Can I get a proper drink, please?

By Suzanne Meyers

It’s true – the rumor mill, the grapevine and the British tabloids are correct (and aren’t they all controlled by Murdoch anyway?) – James Bond no longer orders his usual tipple, a vodka martini, shaken not stirred. No, this time around in the new film Skyfall, he’s wrapping his suave lips around a bottle of Heineken.

A beer for the world’s greatest, most debonair spy?  How can it be? Apparently it revolves around the notion of product placement and the 28 million pounds sterling injected into the film’s production. Still, you can’t blame Bond. Were he a New Yorker, he’d be too hard-pressed to even find a real martini, making the choice of beer all the more obvious. I can attest to this, being a woman (of a certain age, but classic in my own right, thank you) known to enjoy the time-honored mix of spirit and aromatic wine; it’s not out there. No, what’s out there is a big bucket of vodka. (Or gin, if you’re a traditionalist. If you are, you’re going to be equally unhappy.)

Case in point. I arrange to meet a man at a certain trendy hotel bar located near a quaint private park in downtown Manhattan. I name my poison and turn my attention to my companion for the evening. My drink is served and moments later, I take my first sip. No vermouth. Not even a drop. He didn’t even wave the bottle over the glass. The addition of vermouth to a martini is what renders what would be a slap in the face into a soft caress on the cheek. Inquiries are made to the young man behind the bar about the missing fortified wine. His reply, “Of course there’s no vermouth in it. You asked for a martini.” This was served with a look that suggested “You imbecile, you.”  Were this the only occurrence of this conversation I would not remark on it. In many establishments, vermouth, that special blend of botanicals and roots infused in white wine which makes a martini a martini, is not even stocked behind the bar.

I’m far from belonging to the generation which tossed back that particular potable like today’s Cosmopolitans or Mojitos. But having worked a large part of my adult life as a bartender, I do know the recipe, and I realize that most people enjoy their vodka martinis on the dry side. But what currently passes for that beverage in Gotham is a serving of chilled vodka in a container that could satisfy a family of five.  The vial of Dorothy Parker’s era which provided about 2 ounces of liquid has turned into the fat urn of today in which one might actually bathe a newborn child.  In other words, 6 to 9 ounces of alcohol. Given my petite frame and the day’s light lunch, by the time I consumed the enormous offering provided by the aforementioned barkeep, I was spinning.

I negotiate the vermouth issue by ordering with an emphasis on the presence of Neuilly Prat or Martini & Rossi in my refreshment. I hate doing this because there is nothing that bartenders like less than a customer telling them how to do their job. Even so, the size of my drink is left to the establishment. I suppose it justifies paying seventeen dollars when one is served the equivalent of eight shots of booze. Historically, the before-dinner cocktail was intended to light fire to the appetite, not prevent one from being able to read the menu. Still, I could be wrong. In the freewheeling days of Prohibition when New York was lousy with speakeasies, Nora Charles strode into a joint to find her husband, Nick, involved in an in-depth session of wet libations. Telling her he’s about to embark on his sixth martini, she calls over the waiter and says “All right. Will you bring me five more martinis, Leo? And line them right up here.”

The only problem is, that happened one night in the 1934 movie, The Thin Man. Conversely, these days the New York State Liquor Authority does not allow for unlimited beverages to be ordered in a bar. I can only conclude that the super sized glassware of today makes up for this impingement on our drinking rights.  So enjoy those monster martinis with a heavyweight sirloin. And don’t forget to beg a few drops vermouth.

Naomie Harris and Daniel Craig in 007's Skyfall.

Agent 007 James Bond (Daniel Craig) returns to his roots in Skyfall, defending the MI6 agency to which he’s always had steadfast dedication, even while gallantly enjoying its bachelor benefits. On home turf, Bond restores all of us to our pop culture roots; Skyfall’s national security plot, combining an arch villain’s (Javier Bardem) threats to Q (Judi Dench), then breaching Bond’s ancestral residence, carries affectionate—even cultural—resonance. The sense of adventure is stabilizing and feels good.

Skyfall’s success isn’t a surprise. It should probably be the first Bond film to win a Best Picture Oscar—not because it’s the best (Goldfinger and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service are still the series’ high points)—but because Skyfall maintains quality popular filmmaking in an era that’s lost sight of what that means.

Exactly what it means can be seen in the fascinating promotional documentary Everything Or Nothing, which details the history of the James Bond franchise from its inception as a Cold War spy novel by British journalist Ian Fleming then adapted by Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli, intrepid American film producers who shared the dream of a popular entertainment featuring manly daring, sexual suavity and a subtle sense of political purpose. That this Anglo-American commercial enterprise would result in a 50-year globally admired venture that morphs yet without changing speaks to the marvel of the West’s pop culture dominance.

That dominance is at stake in Skyfall’s plot involving a Wikileaks-style enemy whose nefarious personal crusade and terrorist attack on MI6 heralds a new breed of international threat. (Javier Bardem is spectacular in this role; superior to his performance in No Country For Old Men.) Sizing up her enemies, Q says, “They’re not nations, they’re individuals”—which was also true for the old Bond villains but now takes on the modern sense of social chaos that was unconscionably exploited in Chris Nolan’s Batman movies. But Skyfall avoids nihilism by hewing to a code of valor that extends from Fleming to Saltzman and Broccoli.

That code never changes despite having six other faces on its brand. As Everything Or Nothing shows, each Bond actor lent his own personal integrity. Daniel Craig follows that tradition. His brutalized face and cold eyes personify our acceptance of killing more than Connery’s camp glamour and sophistication. Yet, after the spectacular opening stunt, Craig bounds into a moving train and snaps his tuxedo cuffs with terrific élan. Bond’s urbanity bests the Dark Knight’s affluent yet sophomoric pessimism; the world is in safe hands—as is the idea of entertainment.

Most movie chases are alike, and the Bond movies have set the standard for all action thrillers—Road Warrior, Indiana Jones and even the Transporter flicks are just a few that display the Bond influence. The level of stylistic commitment in the Bond films is reassuring. It takes an ace team (including producer Barbara Broccoli), because director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition) knows nothing about this kind of cinema. Joe Wright’s Hanna showed genuine style, and Luc Besson and his cadre have revolutionized action tropes, quickening their purpose, while Skyfall clicks efficiently. The opening escapade introduces a Bond-girl sidekick (Naomie Harris), which enriches what would be routine; that humane flourish sets the tone for Mendes’ foray into genre.

It might have gone badly—imagine Mike Nichols pinch-hitting an Indiana Jones film. But Skyfall features more character nuances than Craig’s previous Bond movies: Harris’ role, along with vivid participation from Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Albert Finney, Ben Wishaw and Bardem display Mendes’ striking  interest in actors.

Mendes is lucky. Skyfall is his first film on home turf, and he knows how these people talk and how they relate to the environs of metropolitan London (including a brief stint among the J.M.W. Turners at the Tate Museum) and the Scottish countryside. It adds to the story’s personal feel. These well-tailored Tories fighting an internal security breach and “a war we can’t understand and can’t possibly win” sounds sufficiently post-9/11, which makes Skyfall a modern version of the British WWII homefront movie Went the Day Well? as much as a Bond installment.

When Bond escorts Q in the fabled Aston Martin, Skyfall also carries us back to the past—our pop culture past where entertainment wasn’t merely frivolous. Skyfall plays with heritage and personal homeland defense but those ideas are no richer than Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Fortunately, the movie looks terrific. Roger Deakins photographs a silhouetted assassin brawl in a skyscraper and a sequence of red-gold pagodas at night like Robert Burks did It Takes a Thief—for sheer splendor.

In Everything Or Nothing, Fleming’s first book is referred to as “the autobiography of a dream.” This speaks to how the Bond film series epitomized desire and satisfaction. As an expression of Western hegemony, the series isn’t just commercial; its good work translates to all territories. In the real world, espionage ain’t pretty, but when James Bond wins, it’s a global victory.

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Like the lusted-over, fantasized Bond girls, the Bond themes are not just love objects; the songs are timeless, idealized encapsulations of the excitements of their times.

Is this also true of Adele’s new theme “Skyfall”? Like all Adele’s recordings, this one is formulaic—but what a workable method! It is quasi-sultry, ersatz romantic, and its enigmatic titular image contains a hint of intrigue and possible hazard that is befitting for a mystery/crime/espionage thriller.

Adele received her Bond commission by right of pop star eminence. In the past, each Bond-theme crooner was a test-proven chart-topper famous enough to attest the new film’s worthiness as a pop culture object. (Adele’s track recalls Nancy Sinatra’s passable “You Only Live Twice” or Rita Coolidge’s “All Time High” rather than Madonna’s forgettable “Die Another Day.”) The formula dictates that if the song and performance was good enough, it worked in tandem with the movie to create a pop event. This actually only occurred a few times, leaving the majority of Bond themes to simply be anti-melodic relics such as Duran Duran’s “View to a Kill,” Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Live and Let Die”—or campy gems like Tom Jones’ “Thunderball,” a wonderfully exaggerated response to “Goldfinger,” the archetypal Bond theme, done with Jones’ testicular melodrama befitting a pop-besotted operatic tenor more than a secret agent’s surrogate.

The greatest of all Bond themes, “Goldfinger,” is so because almost 50 years later it remains a sizzling emanation of what was thrilling in 1964. It still carries the aura of the new, which proves its value as a theme song par excellence. The Goldfinger plot appears in Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley’s lyric description “web of sin,” the narcotizing scent of an intangible element felt in John Barry’s composition. That’s the thrill of movies in a single tune. As a song, “Goldfinger” draws one into the allure of the James Bond phenomenon. The films are not works of high cinematic art, but they are almost ideal examples of commercial movie pleasure, and the song is perfectly scintillating even when it is silly.

Shirley Bassey’s unbeatable, overdramatic recitation maintains the exhilarating promise of a movie trailer. She’s all hype; even her natural sexiness is put to the use of sheer commercial seduction. In the Warhol ’60s, artifice and desire were one. Yet, like the best moments in any Bond film, vocalist Bassey grins—Cheshirely, if not Welshly.

As intro and exeunt to the film—and as a stand-alone 45 rpm, one of the first I ever bought—Bassey’s style established that the Bond theme song was a tease. Its brevity is part of its genius. Though not a rock ’n’ roll tune, it bears that ineffable quality of the greatest pop song: Its two-minute entirety is a hook. It worked before you saw the movie, as you watched and forever after seeing it. Even if you’ve never seen the film—and I find it to still be the most dazzling of the Bond movies—the “Goldfinger” song provides a comparably, pleasurably memorable experience.

According to the documentary Everything Or Nothing, the Bond franchise faced perennial challenge by producers other than Saltzman-Broccoli, who finagled rights to Ian Fleming novels—which explains why the best song to come from a Bond film is a renegade, “The Look of Love” for the 1967 Casino Royale. That Burt Bacharach-Hal David composition, superbly sung by Dusty Springfield, is a really good song despite being a movie tie-in. But its excellence is the rare exception.

Runners-up: Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better” for The Spy Who Loved Me—an odd, elliptical ’70s-singer-songwriter test of the Bond theme formula that builds grandly even as it becomes an obscurely personal woman’s confession. And Louis Armstrong’s “We Have All the Time in the World” for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service eludes campiness to provide love wisdom. It is the most melancholic Bond theme (for the most grandly tragic film of the series). If unquestioned authority were needed to confer worthiness on the Bond films, Armstrong does it.

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