Abstract
This article seeks to place the James Bond film Spectre (2015) in the contexts of the history of the Bond series and the evolution of the “Bondian” formula. It documents the history of the Bond series in relation to the institutional and economic contexts of the film industry and considers the Anglo-American political and cultural economies of the films. It maps the development of the Bond formula and then considers the “reboot” of the series in the in the films of Daniel Craig. The article concludes with an account of the production and reception discourses of Spectre, the most expensive Bond movie to date, arguing that it represents a hybrid of both traditional and new “Bondian” elements. Keywords: James Bond films; Spectre; genre; production history; Bondian.
Highlights
James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester
American investment in the British production sector increased during the 1960s, when United Artists led the way in backing successful films including Tom Jones (1963), the Beatles films A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965), and the James Bond movies
Ian Fleming had tried, without success, to interest film and television producers in his Bond books during the 1950s – Sir Alexander Korda read the galleys of Live and Let Die and the Rank Organization briefly held an option on Moonraker (Lycett 1995, 250) – but the only Bond adaptation to date was a live studio dramatisation of Casino Royale by the American CBS television network in 1954
Summary
The James Bond films are genre films par excellence: they demonstrate both the industrial processes of popular film-making and the narrative patterns of repetition and variation that underpin the idea of genre in popular cinema. The emergence of new approaches to genre studies which extend beyond the reductive structuralism of the 1970s and which understand film genres and cycles in relation to their wider industrial and cultural contexts has seen the Bond films find their place on the agenda of academic film studies. This is amply demonstrated over the last decade or so by the growth of Bond scholarship that has seen the films analysed from a range of critical and theoretical perspectives, Vol I, Issue 1 · Spring 2017 ISSN 2514-2178. In order to do this, it is necessary in the first instance to consider the history of the Bond series and its place in popular film culture
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