Love and Let Die by John Higgs;

Author:John Higgs;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

1973: THE PROBLEM IS BOND

When the film series started in the 1960s, the concept of ‘Bond Girls’ was often viewed as something progressive. They were seen as a new type of woman. The Hollywood portrayal of women in the 1950s tended towards the curvaceous, bubbly and extremely feminine, like Marilyn Monroe. As the Young Bond author Charlie Higson has noted, Fleming ‘kicked against the old-fashioned, 1950s view that women should be simpering housewives, put on a pedestal and wooed. Many in his books were athletic and independent.’ When Ursula Andress stepped out of the Caribbean Sea in Dr. No in her bikini and knife, this was something new. Andress was strong, powerful and athletic, and a very different image of female beauty compared to Monroe. The scene as directed had Bond watching her arrival and as such has been criticised as an example of the male gaze. Yet it was both the male and female gaze that looked on Andress as she emerged from the blue waters. As the actor Britt Ekland, the lead Bond Girl in The Man with the Golden Gun, recalled, ‘I’d seen Ursula Andress in Dr. No and I thought that was the most incredible-looking person I’d ever seen, not as much a role model but as a truly fun and exciting kind of woman and I thought that’s what I want to do.’

The women in that first Bond film often had a sense of agency about them, possibly because it was one of the rare Bond movies to have a female co-writer, Johanna Harwood. It included details such as female receptionists checking out Bond’s body when his back was turned, which suggests a level of female liberation largely missing in the rest of the franchise. Of course, for all the power and impact of Andress’s arrival, she then proceeded to establish the Bond Girl template by spending the rest of the film barely dressed and in dire need of rescuing.

The toned, athletic image of Andress was taken from the depiction of women found in Fleming’s books. The rushed and barely edited nature of some of his novels could reveal things about the author that a more careful writer might have covered up, and one such revealing quirk was his interest in women who had backsides that looked like young boys. As he describes Andress’s character in the novel of Dr. No, ‘the behind was almost as firm and rounded as a boy’s’. Watching two gypsy women fight in From Russia with Love, he notes their ‘hard, boyish flanks’, while in the same book the bum of the Russian agent Corporal Tatiana Romanov is described as being ‘flat and hard at the sides, it jutted like a man’s’.

For all that this strong, confident image of women was admired at the time, there is much about the portrayal of women in 1960s Bond films that can now be difficult to watch. Even allowing for the violent world that the films are set in, the violence towards women

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.