Some people eat turkey every Christmas, even though they find it bland, dry and boring, because it is the traditional thing to do. Others keep going back to the same holiday resort because once or twice they had a really good time there, even though in recent years the tone of the place has declined, the best restaurants seem to have closed and the beach is more crowded.
My equivalent of this is to go, with a sense of religious devotion, to each new James Bond film when it is released. I haven’t seen what I considered to be a really good one since the departure of the celebrated Scottish Nationalist Sir Sean Connery from the top of the cast list. There have been some that had their moments – I rather liked Pierce Brosnan driving a BMW by remote control at high speed round a multi-storey car park in Tomorrow Never Dies – but more and more have been real turkeys. And the last two, with Daniel Craig rather believable as a Bond for the 21st century (if that is not a contradiction in terms), were otherwise slightly weird, and radiated a strange sense of emptiness.
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Bond has a licence to kill, but the films have always been a licence to print money. It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that production of the 23rd Bond film has been suspended because of the parlous financial state of MGM, the business that now owns the rights to the franchise. The lion now squeaks rather than roars, it appears, and will only do that if there is cash up front.
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It has been a long decline for this 86-year-old Hollywood studio. Its official motto, wreathing Leo the Lion, is "Art for art’s sake"; its unofficial one was "More stars than are in the heavens", which was more or less true in the glory days of MGM, from about 1930 to 1950. Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Judy Garland and Joan Crawford were among those under contract. MGM made The Wizard of Oz and distributed Gone with the Wind. It also had Laurel and Hardy on its books. As it fell out with or lost several of its big names in the 1940s, it kept on top by producing some of the best-known musicals of the era – Singin’ in the Rain, An American in Paris, Show Boat and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers among them.
However, the golden age ended in a series of deals, mergers, takeovers and other attempts at leveraging that never quite worked out. One of these was the purchase, in 1981, of United Artists, and with it the Bond franchise. What has gone wrong with MGM is perhaps illustrated by its inability now to make a film that might actually make it some money. Perhaps at some point there will have to be a fire sale, in which its share of the Bond films might be the only thing that would give the firm’s innumerable creditors something to look forward to.
Still, it is hard to imagine even the bankruptcy of MGM killing off James Bond on celluloid, something the world’s leading villains have completely failed to do in nearly 50 years: he and his adventures are always going to be a most marketable asset for anyone strapped for cash. But perhaps the pause in normal service is an ideal moment for those who might shape the next Bond film to ponder on what it ought to be.
April 26, 2010
