Daniel Craig’s ‘soft Bond’ is the truest Bond of them all

Since Daniel Craig first assumed the mantle 15 years ago, James Bond has been carrying out the most audacious covert mission of his career: an assault on the cinema-going audience’s tenderest emotions. The much-delayed No Time to Die, finally released this week, marks the successful culmination of this assignment.

Over several decades the Bond films have made me laugh, shudder, gasp, and instinctively shield a tender part of my anatomy (yes, that scene in Casino Royale). But as No Time to Die reached its climax, I found that, for the first time ever, Bond had caused a manly tear to roll down my cheek; and stunned sobs could be heard from the rest of the majority-male audience in my local cinema too. Critics have been almost unanimous in hailing it as the most emotional Bond picture ever.

There have been tender moments in the franchise before the advent of Craig’s Bond, of course. Few of us can hear Louis Armstrong singing We Have All the Time in the World without picturing George Lazenby’s Bond cuddling the corpse of his new wife Tracy (Diana Rigg), shot dead as they motor off on their honeymoon, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969). But the film is too cartoony to allow the scene to have real impact (and it doesn’t help that Lazenby is so wooden as to make Blofeld’s cat seem vibrantly expressive in comparison).

In the next Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever (1971), poor Tracy was forgotten as Bond drooled over Tiffany Case and Plenty O’Toole. Indeed, she goes unmentioned in the franchise until Roger Moore’s Bond visits her grave at the start of For Your Eyes Only (1981) – but there is no time for viewers’ heartstrings to be tugged as within a couple of minutes Bond is dropping Blofeld from a helicopter into a chimney to the accompaniment of a comedy sound effect.

Things have been very different in the Daniel Craig era. The first major indication of the expanding of the films’ emotional range came in Craig’s Bond debut, Casino Royale (2006).

Unlike all the Bond girls who have preceded her, Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd is deeply upset in that film by Bond’s violent dispatching of several anonymous henchmen, suffering a mini-breakdown that takes the form of her sitting on the floor of the shower fully-clothed. Where previous Bonds would have seen it as their role to cheer her up with a good seeing-to, Craig simply joins her for a soggily gentle cuddle.

Vesper dies at the end of the film and, in sharp contrast to the grief-free Bond of the 1970s, Craig’s Bond is too haunted by her memory to be able to go off into the sunset with the toothsome Camille Montes at the end of the next picture, Quantum of Solace (2008). This was unprecedented: previously death had been the only excuse for a Bond movie’s leading lady to avoid a climactic clinch with 007.

The death, in Skyfall (2012), of Judi Dench’s “M” – now more of a mother figure to Bond than the sparring partner she had started off as in the Pierce Brosnan era – took a further mental toll on the character. Again, this was something new: you can’t really imagine Sean Connery’s Bond going moist-eyed if Bernard Lee had carked it in his arms.

But the reason why No Time To Die marks the greatest emotional leap forward in the history of the franchise is that Bond is allowed, for once, to continue a romantic relationship that began in the previous picture. Yes, as the film opens, Bond is still with psychotherapist Dr Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), whom he met in Spectre (2015).

In the old days, Bond usually ended each film with a new romantic conquest, who had vanished without explanation by the start of the next one. Until now, we have had no real idea of how Bond conducts even the shortest of romances once each mission is over (that is, unless you’ve read Anthony Horowitz’s Bond novel Trigger Mortis, which is set shortly after the events of Goldfinger and sees starchy old Bond giving Pussy Galore the elbow because she teases him too much).

[Warning: spoilers below]

But now we get to see a Bond set on being a one-woman man. The course of true love doesn’t run smooth, of course (Blofeld has a plan to drive a wedge between the couple, and in any case Bond still can’t quite get over Vesper) but as the film progresses it becomes clear that Bond has found his soulmate, prompting him to deliver lines that would not seem out of place in a Mills & Boon (“I don’t regret a single moment of my life that led me to you”). It is a tribute to Craig’s brilliance that he is as convincing in these moments as he is when he’s being the unflappable killing machine.

For well over a year now, rumours have circulated that the film gives Bond a young daughter called Mathilde. I don’t want to give too much away, but I will say that this is the first Bond picture in which a knitted rabbit plays a significant role; and scenes in which Bond is placed in loco parentis certainly add resonance to the heartbreaking choices he has to make at the end of the film.

All this is, of course, anathema to certain types of Bond fanboy, who deplore the creeping of emotional depth into the characterisation of their favourite international assassin/sex-machine, and think Bond was better when he bobbed up baggage-free at the start of every film, never so despondent that a good double entendre wouldn’t help him keep his end up.

Britt Ekland, who played the Bond girl Mary Goodnight in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), has weighed in, deploring the idea that Bond should be given a family life. “The whole idea is hideous and to even start imagining the sort of father Bond would be is to head down a route we should avoid,” she wrote in the Daily Mail last month. “James Bond doesn’t have a human side, that’s not who he is.”

The trouble with the fans who yell, in their best Alan Partridge voices, “Stop getting Bond wrong!” is that the Craig films are getting Bond right – at least in terms of fidelity to Ian Fleming’s original novels. I would argue that Craig’s version of Bond is much closer to Fleming’s character than the smirking automaton of the earlier films, with his three settings of “kill”, “seduce” and “quip”.

It is true that in the original Casino Royale, Fleming’s first novel (published in 1953), the final line has Bond reporting Vesper’s death in rather unsentimental terms: “The bitch is dead now.” But – sorry to contradict you, Britt – his human side is certainly on display.

At one point he tells his French ally Mathis that he wants to resign, worried that he can no longer justify killing people – “this country-right-or-wrong business is getting a little out-of-date … History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.” You can imagine Daniel Craig saying that, but not Sean Connery, Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan.

In Fleming’s works Bond constantly questions the morality of what he does. He is simply nowhere near as trigger-happy as the Bond of the films. Kingsley Amis did the maths in his James Bond Dossier: Fleming’s Bond killed 39 men over the course of 13 books – “not a large figure”.

The more Fleming wrote, the more he changed and expanded the character of Bond. Yes, Bond starts off as a player, but by the time of Fleming’s 10th novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963), he is clearly meant to have found the love of his life in Tracy di Vicenzo. She is killed at the end, as in the film adaptation, but Fleming’s Bond does not get over her: the next novel, You Only Live Twice (1964), begins with the devastated Bond on the brink of being sacked as he tries to lose himself in drink and gambling.

That book – published a few months before Fleming’s death – ends with Bond, who has lost his memory after a head injury sustained in blowing up Blofeld’s castle, living in Japan with his girlfriend Kissy Suzuki, who becomes pregnant. Yes, sorry Britt, but Ian Fleming has already invited us to imagine Bond as a father.

Kissy doesn’t tell Bond about the baby, however, nobly deciding that it is better for him to leave her and head to Europe in search of his true identity rather than settle down as a family man. (None of this made it into the film of You Only Live Twice, which ends instead with a comedy scene involving a submarine).

In Fleming’s next book, the posthumously published The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), Bond has his memory back but not his mojo: there is, for the first time, no romance; no “Bond girl”. The old commitment-phobe seems to have evolved from somebody happy to bed any attractive girl in the vicinity into somebody seeking love and capable of being hurt by it. One wonders, if Fleming had lived, whether he might have introduced Bond to his child and taken the series in the direction the films appear to be following.

Of course Daniel Craig’s Bond behaves like he does because we live in times in which audiences are deemed to be more emotionally intelligent (or, if you prefer, unbearably snowflakey) than in the Sixties and Seventies. But it so happens that our 21st-century screen Bond – a Bond who develops and matures, who is vulnerable, who questions himself and sees that there is more to life than a license to kill – bears more resemblance to Fleming’s character than the armour-plated Connery or the Teflon-coated Moore ever did.

“Englishmen are so odd. They are like a nest of Chinese boxes. It takes a very long time to get to the centre of them,” Mathis tells Bond in the first book. With Craig, we have had the first screen Bond of whom that really seems true.