Feminist and Christian criticisms of James Bond echo each other

If a woman plays the next Bond, Daniel Craig should be the next Miss Marple, writes David Quinn

The latest James Bond movie, No Time to Die is out at last, after a long delay thanks to the pandemic. It was due to be launched just as Covid-19 sent us all into lockdown last spring, and its title was probably a bit unfortunate under the circumstances.

The first James Bond movie, Dr No, was released in 1962, before this writer was even born. Anyone who was an adult when it was released will almost certainly be retired by now, unless they’re happy to work well past the age of 65 because if they were 18 in 1962, then they are 77 by now.

The Bond movies are around as long as most people remember and the books, by Ian Fleming, even longer than that. The first of them, Casino Royale, was published in 1953.

Both the books and the movies attracted quite a lot of criticism from Christian quarters when they first came out.

In 1962, the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, published a lengthy article attacking Dr No.

The piece, called ‘The James Bond Case’, denounced it as “a dangerous mix of violence, vulgarity, sadism and sex”.

The newspaper wasn’t interested in Dr No as a movie, and whether it was well acted or well made. It worried about the effect it might have on viewers. Would James Bond appeal to them? Would men want to be like him, would women be attracted to him?

The Vatican newspaper was concerned the answer in both cases would be ‘yes’ and that would be a danger to people’s souls.

Bond did not attract the ire of the Vatican only. In 1961, the Rev. Leslie Paxton of the Great George Street Congregational Church in Liverpool preached a sermon against the character.

Upset

Ian Fleming was upset and asked for a copy of the sermon to see if it had any merit. The sermon itself does not seem to have survived.

Fleming described himself in response as a “some kind of sub-species of a Christian”.

We have to remember that in the 1950s and into the 1960s, Christian leaders were a lot of more influential than they are today, including in Britain. Christian ideas about sexual morality and the world in general were much stronger than they are now, and the Bond character was fairly shocking compared with the action heroes people were used to at the time.

Think of Charlton Heston in Ben Hur or El Cid, for example. Heroes were rarely morally ambiguous.

But Bond was ruthless and a womaniser. He often used people as a means to an end, men as well as women. We can be glad that he fought for his country against ‘super-villains’ and was not on their side.

007 did not attract criticism in the early days from Christian quarters only.

A review in the New Statesman of Dr No when it was published in 1958, said the Bond books consisted of “three basic ingredients, all thoroughly English”: “the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the mechanical two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult”.

Differently

If things had gone a bit differently for Bond, he might have turned out like Harry Flashman of the Flashman novels which are set in the 19th Century.

Flashman is the appalling bully from Tom Brown’s School days’ who is eventually expelled. The writer, Gordon MacDonald Fraser, decides to take up the Flashman story from that point on (the 1830s) and has him join the British army. Flashman is the ultimate cad, rotter, bounder and a coward into the bargain.

Bond is far from a coward. But if Bond, an orphan, had fallen into the wrong hands after leaving boarding school, he might have turned into a Flashman character, minus the cowardice.

But Bond has always had his defenders as well.

The writer, Kingsley Amis, said in 1965 that Bond believed in loyalty, fortitude, had a sense of responsibility and was willing to die for a greater good. In the stories, it is always clear who the villain is. There is nothing morally ambiguous about that. So, they were more traditional and black and white in their story-telling than might have seemed the case at first.

Review

Much more recently, L’Osservatore Romano seems to have come around to some of the Bond movies. A review in 2012, while Benedict XVI was still Pope, praised Skyfall which came out that year.

It said the version of Bond played by Daniel Craig was “less of a cliche, less attracted by the pleasures of life”. The character had become “darker and more introspective” and therefore, “he is more human, even able to be moved and cry”.

The biggest criticisms of the Bond stories more recently have come from feminist quarters. The complaint is that women are mainly sexual objects for Bond and almost never treated as equals.

That is not entirely true, however. In the second Bond movie, From Russia With Love, 007 teams up with a female Russian agent to track down the villains.

He does the same in The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977, and there are plenty of other, similar examples as well.

In a way, the criticisms of Bond have come full circle. Christian leaders didn’t like him because he didn’t treat women with due respect, lacked an inner life, and was too cold and calculating. The term wasn’t used at the time, but he was effectively being accused of ‘toxic masculinity’.

The Bond movies shook off the Christian criticisms because traditional morality was going out of fashion by the 1960s. It hasn’t been able to shake off the feminist attacks so easily. Therefore, the modern Bond is a reformed man compared with the early Bond.

Finally, there is talk that next time out Bond should be played by a woman. Well, if that happens, then they should let Daniel Craig play the next Miss Marple.