Lovers of the true spy genre should fall on their knees and pray that Quentin Tarantino, the greatest living cinematic interpreter of sub-literature, should have his great ambition rewarded, and be allowed to make a James Bond movie. The film rights to the 007 series are of course owned by the Broccoli family, who have traded the entire Bond brand downwards in order to retain its youthful audience. This might line their pockets, but it is not true to the Ian Fleming novels, which were - for their time - dangerous works, steeped in the pulp-fiction characteristics beloved of Tarantino, writes Kevin Myers.
The only Fleming novel not yet filmed properly is Casino Royale, of which a perfectly dire spoof was made in 1967, starring just about everybody - Woody Allen, Peter Sellers, David Niven, Peter O'Toole, Orson Welles and Eamon de Valera (OK, not him) - and reeking of 1960s clichés. Its glutinous title-song, Burt Bacharach's The Look of Love, characterised the entire mess perfectly; Farrago Royale. Yet this wretched travesty has served to protect the very first Bond plot from the filmic bowdlerising which followed for so many Fleming novels.
So it's a little disturbing to see that Tarantino wishes to place his film version of Casino Royale in the decade in which the early Bond films were set - the 1960s. In fact Casino Royale, the very first Bond novel, was published in 1953, eight years after the second World War. So James Bond's sexual liaisons were not set in the permissive 1960s, but in the altogether different decade of the 1950s, when most Englishwomen still lost their virginity on their wedding nights. The Bond heroines are therefore women of some courage and spirit, and Bond really is an utter cad.
Moreover, James Bond is in his mid-thirties. He is a Royal Naval commander, and would have seen active service throughout the war. Indeed, some aspects of the original Bond character are so unattractive that no modern film could survive their retention. For example, he - as was his creator - is both rampantly sexist (the word didn't even exist then) and an unregenerate racist. In 1953, when rulers from across the empire attend Queen Elizabeth's coronation, Bond is an ardent imperialist who believes that subject peoples have to "earn" the right to govern themselves.
Some aspects of the novels have been sacrificed for the sake of the market. Fleming filled all his Bond works with gratuitous sadistic violence, true portrayals of which would have given the films a commercially disastrous "X" rating. And his sex scenes were, at the time, among the most graphic and explicit in English literature, which if properly depicted, would also have earned X ratings.
Other ingredients of the Bond character have simply vanished over time, as directors, perhaps unaware of them because they had never read a Bond book, adhered to the rules of the filmic brand. Firstly, Fleming's snobbery in all matters was perfectly monstrous, and occasionally ill-judged: in a flourish of apparent sophistication, to finish a meal in a particularly grand French restaurant, Bond orders an "avocado-pear", presumably because Fleming thought the avocado was exotic kin to the normal pear, pyrus communis rather than being the savoury Persea americana.
Bond smoked (I think) extremely fragrant Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, and his car was a British racing green Bentley Continental, both head-turning absurdities for a "secret agent". Yet absurdity is one of the salient points about James Bond. Fleming produced not particularly well-written British pulp fiction, but his narratives were gripping, erotically charged and thoroughly dangerous, which was why they were John F. Kennedy's favourite bedside reading. Nobody could possibly maintain that modern James Bond screenplays are either gripping, erotic or dangerous.
One of the central elements to the abysmal pasteurisation of the Bond film-franchise was the casting of Roger Moore after Sean Connery's departure. Moore was about as threatening as Julie Andrews having a poo. James Bond is a dangerous and amoral killer who wouldn't think twice about breaking an unarmed man's neck.
That's why Pierce Brosnan has been the only proper Bond since Connery. There is menace in those eyes, in those steely features, which he famously revealed in his stunning ten-second debut-cameo in The Long Good Friday. He is, moreover, a far finer actor than he is usually given credit for. Indeed, he is one of the few genuinely bankable film-stars today, whose presence can carry a film, no matter how flabby its script or poor its production values. This is more than can be said for Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, who couldn't possibly inherit a Steve McQueen part and make it completely his own, as Brosnan did in The Thomas Crown Affair. So Quentin Tarantino wants Pierce Brosnan to make Tarantino's first Bond film and Brosnan's last Bond film the first really true Bond film so far - truer even than Dr No and From Russia With Love.
To realise the essence of the extremely unpleasant character that Fleming created, Tarantino should relocate James Bond where be belongs - to 1953, when the Rosenbergs go to the electric chair - and rightly, thinks Bond. The Mau-Mau uprising begins, to which Bond favours the most savage repressive measures. After the Soviet Union explodes its first hydrogen bomb, Bond argues with M that what is needed now is a nuclear first-strike against the Kremlin. Meanwhile, Marilyn Monroe causes a sensation by appearing nude in Playboy, prompting Bond to use MI6 resources to get her phone number - which he does, and he duly phones her, and they arrange to meet at the Casino Royale.
Now, Quentin, make your film.