THE DAPPER BOND

Call me weird but in the speculative frenzy over who the next James Bond was going to be after Pierce Brosnan broke loose from the franchise, my draft pick was never the crowd favorite Clive Owen but rather Tilda Swindon. Tilda had the bone structure and the sartorial cunning and the acting chops for it. If Cate Blanchett can pull off a convincing Bob Dylan, 007 would be a piece of cake for Tilda. And an androgynous Bond might just be precisely the sort of trangressive endorphin the franchise needs. In my wildly, wishfully hallucinating mind, I pictured Grant Morrison writing the script, Portishead scoring, John Woo directing and Tilda totally rocking the ubiquitous tux, the de facto uniform of Bond. If she got the job, this entire piece would have been all about her.

Roger Moore, though, he never did quite rock that tux, did he? I bring him up first because I really liked his Bond, possibly a bit more than Sean Connery. Moore had a tinge of smarmy perv uncle to his look, and I always thought he should come back to the franchise as a villain. His Bond films are the Bond films I seem to go back to the most.  Live And Let Die, The Man With the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me, even Moonraker. They were the most fun, the most self-aware, at least. And that’s mostly out of how Moore always had a comic mischief about him, a sense almost of his own silliness, and if nothing else, it fed a unique current through his run, and somehow neutralized the potential horrors his horrible wardrobe might have wrought had he been on the wrong side of dour. A function of era, perhaps, his dress code, but there is a reason he’s almost always singled out as the worst-dressed Bond. It wasn’t just all those leisure suits. But they sure didn’t help. Specially that blue one.

Connery, on the other hand, gets the good grooming thumbs up almost by default, perhaps as a testament to the wonders of Brylcreem, perhaps as a concession to his universal exalting as the Bond to beat. The first two Connerys, Dr. No and From Russia With Love are superlative, sure, both filmwise and fashionwise, but it was his third, Goldfinger, that broke through the roof, but it also had that horrifying blue toweling playsuit (see picture) which no amount of nostalgia can re-assess, not even forcibly. Connery did have the advantage of having the sort of lean frame on which any piece of apparel will hang with some measure of style. But there’s an anonymity to his suavity, a dapperness without flair, almost generic, by-the-numbers.  Years later, and Pierce Brosnan would have the same dilemma, which isn’t surprising given how his fundamental approach to playing Bond was to channel as much of Connery as he can, despite being the one Bond actor who feels as if he was born to play the part.

I’m not being merely contrarian, then, when I say I proclaim affinity for the remaining three Bonds, in terms of what they brought to the films and in terms of what they brought to the styling. I’ve always rooted for Timothy Dalton, but his brief two-film run was saddled largely by indifference: lackluster scripts and even less enthusiastic filmmaking. Daniel Craig was, in a nutshell, Jason-Statham-As-Bond, and did take getting used to but if nothing else, his Bond is a visceral upgrade and with  Skyfall, gave the world the only other Sam Mendes film that’s actually any good. (after Road To Perdition) Also, the man can wear anything. But it’s the one-off Bond, George Lazenby, that gets the maddest props from me and this is no underdog vote,  On Her Majesty’s Secret Service just happens to be my favorite Bond. Lazenby’s disadvantage was that, for more than half of the film, he was undercover, pretending to be a character that was the diametric opposite of Bond, at one point even wearing a kilt.  But none of the Bonds before and after him gave that tux as much justice as he did and when he abandoned his disguise just before the climactic ski chase scene, it may have been a sleek jet-blue ski suit he changed into, but he made it feel like a badass superhero costume.


*Originally published in Vault