A lot has changed since James Bond emerged in 1953, writes Simon Winder

When Casino Royale was written, Bond was posh and Britain had an empire. That was 1952 … and a lot of things have changed since then, writes Simon Winder (author of Bond history, The Man Who Saved Britain) in The Sunday Herald.

James Bond is Britain’s greatest icon. Nobody has given more innocent pleasure to this country’s cinema-goers over such a long time. Nobody has been more emulated, admired or joked about. Nobody has done it better. For more than 40 years, millions of people (although perhaps more men than women) have settled down with a contented sigh as Monty Norman’s James Bond Theme started up and Bond stepped smartly along, framed by a rifled gun barrel, before turning and shooting the audience. This harmless ritual allows different generations to swap notes on their first Bond experience: those happy few who saw the original Dr No, those swept away by the sight of the giant rocket silo set of You Only Live Twice, those who cheered as Jaws stalked Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me or those who were startled into thinking about adulthood by the sex-crazed female super-killer played by Famke Janssen in GoldenEye.

For me, it was the delirious excitement when, aged 10 in 1973, I was taken to see the first of the Roger Moore movies, Live And Let Die. What a film! I used to lie in bed at night mentally playing it back scene by scene: the murderous New Orleans funeral , the crocodile farm, the speedboat chase, the shark pool, the battle with the one-armed baddie Tee-Hee.

Like so many others, I have been to see each movie in its opening week ever since, though it’s sometimes been an appalling ordeal . Last year, I sat down to write a book about the whole strange phenomenon, The Man Who Saved Britain, which tried to unpick just what it is about this figure – and Ian Fleming, his strange creator – that has put so many British men into the possibly unhealthy position of following his adventures. The book also examined how this British superspy became a global icon while the country he represented began to lose influence on the world stage.

The latest Bond film, Casino Royale, will open this week. It comes marketed as a radical reboot for the franchise, even going as far as to dispense with that iconic opening music. But what are we expecting to see in the last throes of Blair’s Britain? Here is an adaptation of Ian Fleming’s very first James Bond novel, written in 1952, made first into a desperate American TV programme in 1954, then into an even worse comic extravaganza with David Niven and Woody Allen in 1967.

The original book now seems a very modest fantasy about a squalid casino in northern France and Bond’s attempt to ruin a small cog in the Soviet machine. But for its early readers (and they were relatively few – Bond’s success only began later in the 1950s) this was fantasy enough. Getting across the Channel was almost impossible for most people because of currency and travel restrictions. It is one simple measure of how things have changed that the book of Casino Royale is restricted to a faded Normandy resort, whereas the new movie is set in Britain, the Bahamas, Madagascar, Florida, Uganda, Italy and Montenegro.

The introduction of a new James Bond has always been fraught. It went catastrophically wrong for George Lazenby, it was what now seems a wholly bizarre triumph for Roger Moore , it was a raspberry for Timothy Dalton and a loud (if misplaced) cheer for Pierce Brosnan. I was one of those championing Roger Moore in 1973, at that time wholly ignorant of the great Sean Connery who originated the part.

Daniel Craig is perhaps the first Bond who can really be considered a first-rate actor, with the physique to actually strangle and batter his adversaries rather than dispose of them by camply pressing the button on a gadget. Will Casino Royale’s undoubtedly huge audiences warm to Craig’s portrayal of a man who has been with us so long that by rights he really ought to be in his mid-80s, eking out an existence on his none-too-generous government pension? This new Bond must face challenges that would have been entirely alien to his 1952 ancestor.

THE FALL OF EMPIRE

The continuity offered by the Bond phenomenon coincidentally spans almost exactly the Queen’s reign – she was there when Casino Royale came out as a book, she is still here when at last it is made into a legitimate movie . The country she now rules over is uneasily multicultural and multiracial, complicated, fissiparous, services-based, devolved, rich, confused. The country she then ruled was almost entirely white, markedly regional, class-based, industrial, London-ruled, impoverished, confused. That both eras can be characterised by a sense of confusion is some relief; we don’t share Bond’s rather simple-minded sense of one-track, killing-oriented purpose. But there are still amazing changes we have all absorbed.

For starters, the British empire is gone. It was partly intact when Casino Royale was published, but melted and vanished in the decade that followed. How peculiar it must be for those who lived through that time to now see British troops stomping around in Afghanistan and Iraq – two old imperial territories, one the headache of generations of Victorian soldiers, the other a brutally administered spoil of the first world war. These colonies were referred to by the late 1960s – in films such as Carry On Up The Khyber – as harmless old pieces of history. Nothing in Fleming’s imagination could have conceived of a situation that would have made it faintly plausible for Britain to be occupying these dusty countries once more. It is as weird as if Britain were again besieging Delhi or burning down the White House.

CHANGING TASTES

The related food revolution would have baffled Ian Fleming and his creation. Fleming gave Bond many of his own habits and when it came to food he believed in nicely cooked steak, omelettes and British cheese. Solid, traditional national fare. Through the 1950s and well into the 1970s even garlic from just across the Channel was regarded with distaste as a flavouring that created bad breath, devastating flatulence, erectile dysfunction and a shortened lifespan. Garlic was, of course, a mere taster. We have almost disappeared under a mountain of rogan josh, nam pla, chorizo, jerk chicken and falafel. If he had managed to stay on active service for the entire half century, Bond would have seen a revolution in the MI6 canteen.

A NEW ENEMY

Blair’s Britain is, of course, twisting and turning in the face of international Islamic terrorism. This would have struck the 1950s Bond as astonishing. His great enemy was communism, and the cold war dominated political life on Earth. Even when the Bond books or films were notionally about something else (most famously Blofeld and his evil Spectre organisation) they were soaked in the paranoia of that era. The films make Spectre – the Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion – more jokey and, as the cold war began to thaw, the Russians were more likely to appear as allies or aggrieved third parties. But however far he roamed from his roots, Bond remained at heart a cold warrior.

That communism should have disappeared, with the same vertiginous speed as the British empire, is another mega-change we now take as a given. In the new movie of Casino Royale, which sticks in various fun ways quite closely to the original novel, the villain Le Chiffre now finances terrorism instead of communism. The only organisations which have been relieved by the rise of international terrorism must be movie studios and the Bond producers, who were left high and dry by the end of the cold war : at last they have a clear monster in view.

DIFFERENT CLASS

Class is another huge area that has mutated out of control in the past half -century. The subtext of Fleming’s invention was that he could sleep with or kill anyone he liked because he was posh. This was carried over into the films so that Connery or Moore were always frowning over their brandies and adjusting their dinner jackets. Brosnan’s position in the class system was hard to place, not least because he looked like a Moss Bros model who had wandered into an action movie. But Daniel Craig waves goodbye to the last traces of upper-class savoir-faire.

In practice of course, the sort of people involved in high-rolling casino games have always made a mixed crowd, but in the climactic card game at Casino Royale (relocated from France to the slightly more sinister locale of Montenegro for this film), Craig is surrounded by sartorial dodginess – ponytails, black velvet shirts and girls who clearly ran away from home some time back.

Continuity is offered by the scenes set in the Bahamas, where it is possible to compare them directly to the similar backdrop of Thunderball over 40 years ago. These show that although the millionaire yachts may be even bigger, the same kind of international Euro/American hoodlum riffraff still make it their destination of choice.

NEW BRITAIN

Britain as a whole is very much wealthier than it was in the 1950s. When Fleming wrote his first Bond novel it was a battered, rationed, monochrome place; not yet part of Europe, viewed with suspicion and disdain by the US. After a cheerful but illusory boom in the early 1960s, successive governments found themselves with ever less manageable economic figures. While all this was unfolding, of course, James Bond was merrily marching across our cinema screens, implying that all was well.

As things got ever worse, Britain, the “sick man of Europe”, only really kept its end up thanks to Bond: a reminder to the rest of the world, however debased, of the respect that had been felt in so many countries for the old wartime Britain. With the early Roger Moore films I loved so much, it should have been a surprise that many of the international villains he took on didn’t laugh at our British hero. By the release of The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977, Bond himself would have been nervously praying that none of his equipment was actually UK-made.

And yet now Britain is a relatively prosperous place. It could be argued that the changes have been so radical that the country emerged from the horrible chrysalis of the 1970s as something quite different: a new nation in almost the same way that Slovakia and Ukraine are. It is a place that now operates through the service industries, an intermediary between the USA and Europe.

It is part of the weird circularity of watching Casino Royale that here is the same character, far closer in many ways to Fleming’s intentions than even Connery (Craig looks like one of the muscular, brutal Bonds featured on the 1950s Pan paperback covers), following the same story, working for the same organisation. And yet everything else has changed. This makes Bond almost a religious figure – a sort of alcoholic, homicidal version of Jesus , a reassuring constant in a Britain that has been through so much. It is a sort of miracle that after so many books, so many movies, so many years, the same character can be rendered fresh and interesting. Casino Royale is a genuinely inventive, tough, enjoyable movie; Craig is a great new star; and 007 will have his licence to kill renewed, for a few more years, at least.

Simon Winder is the author of The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey Through The Disturbing World Of James Bond (£14.99, Picador)

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