Auric Goldfinger = Supervillain
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LIFE
COVER STORY
Bad enough for BOND These sublime supervillains are as celebrated as 007 himself
Andy Seiler
11/19/1999
USA Today
FINAL
Page 01E
(Copyright 1999)
When it comes to villainy, nobody does it better than Bond.
"I always liked the villains because they were so wonderfully, entertainingly bad," says Scottish actor Robbie Coltrane, one of several scoundrels squaring off against Pierce Brosnan in the 007 movie The World Is Not Enough, opening today. "They weren't simply vicious. They were ingeniously bad. They were imaginatively wicked. They had the laser beam, the circular saw, the sharks, the piranhas. I always wanted to say that line, 'Come in, Mr. Bond.' "
The James Bond series is by far the longest-lasting and most successful in movie history, celebrating its 38th anniversary next year. Despite the age of the series, the most recent Bond, 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies, was the most commercially successful in the history of the franchise, grossing $125 million in North America alone -- despite opening on the same day as the much more heavily publicized Titanic.
To explain that longevity, you need to start with the villains, says producer Michael G. Wilson, whose stepfather, Albert "Cubby" Broccoli, started the movie series with Harry Saltzman in 1962 with Dr. No. While the adventure fantasies are famous for the sexy Bond girls, Q's elaborate gadgets, the international locations and John Barry's ever-popular theme music, the mad baddies are the swizzle sticks that stir the martini. (Bond would prefer his shaken, thank you.)
"Bond and the villains, when they interact, are the key to the whole thing," Wilson says.
In the new movie, Robert Carlyle plays an international terrorist who plans global domination. James Bond also must fend off a small army of evildoers as he protects the daughter of a slain oil baron.
"The important thing about the villains is their obsessiveness and their single-mindedness about their goals," Wilson says. "They also have to be funny or charming or bizarre in some way to make them interesting. For example, Goldfinger is the all-around perfect villain. He is obsessive about something. He's vicious and dangerous. He has a good sense of humor. What more could you want?"
And what more could an actor want in a role?
"The Bond villains are larger than life and can be portrayed that way," says Grace Jones, the actress and singer who played May Day in A View to a Kill (1985). "They are dangerous, but there is also humor." Jones got to kill a French agent with a poison dart disguised as a butterfly and led Bond on a chase to the top of a tower -- only to escape by parachute. "I was involved in the wardrobe and hairstyles -- which got pretty out there," she recalls.
That outrageousness separates the Bond series from more serious espionage books and movies, says screen legend Christopher Lee, Bond creator Ian Fleming's cousin.
"From the very start, Bond villains were a lot more exotic in every respect," says Lee. "They were all-powerful. There were many characters in films who want to take over the world, but Goldfinger was going to do it by cornering the gold supply."
Lee earned his place in the villains hall of fame when he took on the part of Francisco Scaramanga in The Man With the Golden Gun (1974). "I like a girl in a bikini," Scaramanga says at one point. "No concealed weapons."
But if Fleming's idea of a memorable malefactor was unusual at first, it wasn't for long. The Bond formula was much imitated by the mid-'60s, as short-lived super-spy series starring James Coburn (Derek "Our Man" Flint), Dean Martin (Matt "The Silencers" Helm) and others hit theaters.
"So many other action films and adventure films have borrowed and adapted from Fleming's type of villain," says Bond scholar Raymond Benson, who has written a Bond encyclopedia and is the current author of the novel series inaugurated by Fleming. "You see it in a lot of movies these days, even in a stinker like Wild Wild West."
Even comedies can borrow a bit. Austin Powers creator/star Mike Myers sees his hairy hero's adventures as "tributes" to the Bond films and their imitators. He went so far as to wholeheartedly lift cat-loving Bond nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld (the Donald Pleasence version in 1967's You Only Live Twice) to create Powers archenemy Dr. Evil. And Dr. Evil's assistant, Frau Farbissina, is clearly patterned on Austrian singer/actress Lotte Lenya's Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love (1963).
The classic Bond villain is grotesque, often too short and too fat, says Benson, who also writes the tie-in novelizations of the movies. "Hugo Drax in Moonraker had a scarred face from being burned," Benson says. "Auric Goldfinger was described (in the books) as having a little football head. Le Chiffre in Casino Royale was described as having a syphilitic nose. It must have been all red or had bumps on it."
And the bad guy never dispatches Bond with a simple bullet to the brain. No, that would be too simple. Instead, he or she always has an elaborate mechanism that will kill Bond. Luckily for the super- agent, the machinery never turns out to be as perfect as Bond is.
Given all the conventions, playing the villain can be a challenge, says Jonathan Pryce, who played evil media magnate Elliott Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies.
"There are a set of rules you adhere to," Pryce says. "You know for a fact that you're never going to kill Bond, you're never going to win and, unless you're really lucky, you're going to die. The audience even knows it, so you have to make that journey as interesting as possible."
Pryce relished playing a mogul who would start World War III just to improve TV ratings but says he had thought the film would be more thoughtful and politically relevant than it turned out to be. Still, playing Carver he got to say things like: "The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success."
But if the actors playing Bond villains are limited by convention, imagine what it's like to play a villain's henchman. Still, Harold "Oddjob" Sakata in Goldfinger and Richard "Jaws" Kiel in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979) managed to become icons.
"The hard part is that it's a stereotype character, in my opinion," says Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen, who plays the thuggish Sasha Davidov in The World Is Not Enough. "But everybody is a stereotype character in a James Bond movie.
"So what do I do? Not much, actually. I try to keep it a stereotype. It's dangerous to put psychology there that is not really in him. You can burn your fingers."
By the way, Thomsen adds: " I appear on page 20 of the script and I die on page 50."
So much for surprises. But then, the Bond series has survived so long that actors playing villains grow up watching their predecessors.
"I was damn near a child when I saw Goldfinger, and I said, 'Oh, man, I would like to be in a James Bond film,' " recalls Homicide star Yaphet Kotto. He played a double role as the black Kananga and the white Mr. Big in Live and Let Die (1973). "My friends and I used to run around in the street playing James Bond."
Inspired by Bond, Kotto became an actor and within a decade fulfilled his fantasies.
"Dr. Kananga had this elaborate labyrinth underground, with all these weird transporter machines and boats, and technology that was beyond the time: sliding mirrors and floors and an underground chamber," Kotto recalls. "When you're in a Bond movie, you get to do things that you only dreamt about when you were a kid."
Even as a kid Kotto probably never dreamed that when 007 said his name was "Bond, James Bond" in trademark fashion, Kotto would get to reply: "Names is for tombstones, baby!"
Each actor playing Bond (Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan, among others) has done him differently, so each demands a different style of villain, says actor Robert Davi, who, like Bond baddies Pryce, Kotto, Telly Savalas and Robert Shaw, has gone on to play heroes. (He can be seen as a good guy on TV's Profiler.)
Davi, who was drug kingpin Franz Sanchez in Licence to Kill (1989), thinks Sean Connery was the best Bond, but is pleased he worked opposite Timothy Dalton because Dalton didn't like doing the wisecracks Bond screenwriters like to insert.
And as a result, Davi got to crack the jokes.
In a celebrated scene, Sanchez compliments "Senor Bond" on his "cojones" but reminds him, in classic fashion: "Nobody saw you come in -- so nobody has to see you go out."
Alas, like all the Bond baddies before him and all those who would follow, no one told Sanchez the most incontrovertible 007 convention of them all:
Bond always goes out. As for you, don't bet on it.
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