That Hamilton Woman. Or Women

That is interesting, perhaps it was Moore being pissed off with not being directed by Hamilton that informed his performance in TMWTGG because he is decidedly irritable throughout.

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I wonder if any of the “Making of…” books reports on it. To me, it is clear Gilbert charts a new course for Moore Bond.

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As far as I know Hamilton was asked to helm TSWLM but had to decline because at that time he was entangled in SUPERMAN. So, there was probably no more animosity between Moore and him than usual.

Wikipedia (citing https://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-James-Bond-Movie-Encyclopaedia/dp/0071412468/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=9780071412469&linkCode=qs&qid=1617376595&s=books&sr=1-1)

The first director attached to the film was Guy Hamilton, who directed the previous three Bond films as well as Goldfinger , but he left after being offered the opportunity to direct the 1978 film Superman , although Richard Donner took over the project.

Producer, director and many, many writers left TSWLM

No Time To Die’s production was quite relaxed by comparison.

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You and your facts and reason…

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There was certainly an era where the average Joe didn’t feel burdened with the need to babysit society at large and fret at length about “what does this say about our society and what is it teaching our children?” That was once the purview of pyschologists, assorted social activists and other professional worryworts. Most of us exercised our own inbred ability to discern entertainment from reality and goofy fun from some sort of insidious master plot to drag Western society into decadent depravity.

As a lad, I never gave much thought to how Bond “girls” were portrayed because if it were up to me, they’d all be cut in favor of more action scenes, anyway. But I can’t remember a time in my life when I thought the Bond films were trying to seriously comment on womanhood or in any way present their female characters as real-life human beings, any more than I thought they really wanted me to believe Blofeld could “secretly” launch rockets from a Japanese volcano or that a frisbee hat – even one with a steel brim – could be used to break the necks of people and statuary. The Bond films – at least in the glorious days of “Classic” Bond – were only as “realistic” as absolutely necessary to impart a sense of suspense or danger. Otherwise they were totally ridiculous alternate realities and that was the whole point of going: to see a world that could never really exist except in our daydreams.

I’m not old enough to have experienced Bondmania at its 60s height, but even in the ring-a-ding days of Sinatra and the Rat Pack, it’s hard to imagine that people really, in their hearts, ever thought Bond’s interactions with women on screen reflected reality or even an ideal. It was all played for laughs. It’s only later that it became necessary to rationalize or apologize for it all with dialog like “sexist, misogynist dinosaur.” Until then, it was one of those genre conventions you just embrace and enjoy: private eyes only ever get shot in the shoulder, space invaders always speak English and every woman throws herself at James Bond.

I agree the Hamilton entries can seem particularly mean-spirited about pushing Bond girls beyond the standard “bimbo” to “punching bag” or “nuisance.” But in their way, they’re more honest than later characters who start off as “independent” or “Bond’s equal” only to end up having to be rescued, anyway. To this day, the only female character who really stands out for me is Tracy, and even then it’s kind of counter-productive because my takeaway is “she was too good for him,” which is probably not what EON was going for. In its purest form, the Bond series is a comic strip and the best a female character can really hope for is to somehow be closely tied to the mission itself (and thus disposable once the mission is resolved) and not just a decoration. Some of them achieve that, but there’s still an awful lot of them who if you took the advice of 8-year-old me and just trimmed them from the film it wouldn’t make much of an impact on anything.

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Too many men did. Therefore women are still treated like that today. Because entertainment is about ideas, and they remain in our heads.

That does not mean one can never enjoy a Bond film or any entertainment from previous eras. But it is important to understand and remember that it is not reality nor anything which should be emulated.

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I guess we all take from the films what we choose. I could enjoy watching Bond without wanting to emulate his never-ending parade of meaningless hook-ups, let alone get away with, essentially, murder. I also didn’t think my Superman suit would really help me if I jumped off a roof.

But I did grow up around guys who read “Soldier of Fortune” magazine and had “assassin” as their dream job, and I have plenty of friends and relatives who won’t be happy until they own as many firearms as the average third-world army out of a need for “self defense”, so who’s to say where a given person draws the line between reality and fantasy? For some, I guess Bond could be a hero as far as “how to treat women” just as for others the appeal was the “licensed to kill whom he chooses, when he chooses” line from the Dr No campaign. Maybe I’m an outlier for only wanting to emulate the sophistication, wardrobe and ready wit of Bond and leave it at that. If I’m honest, have I been any more successful at looking or behaving like Roger Moore than my old classmates were at becoming high-priced mercenaries and taking out rooms full of opponents with expert ninja moves? I guess we all live in our dream worlds.

I’m willing to believe certain entertainments can feed and support beliefs and prejudices and impulses we already have, but I’m not sure I’m willing to believe we all receive our initial programming from screen imagery. Anyway, any notion I might have had that real females were like the ones in the Bond films doubtless evaporated as soon as I met one.

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And a good thing too. Tom Mankiewicz called Hamilton the most cynical man he ever met (in the context of why he would have been a disaster as director of SUPERMAN).

This cynicism works well for DAF–Hamilton’s jaundiced eye is perfect for a film set in Las Vegas. Only he would have spliced into the movie’s centerpiece car chase a shot inside a casino—patrons fixated on their slot machines, oblivious to the chase going on just outside.

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Maybe at the core of it there is the omnipresence of entertainment today. We are never more than a tap on a screen away from our daydreams taking off. For some that’s no problem; for some it eats away their time, a nuisance but not necessarily something they cannot control if they get their act together. And for some it entirely eradicates the line not just between fantasy and reality but also between opinion and fact.

It’s not, at first sight, something problematic, people feel fine in their extended daydreams - and nothing else is a filter bubble, something where everything that happens has a clear meaning and you and everybody else you have contact with can agree on it. Your world is making sense and the huge number of fellow people who see things just like you is clear and irrefutable proof that you must be right. It only starts getting weird when reality doesn’t play along.

Seriously, has there ever before been a time where such a big percentage of humankind enjoyed so much economic wealth, so much leisure to fill with our own interests? And yet, it doesn’t feel like freedom, nor do we really appreciate what we’ve got because the rat race simply doesn’t ever stop.

Our entertainment though has increased tenfold, a hundredfold: nothing we consume needs to go against our tastes any longer, we’re not challenged by our pastime and amusement, or rather we need not be challenged any more because there’s always something that’s catering to exactly our tastes.

So our entertainment reflects our preferences - and if one is willing enough to dive into the rabbit hole there’s no telling where it’s going to lead us.

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I remember having a black tracksuit jumper zipped half way, with a makeshift tie, to emulate Bond’s tuxedo for Book Week. This was Primary School, probably Year 5 or 6. As a kid I was all about the adventure and humour side of things too. I knew Bond was a womaniser, of course, but really just saw it as a byproduct of him being cool.

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