For the post-9/11 world, a rougher and tougher Bond

He is the spy of a thousand faces - reports NNS.

He has been a British tourist and a Jamaican businessman, an avid golfer, gambler and expert on heraldry. He has pretended to be a man on holiday with his wife, an import-export executive on a business trip and, less believably, a poor Japanese fisherman. He has been whoever he needed to be for the mission at hand.

He has been whoever we needed him to be, too.

"Casino Royale," the latest James Bond picture, brings us a new actor, Daniel Craig, as the agent with a license to kill. But it also brings a new incarnation of Bond, a hero who has always reflected his times. By the tally of its producers (who don't count the 1967 spoof of the same name or the independently made "Never Say Never Again"), it is the 21st movie in the 007 series.

"The character of James Bond is very complex," says producer Barbara Broccoli, whose father acquired the rights to the character more than 40 years ago. "Every actor has been able to make it his own, and with every actor comes a new direction."

The Bond of the original novels reflected his author, Ian Fleming. Like Fleming, Bond was part Scot, and had spent time in Naval Intelligence during World War II. He chain-smoked, drank heavily and drove himself hard; he was particularly fond of good food, sports cars and women who dressed with simple elegance and avoided complicated entanglements.

Yet the books -- which began in 1953 with "Casino Royale" -- also reflected the deepest wishes of their audiences, and satisfied their most frustrated longings.

To 1950s Britons, still suffering from the deprivations of the war, the books offered vicarious, sensual joys. Bond didn't smoke working-class Woodbines, but cigarettes of "a Balkan and Turkish mixture made for him by Morlands of Grosvenor Street"; he didn't have a quick pint at the local pub but ice-cold vodka martinis, "shaken, not stirred." To a people long used to making do, the precise and luxurious details of his life read like soft-core pornography.

The books also delivered a strong dose of nationalist pride. The British had already left India, and would soon be humiliated in Suez; even hard-core imperialists could see the sun was setting at last. In the Bond books, however, America is a crass amusement park of cowboys, Mafiosi and Harlem hoods in purple suits; only the British remain bright and brave enough to lead the world.

The books' snobbery and racism can be jarring today -- every villain is a wily foreigner, usually with bad manners -- and seemed to be shared by their author. At the time, he described the novels as being "for a very specialized, limited market" and loftily announced that "the great unwashed public" was unlikely to appreciate them. He was right about that, at first. When "Casino Royale" was published in paperback in America, it was retitled "You Asked for It." Readers hadn't, and Fleming considered himself lucky to get $1,000 for the TV rights.

Though American publishers were slow to understand (the taut 1955 adventure "Moonraker" was cheesily retitled "Too Hot to Handle"), the novels caught on, even among grubby commoners. American men might not relate to the English chauvinism, but they could identify with another theme -- Bond as the perpetually put-upon middle manager, snapped at by his superiors, criticized for his expense reports and constantly asked to do the impossible.

And then Bond got a second chance.

There were a number of factors in his favor, all happening rapidly in the early '60s. The first was another, smarter business deal, selling the remaining rights to movie producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. The second was an offhand comment from President John F. Kennedy listing "From Russia With Love" as one of his favorite books. The third was simply the Beatles, and the worldwide explosion of Carnaby Street culture.

But mostly there was Sean Connery as Bond, insolent and incendiary.

"No one had ever seen anyone like Sean before," Broccoli says. "He was raw, a rough diamond, and he was just so sexy and beautiful and dangerous and tough. Fleming used to describe Bond as a coiled spring, and Sean had that. He just burst upon the screen."

"The super-sophistication of James Bond, the movies had really lost that quality except for Cary Grant," says James R. Parish, the author of dozens of movie books including the out-of-print "Great Spy Pictures." "But now, here came someone who was not only sophisticated but could do action, too, and who pushed the envelope as far as onscreen sexuality was concerned ... . No matter who the villains were, Connery always seemed in command of the situation, and audiences respond to that."

The 007 craze began, although Fleming would see only some of it -- he died at age 56 in 1964. It also began a new, international Bond. If the '50s literary version had been a revolt against a depressed economy and a shrinking empire, the '60s cinematic one would be an embrace of space-age advances and unlimited sexual freedoms. Bond's arsenal expanded from simple automatics to rocket packs; his conquests went from elegant women in black-velvet dresses to bosomy girls with dirty-joke names.

This was a different kind of Bond -- part Popular Mechanics, part Playboy -- and Connery embodied its rugged, ribald cool even as the series grew to reflect the era's comic-strip sensibility. Villains were dispatched not just with bullets, but with bon mots; plots grew increasingly outlandish. It was no longer enough for Bond to slip in and out of casinos, outwitting double agents and thwarting the Russians; now he had to sneak into abandoned volcanoes, and destroy scarred geniuses who wanted to rule the world.

Some of the changes were due to marketing considerations -- it was simpler to sell the films abroad if the villains weren't Fleming's hard-line communists but apolitical megalomaniacs, easier to market them in America if the sex and violence was done with a wink. But the ultimate result was to push the series from the relatively believable world of "From Russia, With Love" into the cartoonish land of "You Only Live Twice," a flip joke for a hip age.

By the early '70s, though, those simple pleasures were harder to take simply. There were feminists now and black-power activists; neither was likely to smile at the old Bond, who blithely slapped women on the rump, or ordered Quarrel in "Dr. No" to "Fetch my shoes." The new films added stronger female and black characters. They also made Bond more of a self-conscious joke.

Much of that was due to the new casting. Roger Moore had taken over from Connery in 1973, and although he was actually three years older, he remained a pretty boy. Unlike the movies' first Bond, this one was overly aware of his clothes and his coiffure. Yes, he still carried that license to kill, but now he seemed more concerned with whether his shoulder holster spoiled the line of his Yves St. Laurent jacket. He was a feminized Bond for an androgynous age, and his relentless double entendres sounded as if he had something to prove.

"His pictures, really it's hard to remember one from the other," says Parish, whose most recent books include "Fiasco," a cataloguing of Hollywood mistakes. "Right from the start of his career, there was always less than met the eye with Roger Moore ... . You could never quite believe this was a man who'd been licensed to kill. He always looked as if he'd rather be off getting a haircut."

"These were the '70s," Broccoli says in defense. "There was the extravagance of the Me Generation, and this reluctance to take things seriously, and films reflected that. Roger brought this wonderfully self-deprecatory sense to the character, which was great, and absolutely right for those times."

Each generation gets the Bond it wants, or at least deserves, and by the end of the bottom-line, every-man-for-himself '80s it was time for a different kind of spy. Besides, the times had caught up with 007, and proven him right all along. Those communists he had fought in the '60s? They were now part of a despised "Evil Empire." Those outer space weapons Blofeld and his friends were always working on? They were now the property of the Americans, promised as part of the new "Star Wars" initiative. Fact had merged with fiction.

And so, as played by Timothy Dalton, this new Bond was a little cruel, and far more rooted in reality than the tuxedoed spy who had fought a giant with stainless steel teeth. In "The Living Daylights," 007 ended up in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan; in "License to Kill," he turned vigilante to avenge a friend and confront a Latin American drug lord. There were pretty heroines, of course, but they no longer had silly names, and for the first time in years Bond had more on his mind than the next martini or sarcastic quip.

"The Dalton films were much darker films than the Moore ones," Parish says. "It wasn't just the gorgeous scenery and the suave playboy anymore."

"I don't think that Bond is a role model or he should be a role model," Dalton observed of the character's new edge. "I don't think anyone should grow up wanting to go around killing people."

But legal disagreements put the series in limbo for six years, and by the time it returned in the mid-'90s the world had changed again. The Evil Empire had collapsed under its own weight; stories of drug cartels no longer dominated the front pages. And so the new Bond, as played by Pierce Brosnan, was modernized -- with healthier habits and a female boss -- but also modified. He would be tough, like Connery, but not cruel, like Dalton; self-mocking, like the early Moore, but not quite the cartoon he became.

"When we started up (the Brosnan films), the Wall had come down," Broccoli remembers. "The world seemed to be in great shape. What did we need James Bond for? Who is he going to fight? So in the first film, we made the villain a traitor within the organization. In the second, he was a media baron, trying to control information."

It was a moderate Bond for a moderate age, but after 9/11, it became clear that the escapism of the Bond films might be becoming too escapist. The next film, "Die Another Day," went back to the Dalton model, giving Brosnan a harder edge and introducing topical villainy in the shape of some bellicose North Koreans. Although the movie still featured plenty of absurd gadgets, it was obvious that a new cold war had begun, and that it was time to bring back the movies' greatest cold warrior.

But, once again, a new direction required a new 007.

As the latest 007, Daniel Craig is an obvious visual break with the past. He's blond, for one thing -- a first for the series -- and more ruggedly muscular than Brosnan and Moore. He isn't the clotheshorse those actors were, either. On a mission in Madagascar he wears a plain pair of trousers and a washed-out sports shirt. When he dresses for his high-stakes card game in the casino, it's his female companion who picks his tuxedo. The only time we see him change his clothes is when they're full of blood.

But the film shows a stark return to even older traditions, some of them going straight back to the early books. The few gadgets in the film are introduced half-heartedly, and aren't essential to the plot; Bond's best weapons are, once again, his fists and his gun. The violence is more extreme than in recent films, and with more consequence; Bond kills at close quarters, and often in cold blood. And, most important, the conflict is once again ideological; the villains may be terrorists instead of communists, but this is still a war of values.

The great irony is that the man best equipped to defend those virtues -- justice, forgiveness, common decency -- is a man who can't afford to indulge them.

Because our latest Bond is not a nice man. He is not even, by most standards, a good one. Better, calmer times will bring that Bond's return, the one with the perfect hair you'd want to invite into your home. These times demand a Bond who waits outside your house, with his finger on the trigger of his Walther PPK and his blue eyes as cold as ice. This is, right now, the secret agent we secretly desire -- and if he stands ready to defend us again, it is only because we have given him back his license to kill.

Thanks to `Brokenclaw` for the alert.

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