A brief history of the Bond villain
17-Oct-2008 • Bond News
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In 007's latest outing, Quantum of Solace, James Bond's antagonist isn't a Cold War Soviet warrior or the cat-stroking boss of a criminal network. He doesn't have three nipples. He doesn't cry blood. Dominic Greene (played by French actor Mathieu Amalric) is... an environmentalist.
Short of re-imagining Blofeld masquerading as a Greenwich Village folk singer, it's hard to think of a more incongruous profession the film-makers could have chosen for a Bond baddie.
"To be green is so fashionable now," is how Marc Forster, the Swiss director of Quantum of Solace, has explained his decision to make the new villain a character at least pretending to save the world. "All these big companies and corporations suddenly use it for their advantage and say, 'Look how green we are.' But ultimately they use it to enrich themselves."
In the modern Bond era, the old certainties about heroes and villains no longer seem sustainable. Ian Fleming's James Bond was â as the author Alexander Cockburn once characterised him â "a bit of a sicko, held together mostly by his sanction from the state: licensed to kill." He was promiscuous, sadistic and very violent. However, he was also on the side of the "free" world. If he was emotionally repressed and had an inner vulnerability, this wasn't something that Fleming or his readers were much interested in.
Now, though, the dynamics have changed. In making the 22nd Bond movie, Forster has attempted to give the world's most famous secret agent a new emotional depth. It's not that Bond's behaviour has changed. He is still â as he is called in the new film â "a wild one, he'll light the fuse on any explosive situation and be a danger to himself and others. Kill first, ask questions later... A blunt instrument whose primary method is to provoke and confront." The difference now is that film-makers such as Forster and Paul Haggis (who co-scripted both Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace) aren't simply celebrating his behaviour. They're trying to work out what drives him.
"I love the James Bond franchise, but Bond in everything I've seen has always been an assassin that kills, makes a quip and walks off. I can't believe that an assassin kills and it doesn't affect him in the least," Haggis says. "If we ask people to do these terrible things for us, there are personal stakes."
As Bond becomes a richer, darker figure, the villains are likewise taking on an added complexity. That's why Mathieu Amalric is the first Bond villain with green credentials. He's clean-cut and doesn't know how to fight. (Amalric courted controversy earlier in the year by telling one British newspaper that he was "taking the smile of Tony Blair, the craziness of Sarkozy" into his characterisation of Greene, as if modern politics was where you needed to go today to find real villainy.)
So what makes a good Bond villain? The children's author Tom Blofeld, founder of the Norfolk theme park Bewilderwood, suggests that for Ian Fleming, it was all in the names. Like his father and uncle, Tom Blofeld went as a child to Sunningdale School, a small Berkshire prep school that groomed privileged young boys for public schools such as Eton and Harrow. "All the leaving photos were on the walls. I found my father's face, as you do. There was also a chap called Scaramanga (the name of the villain in The Man With the Golden Gun). Four years younger was this little boy called Fleming (a relative of the Bond author)."
Tom's theory is that the young Fleming had some reason to dislike Scaramanga and Blofeld. "He would have been sent off to Uncle Ian to stay and conversations would have taken place as to what life was like [at school]. The answer would have been, 'It's shit because of Blofeld and Scaramanga, who are complete scum.' Fleming duly spotted the dramatic quality of the names and used them."
Tom Blofeld's theory is lent weight by Nicholas Dawson, who was headmaster at Sunningdale for 37 years and confirms that not only did Scaramanga and Blofeld overlap, but that there was a Bond in the school rolls at the same time. "I always believed V C the names came from boys in the school at that time," Dawson says of Sunningdale's post-war crop of pupils.
Did the youthful Blofelds and Scaramanga behave like future Spectre bosses and mobster assassins? "Certainly not while they were at school," the ex-headmaster says. The Blofelds, at least, didn't have anything inherently villainous about them. One, Sir John (Tom's father) went on to become a High Court judge. Another, Henry, is a well-known cricket commentator.
Goldfinger wasn't a pupil at Sunningdale; that Bond villain was directly inspired by the modernist architect Erno Goldfinger. Hugo Drax (from Moonraker) was reportedly named after Sir Ian Fleming's friend Sir Reginald Drax.
Of course, working out the real-life inspirations for Bond villains has turned into a parlour game. For the producers of the Bond films, the challenge has been to cast these villains astutely. They had to have charisma and seem plausibly evil. If they were too restrained, they risked appearing dull. If they were too extravagant in their villainy, they could teeter on the edge of kitsch.
An extraordinary array of actors have played Bond's antagonists. If you trace a line from Joseph Wiseman in Dr No (1962) to Amalric in Quantum of Solace, you encompass almost every kind of modern malfeasance. Bond villains have been newspaper barons, assassins, drug dealers, arms traders and psychopathic Cold War warriors. They have been played by an extraordinarily colourful range of actors: disciples of Bertolt Brecht, former Nazis, Shakespearean actors, pop divas and acclaimed novelists have all had a go at grinding 007 into the dust.
Wiseman's Dr Julius No, the first villain off the blocks, was a little on the bland side. "Unfortunately, I misjudged you. You are just a stupid policeman whose luck has run out," Wiseman sneers at Sean Connery. Dressed like Chairman Mao, he is more refined than his opponent â a cold, cerebral figure with prosthetic hands. The Montreal-born Wiseman was an acclaimed stage actor, renowned for his work at the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre. As Bond producer Cubby Broccoli noted, he brought "cold, sadistic menace" to his role. What he lacked was that mix of intensity and flamboyance that galvanised the best Bond villains that followed.
Far better were Robert Shaw and Lotte Lenya in From Russia With Love (1963). The former played Spectre assassin Red Grant. What gave Shaw his edge was his clear inner conviction that he was cleverer, better-looking and stronger than Connery's Bond. Shaw's wife, the actress Mary Ure, talked him into taking on the role. He had his hair bleached and wore "lifts" so that he was taller than Connery. When he tells Bond: "You may know the right wines, but you're the one on your knees," the disdain doesn't seem feigned in the slightest.
As Shaw's biographer John French notes, the role of the killer was well suited to Shaw, bringing out his ability "to suggest a capacity for unlimited violence... in a character on the lower rungs of life, in conjunction with some sort of moral, physical or spiritual superiority". Shaw always used to tell friends that in the fight sequence aboard the train, he "bested" Connery.
Shaw's testosterone-driven villainy was perfectly complemented by Lenya's Bette Davis-like spite and malice as Rosa Klebb. Lenya, who was married to Kurt Weill, had first achieved fame in Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera in the 1920s. Although playing a Soviet agent, she was a link with the Weimar era of decadence and promiscuity. "A butch, crop-haired villainess... evil overtones with just a hint of lesbianism," was how Cubby Broccoli summed up her character in the film.
The scene in which she tries to kick Connery with a switchblade hidden in the toe of her shoe remains one of the great Bond film set-pieces. Somehow, Bond trying to fend off an elderly lady (Klebb was in her sixties by the time she played Klebb) with a spike in her shoe was infinitely more dramatic than watching him fell yet another thug with a knife or a machine gun.
Blofeld first featured in the Bond movies in From Russia With Love. He was played by (an uncredited and largely unseen) Anthony Dawson, who also went on to appear in Thunderball. However, it was only with Donald Pleasence in You Only Live Twice (1967) that we began to see Blofeld in full, and not just as somebody who liked stroking cats.
The Blofelds from Sunningdale Prep School were part of an old English family. As Tom Blofeld explains, the name is Anglo-Saxon/Dutch Walloon in origin and was in the Domesday Book. "It's an old Norfolk name for 'blue field,' which is flax field. The primary crop was flax." In the books and movies, Blofeld was of East European origin, hence immediately suspicious in the Bond cosmos. His first names played to old-fashioned British xenophobia; the "Ernst" hinted at the possibility of a German, and perhaps Nazi, past. The "Stavro" suggested Greece or Turkey.
As played by Donald Pleasence, he wasn't some public schoolboy bounder à la Flashman but a clammy, balding figure with a scar down his face. "As you can see, I am about to inaugurate a little war," Pleasence tells Connery in an icy, unexpressive voice. Cubby Broccoli warmed to what he called Pleasence's "pale-eyed menace", that miasmatic quality Pleasence would later bring to many other roles as beady-eyed psychopaths and killers.
Telly Savalas's Blofeld in On Her Majesty's Secret Service was a villain in a more exuberant groove. He didn't suck on a lollipop, as he would during his many years playing the television detective Kojak, but he had a jocularity about him.
Entirely different again was Charles Gray's incarnation of Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever. Gray (whose other best-known movie role was as the narrator in The Rocky Horror Picture Show) approached playing Bond's nemesis in much the same way that George Sanders did playing the supercilious theatre critic Addison DeWitt in All About Eve â that is to say, with a mix of smugness and sneering superiority.
Perhaps the least likely Blofeld in Bond history was Max von Sydow, the Swedish actor hitherto best known for his work in Ingmar Bergman movies and for playing Christ in George Stevens's The Greatest Story Ever Told. He was Blofeld in Never Say Never Again (1983), the second (unofficial) screen version of Thunderball. A tall figure with a beard, his Blofeld looked as if he had stumbled out of rehearsals for some new stage version of Ibsen's A Doll's House.
Von Sydow's Blofeld was upstaged by Klaus Maria Brandauer's highly energetic turn as fellow villain Largo. Brandauer got into trim for his stint of Bond villainy by playing the chameleon-like lead in Istvan Szabo's Mephisto (1981), a charming and infinitely adaptable stage actor who abandoned his principles to become a darling of the Nazi party. It's a measure of his ability as an actor that he was able to put across lines like: "Bond â the game is over!" without entirely losing his dignity.
Gert Fröbe, who played Auric Goldfinger, has a fair claim to be the quintessential Bond villain. He had actually been a member of the Nazi party, something that led to Goldfinger (1964) being banned in Israel, and he later went on to appear in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang â a reflection of the extreme contradictions in his biography.
Fröbe defended himself thus when details of his Nazi past emerged in the mid-1960s: "I was not interested in politics and joined the party because of its social programme. All I knew about Nazis in my little village of Zurchau was that they were distributing to workers flats of the rich." He was able to prove that he hadn't been active in the party, even though he had been a Nazi party member for many years. He lived in a castle outside Munich and didn't speak English well.
Nonetheless, as Cubby Broccoli noted, Fröbe combined "menace with a great sense of humour". As the self-mocking elements in Bond movies began to be heightened, the actor made the perfect transitional figure between the more earnest villains of the past and the increasingly flamboyant figures who succeeded them.
One tendency became pronounced; the villains risked being eclipsed by the gallery of misshapen and psychopathic henchmen and henchwomen they hired to do their dirty work. Playing Oddjob, the Japanese-American bodybuilder and wrestler Harold Sakata won plaudits for his frisbee-like antics with his bowler hat in Goldfinger. The diminutive Hervé Villechaize was likewise admired for his role as Scaramanga's dwarf servant Nick Nack in The Man With the Golden Gun.
In a cynical but ingenious piece of opportunism, the Bond producers even managed to tap into the obsession with sharks in the wake of Steven Spielberg's Jaws by casting the hulk-like Richard Kiel as Jaws, the villain with the steel teeth, in both The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979). Good though Kiel was, his double turn highlighted an increasing weakness in the Bond movies, especially in the Roger Moore era â the tendency to teeter on the edge of preposterousness. The villains became more and more like figures who looked as if they were on leave from Christmas pantomimes. Grace Jones's tussle with Bond on the V C Eiffel Tower in A View To a Kill represented a nadir. Steven Berkoff was entertaining but wildly over the top as the mad Soviet general Orlov in Octopussy (1983).
There has often been a conservatism â a distrust, even a downright loathing of "difference", however it is defined â at the heart of the Bond films. Diamonds Are Forever (1971) was accused of homophobia because of its caricatured portrayal of the dastardly gay assassins, Mr Kidd (Putter Smith) and Mr Wint (Bruce Glover). Meanwhile, Live and Let Die (1973) was accused of racism after it borrowed heavily (and far from subtly) from 1970s blaxploitation movies; the New Orleans street funerals, Caribbean voodoo rituals and Shaft-like action scenes were staged with great energy, but seemed misjudged. Guy Hamilton (whose credits included The Colditz Story) was directing the dapper Roger Moore. It was as if Fifties British cinema and Seventies urban America had clashed head on.
As the critic Richard Schickel wrote in Time magazine: "In this incarnation, 007 is the Great White Hope. He goes about beating up black men... why are all the blacks either stupid brutes or primitives deep into occultism?"
Sometimes, the choice of Bond heroes has been as startling as the franchise's gallery of villains. For example, Bond's allies in The Living Daylights (1987) include the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, who share his antipathy toward the Soviet Union. Twenty years on and a few twists in world geopolitics later, it's highly unlikely that Afghan freedom fighters would be painted in quite such a rosy light.
In his entertaining essay on Bond, "The Secret Agent", Alexander Cockburn argues that Bond "became the embodiment of Western discourse on the Cold War. The men who would later construct the Reaganite view of the universe turned time and again to their Bond for edification." However, Cockburn also pointed out that, right from the outset, the Bond movies tended to treat the Russians with surprising restraint. They knew that when the Cold War did end, Russia would become an important foreign market. (Sure enough, Quantum of Solace is due to open in Russia in early November.) The villains were therefore invariably rogue individuals â megalomaniacs from different corners of the world â rather than tied to any ideology or country.
Bond himself has many of the qualities of the traditional movie villain. When Vesper Lynd isn't on the scene, he's cold-hearted, violent and cynical. Bodies are left trailing in his wake. Who's the biggest killer in Bond movies? Surely Bond himself. One guesses that he must be responsible for more of the deaths we see on screen than Blofeld, Scaramanga and Le Chiffre combined.
He is also utterly aloof. There is an air of mystery about him. If he bares his emotions too much, that mystique will diminish. By the same token, if his antagonists become too sympathetic or turn into mirror images of him, they will begin to disappoint us too.
Ultimately, whether it is Blofeld's master criminal trying to trigger a new world war or Dominic Greene posing as an environmentalist, audiences don't want too much shade or nuance in their Bond villains. The challenge lies simply in finding fresh ways to be bad.
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