In “Casino Royale,” James Bond’s boss, M, played by Dame Judi Dench, excoriates him for botching a job, snapping, “Any thug can kill people.”
And any thug can be a witless boozer.
Author Ian Fleming’s suave British secret agent has turned into a muscled killer in this new movie. Played by Daniel Craig, he’s ill-suited to witty repartee and rather dismissive about what he eats and drinks.
Fleming’s 007 was a man of very personal tastes in food and wine. “I take a ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink,” he says in Fleming’s first Bond novel, “Casino Royale” (1953). “It comes partly from being a bachelor, but mostly from a habit of taking a lot of trouble over details. It’s very persnickety and old-maidish…”
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New James Bond Is Indifferent Boozer, No Epicure (Update1)
By John MarianiNov. 28 (Bloomberg) — In “Casino Royale,” James Bond’s boss, M, played by Dame Judi Dench, excoriates him for botching a job, snapping, “Any thug can kill people.”
And any thug can be a witless boozer.
Author Ian Fleming’s suave British secret agent has turned into a muscled killer in this new movie. Played by Daniel Craig, he’s ill-suited to witty repartee and rather dismissive about what he eats and drinks.
Fleming’s 007 was a man of very personal tastes in food and wine. “I take a ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink,” he says in Fleming’s first Bond novel, “Casino Royale” (1953). “It comes partly from being a bachelor, but mostly from a habit of taking a lot of trouble over details. It’s very persnickety and old-maidish…”
Before Bond entered pop culture, such extreme epicureanism was usually displayed onscreen only by effete villains played by fat actors like Sydney Greenstreet or equally effete fat detectives — think of Agatha Christie’s rotund Hercule Poirot.
Bond reveled in his connoisseurship, which was as much a part of his personality as it was crucial to his survival. In the movie “Diamonds Are Forever” (1971), he exposes two waiters as assassins because they fail to identify a Chateau Mouton-Rothschild ’55 as a claret.
Bond even struts his oenophilia in front of M: In the same film, he sips a glass of sherry and tells M: “Pity about your liver, sir. Unusually fine Solera. ’51, I believe.” When M shoots back, “There are no vintages in sherry, 007.” Bond replies, “I was speaking of the original on which the sherry was based, sir. 1851.” And in the movie “Goldfinger” (1964), Bond sniffs at a cognac and observes, “I’d say it’s a 30-year- old fine, indifferently blended, with an overdose of Bon Bois.”
White Bread
Fleming larded his novels with Bond’s gourmandise (although Noel Coward considered Fleming’s own cooking at his Jamaican residence, Goldeneye, to be inedible). Bond buys his coffee beans at De Bry on New Oxford Street, insists his eggs be from brown, speckled French Marans hens and boiled exactly 3 1/3 minutes. Being Scottish, he favors smoked Scottish salmon. He buys his Norwegian honey, Cooper’s Vintage Oxford marmalade and Tiptree Little Scarlet strawberry jam at Fortnum’s. In the new “Casino Royale,” you’ll find no such references, requests or demands, which is the very stuff that Bond is made of.
Bond’s high living does take its toll. In the novel “Thunderball” (1965), M informs 007 his physical exam reveals a furred tongue, elevated blood pressure and a liver “not palpable,” owing to “too much alcohol, fatty foods and white bread,” to which Bond replies, “I don’t eat all that much bread, sir.”
In Fleming’s books, Bond’s champagne of choice is usually Taittinger Blanc de Blancs — “A fad of mine,” he calls it in “Casino Royale.”
Product Placement
For their part, the Bond flicks aren’t shy about product placement. In the first Bond movie, “Dr. No” (1962), he disses his captor’s choice of Dom Perignon ’55, noting, “I prefer the ’53 myself.” This single scene sent the champagne maker’s sales soaring, and in every successive 007 movie, champagne makers have paid big bucks to get their brands mentioned.
In the 1963 film “From Russia With Love,” Bond drank Taittinger Blanc de Blancs in two scenes, and in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969), Bond tells a St. Bernard that has revived him with brandy, “Good fellow, but I do wish it had been Hennessy.” In most later films, including the new “Casino Royale,” he asks for Bollinger’s. In fact, for “The Living Daylights” (1987), Bollinger created an ad reading “Bollinger, the Champagne of James Bond 007.” And in a “A View to a Kill” (1985), the secret agent holds up a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka to the camera.
Who Cares?
Of course, no drink is more closely linked with Bond than the vodka martini, which he dubbed the “Vesper” after the femme fatale Vesper Lynd in “Casino Royale.” In the new movie, the screenwriters toy with a classic Bond-ism: While playing poker, Bond first orders a martini “shaken over ice,” then 10 minutes later when the bartender asks if he wants his vodka martini “shaken or stirred,” 007 snaps, “Do I look like I care?”
That one line seems symptomatic of much that is wrong with the new Bond. Craig is too rough around the edges. He wears his Brioni tuxedo like a teenager off to a prom, crashes his brand- new Aston-Martin because of poor driving skills and drinks too much. At the very moment when he is supposed to be totally lucid and focused on playing a high-stakes poker game against a vicious antagonist, he sloshes down the martinis — one of which sends him into cardiac arrest. Yet in Ian Fleming’s original novel, “Casino Royale” (1953), 007 tells a CIA agent, “I never have more than one drink before dinner.”
Conch Chowder
The new Bond never gets to flaunt his connoisseurship. Previous screenwriters always included a scene or two to show off 007’s classy appetite: Sean Connery orders conch chowder in “Thunderball” (1965) and Roger Moore shows a preference for non-resinous Greek wines in “For Your Eyes Only” (1981).
There’s only one scene in which Craig’s Bond actually eats dinner, a lamb dish washed down by an unidentified bottle of Bordeaux. When Vesper asks him how he likes his lamb, he answers, “skewered.” In another scene he orders beluga caviar. Clearly a fish-and-chips guy, he doesn’t even know the species is no longer sold because of over-fishing.
(John Mariani writes on wine for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
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