The James Bond epic is the most popular film series in silver screen
history: it is estimated that a quarter of the world's population has
seen a Bond feature. The saga of Britain's best-loved martini hound (who
we all know prefers his favorite drink "shaken, not stirred") has
adapted to changing times for four decades without ever abandoning its
tried-and-true formula of diabolical international conspiracy, sexual
intrigue, and incredible gadgetry.
James Chapman expertly traces the annals of celluloid Bond from its
inauguration with 1962's Dr. No through its progression beyond Ian
Fleming's spy novels to the action-adventure spectaculars of GoldenEye
and Tomorrow Never Dies. He argues that the enormous popularity of the
series represents more than just the sum total of the films' box-office
receipts and involves questions of film culture in a wider sense.
Licence to Thrill chronicles how Bond, a representative of a British
Empire that no longer existed in his generation, became a symbol of his
nation's might in a Cold War world where Britain was no longer a primary
actor. Chapman describes the protean nature of Bond villains in a
volatile global political scene--from Soviet scoundrels and Chinese
rogues in the 1960s to a brief flirtation with Latin American drug
kingpins in the 1980s and back to the Chinese in the 1990s. The book
explores how the movies struggle with changing societal ethics--notably,
in the evolution in the portrayal of women, showing how Bond's
encounters with the opposite sex have evolved into trysts with leading
ladies as sexually liberated as Bond himself.
The Bond formula has proved remarkably durable and consistently
successful for roughly a third of cinema's history--half the period
since the introduction of talking pictures in the late 1920s. Moreover,
Licence to Thrill argues that, for the foreseeable future, the James
Bond films are likely to go on being what they have always been, a
unique and very special kind of popular cinema.
