Bond Night takes a break to showcase Americans in James Bond films and how the franchise satirizes the States.
By Michael O’Connor // Welcome to Bond Night: Intermission! Occasionally, this column will take a quick break for drinks and digressions, eschewing the individual film coverage to take a broader look at the larger franchise. Last time, James Bond games were the focus; this time, it’s all about Americans in James Bond films. Specifically, how does the James Bond franchise portray Americans and American culture? Spoiler warning: it ain’t pretty!
America The Hideous
If your only exposure to the United States was through watching James Bond films, you could be forgiven for believing it was the ugliest country in the world. The land of the free and home of the brave makes its debut in Goldfinger, and aside from some glamorous relaxation besides a Miami swimming pool, it’s a pretty unimpressive showing. The first half of that film romances and seduces us with the stunning natural beauty of the Swiss Alps; the second half quickly demoralizes our senses with the hideous billboard-laden highways and trash-heaped scrapyards of suburban Kentucky.
Our next visits to America aren’t winning any beauty contests either. Diamonds Are Forever depicts the desert town of Las Vegas as high on tacky garishness and low on class or culture. And Live and Let Die reveals only the most dilapidated, crumbling neighborhoods of Harlem before introducing us to Louisiana’s humid, stinking swamps. Even A View to a Kill with its fairly benign portrait of San Francisco doesn’t deliver a single shot that could rival the glamorous cinematography provided to India, for instance, in the previous Bond film, Octopussy. (And to anyone who disputes San Francisco’s photogenic quality, I’ve got one word for you: Vertigo.)
The sum effect of all this ugliness is to convey the United States as a place of poverty, kitsch, backwardness, crass commercialism and self-destructive vanity. The Bond films have always been masterful at inciting in their audience a desire to travel and explore, to indulge in the beauty and variety of the world; but who would want to visit the America portrayed in these films?
Goofy Gangsters
The America of the James Bond films is not only a pretty ugly place scenically; it’s also filled to bursting with mouth-breathing idiots. According to Guy Hamilton’s Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever and Live and Let Die (which I’ve dubbed the American Idiot Trilogy), this is a land predominantly occupied by uneducated mafia hoodlums, ditzy airheads, and buffoonish cowboy wannabes.
Our first exposure to these folks is in Goldfinger, where the titular villain’s Kentucky ranch becomes the meeting place for a gang of cheap hoodlums who talk and dress like they just walked out of a 1934 gangster picture. They’re jumpy and jittery with nasal voices that speak almost entirely in exposition and contractions; anything and everything sets them off, often to comical effect; and they don’t exude menace so much as they appear like poseurs to power, insecure and frightened.
When Goldfingers delivers the 60s super villain equivalent of a Power Point presentation, they completely freak out. “What’s with that trick pool table?!” one demands. “What’s that map doing there?” another asks suspiciously, as if a map once slapped his mother. Ironically, they needn’t fear the map or the pool table; it’s the silent, invisible gas getting pumped into the room that causes their demise.
Another group of lamebrain hoods arrives In Diamonds Are Forever. They sound and look so similar to the Goldfinger gang, I’d bet some of them are the same actors. Their job is to escort an undercover Bond and the corpse of his “brother” to a mob operated funeral home. One of the henchmen, hearing about Bond’s fictional sibling, proudly announces “I gotta brutha!” to which Connery dryly responds, “Small world.” Later, one of these hoods throws 007’s latest female partner out the window and into a swimming pool below. Bond compliments the hood on his aim. The bewildered thug responds, “I didn’t know there was a pool down there.”
Contrasted with the smooth charisma of Connery’s Bond or even the measured malice of Goldfinger or Blofeld, these goons stand out as even more cartoonish and impotent. They are garish parodies of American tough guys. In the world of 007, they’re nothing but a bunch of craven chumps with glass jaws.
Willard Whyte
My hate for Willard Whyte burns like a diamond encrusted satellite laser. While the character was apparently modeled after the inventor, filmmaker, genius and hermit Howard Hughes, it doesn’t show. He comes across like a clueless dope. Whyte doesn’t even seem to realize he was under house arrest while Blofeld was running his company and impersonating him.
The actor portraying Whyte is Jimmy Dean of Jimmy Dean Sausage fame and he looks like a gangly cowpoke who couldn’t outsmart a saddle if his life depended on it. For some reason, his mouth is perennially agape and the only face he can convincingly pull off is one of bewildered confusion. As for his range as an actor, it peaks at exactly one emotion: frustrated outrage. I’m convinced that Hell is really just his drawled reading of the line “Bert Saxby? Tell him he’s fired!” repeated for all eternity.
American Airheads
Let’s face it, the Bond films don’t have a great reputation for intelligent, capable, well-rounded female characters; despite that low bar, the absolute dumbest Bond girls are Americans. (The only exception is Brit Mary Goodnight from The Man with the Golden Gun; her bikinied butt accidentally pushes a button, nearly killing Bond as a result.)
From Diamonds Are Forever, there’s Jill St. John’s Tiffany Case who manages to shoot herself off an oil rig and Lana Wood’s Plenty O’Toole who acts like she discovered the alphabet yesterday; from Live and Let Die, there’s superstitious simpleton Rosie Carver; and from A View to A Kill there’s Tanya Roberts’ Stacey Sutton, who manages to get outsmarted by a blimp. Denise Richards from The World is Not Enough gets an honorable mention too; even though her character is supposed to be a nuclear physicist, there’s no audience in the world gullible enough to believe it.
J.W. Pepper
There is no more scathing parody in the Bond franchise of the American white Southerner than Clifton James’ Sheriff J.W. Pepper. Squinting with a pig-face and a curled lip, he preens around Louisiana like it’s his nest and he’s its master. Possessed by an almost Napoleonic zeal, he barks orders, commandeers vehicles and devolves into racist rants; he’s a small man who thinks he’s a big fish.
But the real treat is watching how helpless and useless he is. The black gangsters run circles around him, knocking out his cousin and stealing his boat; meanwhile James Bond tears up the bayou, completely ignoring the sheriff’s authority. Despite his delusional sense of self-importance, J.W. is spectator and victim to a situation that is far beyond his control. Even when he finally believes he can take down Bond, he’s led away by someone who outranks him and told to go back and sit in his corner.
When the character returns in The Man With The Golden Gun, it’s as the living embodiment of the archetypal Ugly American tourist. He’s loud, he’s lewd, and when surrounded by people who don’t look or act like him, he squirms and stews in intolerance and irritation. He has no sense of humility, no interest in showing deference or respect or even recognizing that he’s a guest in a foreign country; he still believes he’s running the show.
In his final scene, his deluded arrogance reveals itself one last time as he approaches the Thai police after a raucous car chase and orders them to bow to his authority. They promptly cuff him and stuff him in the back of a squad car.
War-Mongers and Profiteers
The trope of America as a war-mongering country has been a common one in film since at least 1964’s Dr. Strangelove; the James Bond franchise spun its own iteration just three years later in 1967’s You Only Live Twice.
In the film, the United States and the Soviets accuse each other of stealing each other’s space vessels and threaten nuclear war in retaliation. The British take on the role of exasperated schoolmarm dealing with bickering schoolchildren; they even show them siding with the Soviets over the Americans when the latter accuses the former of attacking their ship.
Up to this point in the franchise, the Americans and the British had always shared the same goals and intelligence, like two halves of the same whole. But here, the Americans are just as big of a problem as the Soviets. Of course, it’s SPECTRE manipulating both sides, but the satire shines through regardless. Both the Americans and Soviets are so eager to rush to war against one another, they completely ignore the elephant-sized terrorist organization in the room.
The Bond franchise would poke at American warmongering again many years later in The Living Daylights. In that film, Joe Don Baker plays former American military man Brad Whitaker. Now an arms dealer, he’s obsessed with war and its history, even though he’s never actually fought in one. His opportunist attempts to stoke a war for his own profits and his fascination with battle provoke a pretty scathing critique. Militarism is easy when you aren’t the one dying overseas to appease someone else’s vanity.
This same brand of slimy opportunism shows its serpentine tail in Quantum of Solace. In that film, CIA agent Gregg Beam conspires with terrorist Dominic Greene to gain access to Bolivian oil. He not only turns a blind eye to Greene’s plans to start a coup; he also assists him in targeting the MI6 agent pursuing him–Bond.
Felix Leiter
Speaking of CIA agents, I know what you’re going to say. What about Felix Leiter? Isn’t he the one bright, shining beacon of American purity in the Bond franchise?
In a word, “no.”
My Bond Night crew cheered every time Felix Leiter appeared in a James Bond film; and for the life of me, I have no idea why. Maybe because he was our token American, a hilariously unfamiliar familiar face that let us bask in our natural pride for a moment before we rolled our eyes and disavowed him.
I can say only one thing without a doubt: Felix is absolutely useless. At first blush, he might look like the American James Bond, but he’s really not; Indiana Jones is the American James Bond. Felix Leiter arrives, delivers some badly acted exposition, tells Bond not to fly off the handle, cleans up the mess after Bond flies off the handle, and promptly disappears from the film at the end of the second act without anyone noticing or caring. And aside from an action scene at the beginning of Licence to Kill, Felix is always conspicuously absent whenever the gunfire starts.
So what does Felix say about the Bond films’ view of Americans? Probably that they’re a dime a dozen, indistinguishable from one another, and mostly worthless. How else do you explain that out of his ten appearances, Felix has been played by eight different actors? That gives you a pretty good indication how much the producers actually cared about this character.
Keep in mind, this is a franchise that managed to retain the same actor as Q for thirty-six years, but James Bond’s best American friend gets recast two years after Dr. No by someone who honestly couldn’t look less like original Felix actor Jack Lord. One of them looks like Connery’s contemporary (Lord) while the other looks like he could be his father (Cec Linder).
In the very next film, Thunderball, the far younger Rik Van Nutter takes the role of Leiter. His highlight moments involve Bond punching him in the stomach for acting like an idiot and cosplaying as a peacock that wants to make America great again. Are you noticing a pattern yet?
The story of Felix Leiter is the story of mostly terrible actors who don’t have much to do. Even Jeffrey Wright who can act the hell out of the exasperated, cynical American bureaucrat of Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace is pretty much only useful for giving Bond some money when he runs out.
Americans in James Bond Films
All the pokes and jabs notwithstanding, the James Bond cast and crew are clearly fans of American cinema and culture. The parodies and satires ingrained in these films are usually not mean-spirited digs, but instead offer American audiences the opportunity to laugh at themselves… and occasionally cringe. Rather than react peevishly or defensively let’s embrace the criticism and reflect upon how much of it might actually have merit.
As Americans, we tend to isolate ourselves from the rest of the world both geographically and culturally; although we export our entertainment to the far reaches of this Earth, we haven’t been as good about importing other cultures’ art and entertainment. The James Bond series is one of the few exceptions. As a foreign film series, it serves as a record of the last half century and can help us see our world–and our country–from a slightly different perspective.
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Bond Night is a tradition started by myself, a bonafide Bondian, and friends whose exposure to the James Bond film franchise was limited. One film a month is paired with a region-appropriate cuisine and cocktail, and spirited discourse about each film’s merits and shortcomings. The goal of this column is to translate that experience here, walking newbies and Bond-experts alike through fifty years of the British superspy’s cinematic history (from Dr. No through today) and declassifying all the secret intel necessary for you to host your own Bond Night with friends and family.