, In Churchill's Shadows (London: Allen Press 2002) p. 279–311. See J. Chapman and M. Hilton, 'From Sherlock Homes to James Bond: Masculinity and National Identity in British Popular Fiction', in S. Caunce et al. (eds), Relocating Britishness (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2004) pp. 126–47. C. Bold, 'Under the Skirts of Britannia: Re-reading Women in the James Bond Novels', in Lindner (note 13). M. Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (London: Routledge 1987), especially the chapter 'Licensed to Look'. C. Baron, 'Doctor No: Bonding Britishness to Racial Sovereignty', Spectator USC Journal of Film and Television Criticism 14 (1994) pp. 68–81. T. Balio, United Artists (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press 1987) p. 253. The film rights to Casino Royale had been sold to Gregory Ratoff in 1955 for only 6, 000. CBS had earlier purchased the rights to televise Casino Royale and broadcast in October 1954 an hour-long programme on its 'Climax Mystery Theatre'. Ratoff was never able to find any financial backers and his widow later sold the film rights to Charles Feldman in 1960. Interestingly, the televised version of Casino Royale featured an American Bond and a British Leiter (renamed Clarence). Thanks to Jeffrey Richards for making this point to me. See P. McGilligan, 'Richard Maibaum: A Pretence of Seriousness', in P. McGilligan (ed. ), Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1986) pp. 266–89. A. Turner, Goldfinger (London: Bloomsbury1998) p. 131. See also R. Sellers, 'Goldfinger', Film Review 21 (1997) 47–51. Turner (note 35) pp. 131–2. McGilligan (note 34) p. 286. I. Fleming, Dr No (London: Penguin 2002) pp. 212–14. The original was published in 1957. Ibid. pp. 236–7. Papers of Richard Maibaum, MSc 149 Special Collection of the University of Iowa, Box 20 – A film treatment of Dr No dated 7th September 1961, p. 27. Papers of Richard Maibaum (note 40) p. 36. Papers of Richard Maibaum (note 40), A film treatment of Dr No dated 25th September 1961, p. 46. Papers of Richard Maibaum (note 40), Box 34 – untitled and undated paper. Amory (note 16) p. 297. A. Marwick, The Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998) pp. 17–18. 'Dr No', Film Daily 122/53 (19 March 1963) p. 7. 'Dr No', Kine Weekly 2866 (6 September 1962) p. 15. Playboy later became part of the widespread 'branding' of the James Bond films. For example, James Bond's wallet is shown to contain a membership card for the Playboy Club in Diamonds are Forever (1971). Black (note 19). In the novel Dr No, Fleming reflected on the nature of 'modern Jamaica' and complained that exclusive colonial clubs such as Queen's would not survive the post-colonial transformation. Ann Fleming, in one her letters to Eveyln Waugh dated February 1964, denounced the independence of Jamaica and complained that 'aggressive Negro custom officials enjoyed themselves hugely by a minute examination of underclothes'; Amory (note 16) p. 333. For a more scholarly reading of the US–UK intelligence relationship see R. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: Routledge 2001). Prime Minister Anthony Eden famously took a first in Oriental Languages at Christ Church Oxford. Oriental Languages in this context referred to Arabic and Persian. I owe this observation to Matthew Jones. I. Fleming, You Only Live Twice, p. 35. 'You Only Live Twice', Variety, 14 June 1967. F. MacDonald, 'The Atlantic as Perceptual Field: Rockall and the Cold War', paper presented to the 2003 RGS-IBG Annual Conference London, 4–7 September 2003. Quoted in K. Philby, My Silent War (London: Panther, 1973) p. 142. Wisner was referring to Malta, which proved a useful base to launch espionage operations against the Albanian regime. C. Hitchens, 'How does Bond Keep it Up? ', The Observer, 17 March 2002. This does complement the description offered of SPECTRE in the novel Thunderball (Harmondsworth: Penguin 2002) pp. 62–4. The original was published in 1961. Anglo-American suspicion of de Gaulle's France was well entrenched by the mid 1960s after the French decision to withdraw their Mediterranean fleet from NATO control, their advocacy of joint control of any US nuclear weapons stationed on French soil and France's decision to establish diplomatic relations with China in 1964. For an extended discussion of Dr Fu-Manchu see L. Ling, Postcolonial International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2001) pp. 81–97. See K. Dodds, 'Licensed to Stereotype: James Bond, Popular Geopolitics and the Spectre of Balkanism', Geopolitics 8/2 (2003) pp. 125–54. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say M's office in London, which for Bond is reassuringly unchanged for much of the Bond film series. As befitting M's nautical background, the office is filled with naval and imperial memorabilia. See P. Stock, 'Dial M for Metonym: Universal Exports, M's Office and Empire', in C. Landner (ed. ), The James Bond Phenomenon (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2003) pp. 215–31. See the useful analysis by Baron (note 31). See D. Stafford, Spies Beneath Berlin (London: John Murray 2002). 'You Only Live Twice Still Another James Bond Hit', Hollywood Reporter, 15 June 1967, p. 3. Cawelti and Rosenberg (note 2) p. 127. 'Goldfinger', The Guardian, 18 September 1964.