Veteran James Bond experts may recall some controversy about the poster for For Your Eyes Only in 1981. That was the one with a distant gun-wielding Roger Moore framed between the enormous uncovered legs of an otherwise unseen female antagonist.
The publicists had enough sense to direct 007’s aim somewhat to stage right of – how shall I put this? – the point at which the legs meet. But the image remained sufficiently raunchy for such liberal organs as The Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times to censor all flesh from the knee up. The Pittsburgh Press even imposed a pair of shorts on the largely naked buttocks.
How times have changed. In the 21st century the hot-under-the-collar tabloids are concerned about the Bond people not being daring enough. I regret to inform you that the Daily Mail is putting the W-word within inverted commas again: “007 fans blast ‘woke’ Amazon for removing sexy Bond girls and even spy’s gun from posters,” the paper recently thundered.
To be fair to Amazon MGM, new custodian of Bond, it was more an issue of not including “Bond girls” rather than cutting them out. But there is no question that Prime Video, Amazon’s streaming service, had been excising weapons from artwork directing visitors to individual titles.
A vintage shot promoting Dr No scrubbed the pistol from Sean Connery’s left hand, leaving the folded arm with an awkward-looking fist. Something similar happens to Pierce Brosnan for GoldenEye. He doesn’t have anything to shoot you with, but it now looks as if he’s preparing to sock you in the jaw. Weirdest of all is the image for Spectre. Daniel Craig no longer has a gun in his hand, but he is still wearing a shoulder holster. Maybe, like Gareth Keenan in The Office, he uses it for his mobile phone.
The studio took the stills down within days. The airbrushed promotional portraits have been replaced with images apparently plucked from the movies. Bond in a car for Dr No. Bond in Las Vegas for Diamonds Are Forever. Readers of the Mail will be reassured to see that “sexy Bond girls” have been allowed back in the frame. Michelle Yeoh shares a motorbike with Brosnan for Tomorrow Never Dies. Lois Chiles orbits with Moore for Moonraker.
But it is surely no coincidence that still nobody is wielding a gun. Is this what they mean by “woke” gone mad?
This is all the more peculiar in that it wasn’t exactly true to say there were no guns in the original images (or that there are none in the new). Each thumbnail featured the famous 007 logo that – showcasing suave graphic design by the great Joe Caroff, who died in August, at 103 – tweaks the “7” into a version of Bond’s Walther PPK pistol.
In other words, each mini poster featured confirmation that the Bond arrangement is, and forever will be, woven in with gun violence. “I think you are a sexist, misogynist dinosaur and a relic of the cold war,” Judi Dench’s M said of Bond in GoldenEye. True enough. He is also a violent psychopath.
It is hard to know what Amazon is up to here. It took me 30 seconds of diligent research (that’s typing in the words “Prime Video thriller”) to discern that there are guns elsewhere in Prime’s promotional images. The late Val Kilmer is wielding an assault rifle for Heat. Jude Law brandishes a revolver for the true-life crime flick The Order. So it’s not – or not yet, anyway – a comprehensive firearm ban.
Whatever the logic, the news generated a smidgen of unfortunate publicity for the new Bond regime. It is a small thing. It is already little more than a footnote. But it is hard to exaggerate how paranoid Bond fandom is about the advance of the demon woke (or demon “woke”).
No threat from Ernst Stavro Blofeld is quite so fearsome as that posed by imagined creatives turning Bond into a woman or a vegan or a cyclist. The writers of No Time to Die played rather a good joke by casting Lashana Lynch, a black woman, as a stand-in 007, thus leaving idiots who don’t understand how modern culture works to believe that, after the death of Bond, she will return as hero of the next film.
Amazon MGM, which gained creative control earlier this year, will, of course, be rebooting the entire project from scratch. Steven Knight is writing. Denis Villeneuve is directing. James Bond may become a person of colour, but he will remain a man. He will continue to sleep with women who aren’t his wife. He will continue to drink Martinis and drive sports cars. And he will kill people with guns. The alternative would be like having Superman take the bus.
