Remembering Honor Blackman

The spy genre has lost a Great today. The Guardian reports that Honor Blackman has passed away at the age of 94, "of natural causes unrelated to coronavirus." It's crushing to lose two of the key Bond Girls in a matter of months, Blackman's death coming on the heels of Thunderball's Claudine Auger in December. And while she will probably be best remembered for her definitive portrayal of Pussy Galore opposite Sean Connery in Goldfinger, Blackman's mark on the spy genre is far greater. For me, she'll first and foremost always be Cathy Gale, John Steed's first regular female partner on the UK TV classic The Avengers.

Cathy Gale was ultimately overshadowed by Steed's more famous subsequent partner, Emma Peel (played to perfection by another future Bond Girl, Diana Rigg), but Gale's and Blackman's place in television history cannot be overstated. Cathy Gale was television's original badass, leather-clad female spy, paving the way not only for Mrs. Peel, but for Honey West (producer Aaron Spelling was inspired to create the show by Avengers episodes he saw in England, and reportedly first offered the role to Blackman, who turned it down), The Bionic Woman, Alias's Sydney Bristow, and every other leading lady of espionage to throw an attacker over her shoulder, as well as non-spy heroines like Xena and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Quite simply, there had never been an action-oriented female protagonist on television before Honor Blackman's groundbreaking performance. She changed the game. In part, this was due to Blackman inheriting scripts that had been originally written for another male partner for Steed (following his first season foil, Ian Hendry's Dr. David Keel), which were hastily rewritten for her, but kept the character involved in the action in a way women hadn't been previously on TV. But in a larger part, it was due to Blackman's undeniable and very physical presence: she played Cathy as a woman definitely not to be trifled with! And she learned judo for the role, impressively dispatching stuntmen twice her size on a regular basis on episodes that were at the time taped live. Her obvious talent even led to the publication of a book, Honor Blackman's Book of Self-Defense.

Prior to playing Cathy Gale, Blackman was known for glamour more than ass-kicking. But she'd already racked up a pretty impressive roster of spy roles. Foremost among them was a regular role on the 1959-60 ITC wheel show The 4 Just Men (review here), in which she played Nicole, secretary to Paris-based Just Man Tim Collier (Dan Dailey). That was a series very much of its time in all respects, so Nicole was no Cathy Gale, but Blackman nonetheless imbued her with the quick wit and spark that would later define her more famous character alongside her martial arts skills. She also made pre-Avengers appearances on other ITC series like The Saint, Danger Man,  and The Invisible Man, as well as U.K. spy and detective series like Top Secret (sadly lost), Ghost Squad, and The Vise, while also turning up in spy movies like Conspirator (with Elizabeth Taylor), Diplomatic Passport, and the original 1953 TV movie version of Little Red Monkey (penned by wartime BSC spy Eric Maschwitz and adapted two years later into a feature film version). Other notable film roles during this period include Jason and the Argonauts (1963), the Eric Ambler-penned Titanic drama A Night to Remember (1958), the Dirk Bogarde suspense drama So Long at the Fair (1950), and the Hammer noir The Glass Tomb (1955). Following the international success of Goldfinger, Blackman surprisingly didn't make many more spy appearances. The notable exceptions were the superior 1968 Goeffrey Jenkins adaptation A Twist of Sand (a movie in dire need of a Blu-ray or at least DVD release!), opposite Deadlier Than the Male's Richard Johnson, and a 1983 TV adaptation of Agatha Christie's Tommy and Tuppence mystery The Secret Adversary. In the late Nineties, Mike Meyers dreamed of getting Blackman and Connery to play Austin Powers' parents, but that didn't happen and Michael Caine ended up playing his dad. While not playing spies, though, Blackman continued to have a robust post-Bond career, including a re-teaming with Connery in the 1968 Western Shalako, a pair of 1970s cult horror movies, Fright ('71), and Hammer's final genre flick of that incarnation, To the Devil a Daughter ('76), opposite Christopher Lee, and, more recently, a very memorable comedic turn in Bridget Jones's Diary (2001). She also continued to make her mark in television, too, with recurring or starring roles on Doctor Who, The Upper Hand, and Coronation Street, and guest appearances in Columbo, Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible, Midsomer Murders, and New Tricks.

Her early fame from The Avengers brought her an unlikely career milestone in 1990 when an infectious novelty single she had recorded with Patrick Macnee in the early Sixties, "Kinky Boots," became a dubious Top 10 radio hit at Christmastime. Some have described it as "embarrassing," but as far as I'm concerned both of those stars had enough infectious charisma to pull it off even if they're not really singers! (I'm also partial to the B-side, "Let's Keep It Friendly," about the characters' platonic relationship on the show.)

Blackman has also had a successful theater career, including productions of "The Sound of Music," "My Fair Lady" and "Cabaret," and a couple of touring one-woman shows. It was one of these performances that brought her into my out-of-the-way neck of the woods when I was in high school in the mid-Nineties. I took in the show, which was amazing, and then managed to meet her backstage. Blackman was the first Bond celebrity I'd ever met, and she did not let me down. She seemed genuinely happy to meet with fans, and gladly signed a Goldfinger trading card for this starstruck teen while regaling me with stories from her days on The Avengers. She even weighed in with a decidedly non-PC answer on a debate I'd been having at the time with a friend about whether Bond and Pussy's roll in the hay was truly consensual. "Darling," she told me, eyes sparkling, "it was Sean Connery. Any woman would have wanted it!"

That sparkle remained ever-present as she remained a public figured right up to the end, always reliable for some media appearances whenever a new Bond movie came out. She never turned her back on the franchise, or publicly showed any resentment for the "Bond Girl" label that followed her throughout her career. She also continued to be a cheerleader for The Avengers, despite having left the series just before its transition to film and color... and the American broadcast that cemented its global fame.

In Blackman's final episode of The Avengers (after her Goldfinger casting was already public news), Steed bade farewell to Cathy Gale with a typical request of a favor, beginning, "And as you're going to be out there anyway, pussyfooting along those sun-soaked shores..."

"You thought I might do a little investigating," she finishes, knowing him all too well. She demurs, asserting her well-earned right to a vacation. "You see I'm not going to be pussy-footing along those sun-soaked shores," she corrects her partner, "I'm going to be lying on them." Pussyfooting or lounging, Honor Blackman has certainly earned her trip to those sun-soaked shores. While more terrestrially, the modern spy genre forever owes her an enormous debt. Blackman was a true trailblazer, who transformed the role of women in the spy genre from femme fatales who relied exclusively on their sexuality to equal participants in the action, undaunted by superior force and unmatched in combat skills.

Remembering Roger Moore

The great Sir Roger Moore has passed away after a short battle with cancer, according to numerous news outlets. And this is the piece I have most dreaded writing ever since I began this blog. Roger Moore may not have been the screen’s "best" James Bond in terms of realizing Ian Fleming’s literary character, but he is certainly one of the most appealing. He is the one you most want to hang out with. He was my favorite Bond as a kid, and was always the Bond actor I most fancied having a conversation with. Even now, when I’m in the mood for a Bond movie in general but have no specific title in mind, I find myself most frequently putting on a Moore movie—usually For Your Eyes Only (1981), easily in my Top 5 Bond movies.

Roger Moore personified the witty playboy adventurer who brushes off danger without creasing his immaculately tailored suits. He perfected this persona most famously across three different characters—TV’s Simon Templar on The Saint and Lord Brett Sinclair on The Persuaders!, and of course 007—each distinct, and yet each distinctly Roger Moore. He sold a personal brand long before we spoke in such terms, and he sold it to perfection. Critics have accused him of turning all of his roles into Roger Moore rather than adapting Roger Moore to the roles, but for a movie star, I’ve never seen that as a bad thing. In fact, I’ve always found it incredibly appropriate that at the height of his Saint fandom in the 1960s, while every popular TV character (including The Saint) had his own Annual (hardcover books for children packed with stories, comics, and puzzles), Moore was the only actor to have his own—The Roger Moore Adventure Book.

It was a narrative often put forth by Moore himself that he was not a good actor. Always charmingly self-deprecating, he once famously reduced his own acting ability to, “left eyebrow raised, right eyebrow raised.” He was, of course, selling himself short, and I’m saddened to see that many obituaries today still persist with that narrative. Many James Bond purists lament that Moore played the character so comically, and they certainly have a point. But ask any actor what’s harder, comedy or drama, and nearly unanimously they all answer comedy. It’s true that Roger Moore was not one of the screen’s great dramatic actors (though he was certainly capable of fine dramatic performances, as evidenced in The Man Who Haunted Himself and several crucial scenes in For Your Eyes Only, among others), but he was an incredibly gifted comedian, and deserves recognition as such. His comic timing was impeccable, and his wry delivery of innumerable oft-quoted one-liners unequaled. For proof, one need look no further than other, subsequent James Bond actors who have been saddled with similar lines and unable to pull them off despite their undeniable dramatic gravitas. Roger Moore had a unique talent to sell even the most ridiculous double-entendres or pithy asides, and that talent more than anything else carried the Bond franchise to new Box Office heights in the Seventies and ensured its continuation after Sean Connery.

This is another part of Moore’s legacy that should never be overlooked. While all the other popular spy series of the Sixties (on the big and small screen) dried up in the Seventies (as public perception of spies themselves shifted from heroic to underhanded in the wake of Watergate, COINTELPRO, the Church Committee Hearings, and other scandals), James Bond thrived during Moore’s tenure. Moonraker may not have pleased critics, but it broke Box Office records. What Roger Moore brought to the franchise was exactly what audiences craved in the 1970s. Without him, the series may well have languished, but instead it became more popular than ever.

Despite eventually personifying the upper-class English gentleman, Roger Moore was born into a working class London family. He grew up idolizing suave leading men like George Sanders and Stewart Granger, and following his compulsory army service and a stint as a male knitwear model (which briefly earned him the nickname of “The Big Knit”), had the chance not only to follow in their footsteps, but eventually to work with both. After a string of supporting roles as an MGM contract player opposite the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Lana Turner (during which, Moore wrote in his autobiography*, he and his neighbor William Shatner “whiled away many an evening… sitting around the pool [of their Westwood apartment complex], having a drink or three”), Moore found success on television. First as the titular knight on Ivanhoe (for England’s ITV, where he would later find stardom as The Saint), then as a cowboy with an unlikely accent on The Alaskans and Maverick (both for Warner Bros.), where he had the unenviable task of filling the void left by James Garner, playing Brett (Garner) and Bart’s (Jack Kelly) English cousin Beau Maverick. In the former he found himself speaking Garner’s lines (a writers’ strike led to scripts from Maverick being recycled wholesale for The Alaskans), and in the latter wearing his clothes (from his autobiography: “They assured me that I wasn’t replacing [Garner]. Oh yeah? Then why did all of my costumes have ‘Jim Garner’ in them, semi-scratched out?”). It would prove valuable experience for later, when he once again found himself taking over from a very popular actor!

Moore’s real fame, however, came not from American television, but UK television. After trying himself, unsuccessfully, to acquire the rights to Leslie Charteris’ Saint stories several years earlier, Moore jumped at the chance to play Simon Templar for producers Monty Berman and Robert S. Baker at Lord Lew Grade’s powerhouse production company, ITC. He made 118 episodes of The Saint, the first batch in black and white, and the second (without Berman) in color. Charteris had imbued his hero with ample wit to match his wits, and Moore, naturally, excelled at conveying that wit on screen. His Simon Templar would break the fourth wall to directly address the audience, making the most of Moore’s innate charm. Simon Templar was the absolute perfect part for Moore, the idea match of character and star. In America, The Saint played on NBC, making Moore a household name on both sides of the Atlantic. It was also his first major brush with spy stardom, as, though Templar was no agent, his adventures frequently brought him into espionage territory.

Once The Saint wrapped, Moore was eager to segue from television into movies. He and Baker, now producing partners, made Crossplot, a highly entertaining Hitchcock knock-off (parts North by Northwest and The Man Who Knew Too Much) in which Moore played an advertising executive caught up in an espionage plot who has to stop an assassination. Bernard Lee, best known as M from the Bond movies, co-starred, and the advertising campaign traded heavily on Bondian imagery, prominently featuring Moore in a white dinner jacket brandishing a pistol. It wasn’t the first connection between Moore and 007. His name was linked with the Bond role as soon as the first movie was announced, but of course Sean Connery was cast instead. Still, Moore played the character in a 1964 sketch on the BBC comedy series Mainly Millicent, and in the Saint episode “Luella” (co-starring future Felix Leiter David Hedison), Templar jokingly introduced himself as James Bond. In another episode, he ordered his drink “neither shaken nor stirred.”

Moore and Baker had planned several other films together (including, according to Andrew Pixley, the spy drama The Patterson Report and an action-adventure called Vanishing Point**), but never had the chance to make them. Instead, Moore was lured back to television by Lew Grade, who had already sold The Persuaders! based on Moore’s involvement, but without his permission! He then persuaded Moore to make the series by urging him to think of all the jobs it would create, and the boon it would be to the British economy. (“Think of the Queen!”) And thank God it worked, because The Persuaders! is fantastic. It’s one of my favorite TV series, and it's actually his character from that show, Lord Brett Sinclair, that I think of first when I think of Roger Moore... much as I love his Saint and his Bond.

The Persuaders! arose from an idea Moore and Baker had had while shooting the final season of The Saint—the idea of a buddy series teaming Moore with a brash American co-star. The Saint episode “The Ex-King of Diamonds” served as an unofficial pilot, pairing Moore with The Champions star Stuart Damon. When it came to the series, however, a bigger name was required, and when Rock Hudson proved unavailable, Tony Curtis came aboard as self-made oil millionaire Danny Wilde. When Brett and Danny first encounter each other on the French Riviera, the two wealthy alpha males find themselves instantly in competition, first in a road race (Brett’s Aston Martin DBS versus Danny’s Ferrari Dino), and then in a fist fight over the proper way to make a ridiculous drink called a Creole Scream. In the course of this fight, they tear apart the whole hotel bar and find themselves facing a judge, Judge Fulton (played by Diamonds Are Forever’s Laurence Naismith), who offers them an alternative to a jail sentence. It turns out he manipulated their meeting, having selected them to be his personal vigilante crime fighters. It’s a tenuous premise, but it serves its purpose, setting Brett and Danny on numerous missions against kidnappers, counterfeiters, and, of course, spies. (Somehow this judge is also privy to information about classified British Intelligence operations when the plots require that.) The Persuaders! had a top-notch roster of talent (including Avengers writer Brian Clemens and Casino Royale director Val Guest) both behind and in front of the cameras, and their skills combined with lush location filming in exotic European locales (as opposed to The Saint’s stock footage and studio backlots) made every episode of the series look like a feature film. But more than anything, it was the fantastic chemistry between Moore and Curtis (whose off-screen relationship influenced their friendly on-screen competition) that made the series work so well. While The Persuaders! faced stiff competition in America from Mission: Impossible, it was a huge hit around the world, and a second season was in the offing… until Moore received a life-changing phone call from Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman.

During his Bond tenure, Moore made numerous other action-adventure movies, including Gold (for Bond director Peter Hunt), The Wild Geese (opposite Richard Burton), Shout at the Devil (with Lee Marvin), North Sea Hijack (aka Ffolkes, with Bond alumni David Hedison and George Baker), and The Sea Wolves (with Patrick Macnee and David Niven). He even found time to, unlikely though it may seem, play Sherlock Holmes on TV, in Sherlock Holmes in New York with Macnee as Watson and John Huston as Professor Moriarty. All of these movies are well worth watching. He also displayed that considerable gift for comedy in Cannonball Run (sending up his own image as an Aston Martin-driving racer who thinks he’s Roger Moore) and Blake Edwards’ Curse of the Pink Panther (1983). While the latter is a pretty lousy movie, Moore elevates it considerably in his brief cameo as a post-plastic surgery Inspector Clouseau, ably aping Peter Sellers’ famous French accent and pulling off the requisite pratfalls with great aplomb. (You can watch his scene on YouTube, saving yourself from slogging through the entire film.) In my opinion he’s the only actor to ever successfully fill Sellers’ shoes in that role (once again demonstrating his ability to rise to the challenge following in famous footsteps), and it’s a real shame that Edwards didn’t make Moore’s Clouseau the star of the film.

Moore played James Bond in seven official entries in the series, more than any other actor (though tied with Connery if you count the unofficial Never Say Never Again), and until he was 57, making him the oldest actor to play 007. Too old, really. Moore himself was the first to admit that A View to a Kill was at least one movie too many, and stretched credibility when he switched off with stuntmen for the outlandish action. He had actually tried to leave the series, but Broccoli simply offered him too much money to pass up.

After finally hanging up the Walther PPK, Moore focused more on charity than acting, devoting much of his time to children’s health as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF. (His friend Audrey Helpburn had recruited him to the cause.) He played two more spy roles (in The Enemy, based on a Desmond Bagley novel, and as a guest star on J.J. Abrams’ TV show Alias), and made an intriguing mystery for director Bill Condon, The Man Who Wouldn’t Die, but primarily focused on comedy when he did act. His comedic roles included Bullseye! (an unfortunate miss, but an opportunity to star with his good friend Michael Caine), Boat Trip (an awful movie in which Moore is nonetheless hilarious), and Spice World. The latter was the first of several cameos sending up his Bond image. More recently, he starred in a Lifetime holiday movie, A Princess for Christmas, and played an important supporting role in the unsold pilot for a new version of The Saint starring Adam Rayner. (Sadly, that remains unreleased.) He also found time to record many excellent DVD commentaries, and to pen three memoirs (co-authored with Gareth Owen), My Word is My Bond, Bond on Bond, and One Lucky Bastard. My Word is My Bond is essential reading for any 007 fan, and one of my very favorite showbiz autobiographies, full of humorous and typically self-deprecating anecdotes from Moore’s amazing life.

With Roger Moore’s passing, we have lost one of the true titans of the spy genre, and a very talented comedic actor who never got proper credit for those talents. Fortunately, that Roger Moore brand will live on in his incredible body of work, preserved for posterity on DVD and Blu-ray and no doubt all formats to come. There is truth to the criticism that his Bond movies aren’t so much Bond movies as “Roger Moore movies.” But so what? I find myself frequently craving Roger Moore movies, and I don’t expect that will ever change. It may well be that I'm a bit more of a Roger Moore fan than I am a James Bond fan. Roger Moore was truly one of my heroes, and I am genuinely crushed by his passing. But what a legacy he leaves behind!

*Moore, Roger with Gareth Owen: My Word is My Bond, 2008
**Pixley, Andrew: The Persuaders! Read and Destroy: A Complete Series Guide, 2011

R.I.P. Chris Cornell

Singer Chris Cornell died yesterday at the age of 52. Numerous outlets report that his death is being treated as a possible suicide. A superstar of the Nineties grunge scene, Cornell rose to fame as the front man of the band Soundgarden. He found similar success with another group, Audioslave, and as a solo recording artist. It’s in the latter capacity that he is probably best known to James Bond fans, for co-writing and performing “You Know My Name,” the theme song to Daniel Craig’s debut 007 movie, Casino Royale, in 2006.

As much as I love Adele’s “Skyfall,” for me “You Know My Name” is easily the best Bond song in the last 30 years. It’s also the last one, to date, to be co-written by the film’s composer—in this case David Arnold. Arnold and Cornell achieved a perfect creative symbiosis with this track, which boldly introduced Craig’s new, younger, rawer Bond with aggressive first-person lyrics. According to John Burlingame’s The Music of James Bond, Arnold wanted the song to serve as an alternative theme for the less mature Bond, who wouldn’t “earn” the classic Monty Norman/John Barry version of “The James Bond Theme” until the end of the movie. Therefore, he wanted it to have “the same genetic material as the Bond theme, but in a different order and in a different shape.” Indeed it does, and it makes for a truly fantastic substitute theme as Arnold weaves the melody throughout his score. Yet it’s Cornell’s powerful vocals (at the time the first male vocals on a Bond song in nearly two decades) that really cement “You Know My Name” as one of the all-time great Bond themes.

Incredibly, given that he is one of the youngest and most recent, Cornell is the first James Bond main title vocalist to leave us. (The songs performed by Matt Monro, Louis Armstrong, and Dusty Springfield did not play during the main titles of their respective films.) Cornell had battled addiction for most of his life, but seemed to be doing better in recent years. In his final performance, with Soundgarden, earlier last night, CNN reports that he substituted the planned encore with a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “In My Time of Dying.” Cornell’s death so young is a tragedy, but in addition to his lasting impact on popular music, he left an indelible mark on the Bond series with a terrific theme song for one of the franchise’s best films.

R.I.P. Robert Vaughn

We have lost another pillar of Sixties spydom. The Man From U.N.C.L.E. himself, Robert Vaughn, has passed away at 83.

While no one would deny that it was the partnership of Napoleon Solo (Vaughn) and Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum) that made the show special, Man From U.N.C.L.E. fans tend to be divided on their favorite agent. I've always been a Solo man. Initially conceived by Ian Fleming, Solo was intended to be a TV version of James Bond. That's easy enough on paper, but as we've seen in countless Eurospy movies (as well as various TV attempts at the formula), in practice, it's easier said than done. Really only a handful of actors successfully managed to imbue their superspy characters with the suave charm that defined Sean Connery's 007: James Coburn... Richard Johnson... and, of course, Robert Vaughn. While producers Sam Rolfe and Norman Felton undoubtedly contributed to Solo's character, it was really Vaughn who made him so likable. Let's face it: the spy genre is full of suave charmers. Ultimately, it comes down to the actors to make that charm real. And Robert Vaughn had charm in spades! In short, he was cool. Thinking of this coolness, what leaps immediately to my mind is not one of his many genuinely clever witticisms. It's a line that would be cringe-worthy on the tongue of... really, just about anyone! In the U.N.C.L.E. movie To Trap a Spy, the beautiful Lucianna Paluzzi (Thunderball) seductively asks Napoleon, "What would you like me to change into?" To which the debonair secret agent replies, "Anything... but a boy." (Surely part of the success of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. among children was that it sometimes served up the very same scenarios and lines that they came up with while playing James Bond with their spy toys and costumes!) You simply had to be cool to deliver a line as corny that... and even make it sound sophisticated. Iconic as the character became, audiences didn't tune into The Man From U.N.C.L.E. for Napoleon Solo. They tuned in for Robert Vaughn.

While The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is Vaughn's towering legacy, it wasn't his only brush with espionage. His half-hour Gerry Anderson-created ITC series The Protectors (1972-1974) also carries my high recommendation for spy fans. At the time, Lew Grade was importing a lot of American stars from the previous decade to headline his trademark adventure shows, and Vaughn acquits himself far more admirably in this context than some of his colleagues! (Cough, Gene Barry, cough.) While the character remains a bit of a cypher owing to the half-hour runtime, his jetsetting detective Harry Rule embodies all of that Vaughn charm and coolness that gave life to Napoleon Solo. And I suspect that Vaughn is probably the only actor to fight fully kitted-out scuba divers on dry land (or deck) in two separate series! (The Protectors actually takes the prize in that category, because the fight involves swordplay.) In my book, that's an honor worth noting. Vaughn also orbited the spy world in the shows Washington: Behind Closed Doors (giving an Emmy-winning performance as the Bob Haldeman character opposite former Girl From U.N.C.L.E. Stefanie Powers in a miniseries based on John Erlichman's roman a clef about Watergate) and The A-Team.

On the big screen, his best spy role came in the 1966 Helen MacInnes adaptation The Venetian Affair opposite Elke Sommer. Though its evocative title (which actually came from the novel, despite sounding like an U.N.C.L.E. episode name) and lurid marketing ("Enjoy the Fine Arts of Venice... Murder! Spies! Women!") clearly aimed to capitalize on Vaughn's television success, the film is actually far more serious and downbeat than the fanciful Man From U.N.C.L.E. Like its atmospheric, harpsichord-heavy Lalo Schifrin score, it has far more in common with The Ipcress File and The Quiller Memorandum. Vaughn's most famous film roles came outside the genre in movies like The Magnificent Seven, Bullitt, The Mind of Mr. Soames, The Towering Inferno, Battle Beyond the Stars (in an homage to his Magnificent Seven roots) and Superman III, but he continued to make spy movies of varying quality throughout his career, including Brass Target (with Patrick McGoohan), Cuba Crossing, Hour of the Assassin, Skeleton Coast, and, of course, the 1983 telefilm The Return of the Man From U.N.C.L.E. 

Off screen, Vaughn was known for his liberal politics. A lifelong Democrat, he continued his education after wrapping The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Hollywood blacklist. A former Army drill instructor himself, he was active in the antiwar movement, campaigning for Eugene McCarthy and memorably locking horns (and more than holding his own) with conservative talk show host (and spy author) William F. Buckley, Jr. (Their articulate debate on Buckley's Firing Line is well worth watching, epitomizing the late Sixties political schism in America.) 

In the late period of his career, Vaughn riffed on his U.N.C.L.E. persona in a fun, nostalgia-driven guest appearance on Diagnosis Murder before creating one more indelible role on the highly entertaining U.K. con artist series Hustle. As Albert Stroller, he still conveyed all the charm and charisma that made Napoleon Solo a household name four decades earlier.

Robert Vaughn was a class act and an icon of the spy genre. To say he will be missed is a gross understatement. We have lost one of the titans of popular culture espionage.

R.I.P. Christopher Wood, 007 and Remo Williams Screenwriter

I was very saddened to read on The Book Bond that screenwriter and author Christopher Wood passed away over the weekend at the age of 79. Wood's contributions to both the cinematic and literary James Bond are sometimes overlooked, but tremendous contributions nonetheless.

After poor sales doomed his early ambitions as a serious novelist, the Cambridge-educated Wood turned his talents to penning humorous erotic potboilers under the name Timothy Lea. In this realm, he found great success, creating the popular "Confessions" series. Beginning with Confessions of a Window Cleaner in 1971, Wood wrote 19 pseudonymous "Confessions" paperbacks during the Seventies (selling in excess of 3 million copies) and helped launch that decade's odd genre of British sex comedies (a craze that also kick-started the career of future Bond director Martin Campbell). Under his own name, Wood penned the screenplays for four popular Confessions movies (the first helmed by former Bond director Val Guest) which made an unlikely sex symbol out of shaggy star Robin Askwith. He also wrote the Michael York comedy Seven Nights in Japan (1976) for director Lewis Gilbert. (For Bond fans, this was Gilbert's second Japan-set film to feature Charles Gray, following You Only Live Twice.) This led to Gilbert bringing him to EON Productions' attention, and he was hired to write Gilbert's next Bond movie, The Spy Who Loved Me.

While Bond scripting was always a team effort (Richard Maibaum also received writing credit on Spy, and the writer of the previous three films, Tom Mankiewicz, did a lot of uncredited work), there is no question that Christopher Wood was at the very center of that team in the most formative period of Roger Moore's tenure as 007. While Moore had already had two outings as the famous secret agent, it was The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) that really defined his incarnation of James Bond. Wood and Lewis also stuck around for the follow-up, Moonraker, in 1979. While it's not difficult to believe that the Confessions screenwriter coined some of the series most egregious double-entendres, Wood contended that Moore himself deserved substantial credit for those. Whoever was responsible, it was the right formula for the time, and arguably saved the franchise, which had flagged early in the decade. Moonraker became the highest grossing entry to date.

From Adrian Harrington Rare Books

But Wood's contributions to James Bond weren't limited to celluloid. Because Ian Fleming had stipulated that the movie producers could only use the title The Spy Who Loved Me and not the plot of his novel (an experimental outing narrated by the Bond Girl, with Bond himself absent until its final third), the resulting movie bore no resemblance to the book. Consequently, it became the first Bond movie to get a novelization - and Christopher Wood wrote it, making him the third official continuation author, after Kingsley Amis (Colonel Sun) and John Pearson (James Bond: The Authorized Biography of 007). To differentiate it from the Fleming title, Wood's novelization was titled James Bond, the Spy Who Loved Me. Moonraker, reinvented as a space story to cash on the Star Wars craze, also deviated completely from Fleming's novel (rather a pity, since it was one of his best) other than the villain's name. So Wood once again wrote a novelization, James Bond and Moonraker. Despite the vast disparity between the over the top adventures of the Late Seventies cinematic 007 and Ian Fleming's more grounded novels, Wood managed the neat task of reconciling the two takes in his books. (Even Kingsley Amis praised him for this feat.) The results were two continuation novels with a very Fleming feel, much more successful pastiches than Sebastian Faulks' later attempt to capture Fleming's style. As such, they've long been held in high regard by Bond fans, considered among the best of the numerous continuation novels. The UK hardcover first editions, from Jonathan Cape, are also highly collectible, since they had a very limited print run geared mainly towards libraries. Paperback editions from both the UK and USA are easy to come by and worth tracking down.

While he didn't continue to work on the James Bond films in the 1980s, Wood did collaborate with a former Bond director to bring another famous fictional secret agent to the big screen in that decade. He wrote Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins in 1985 for director Guy Hamilton (Goldfinger). Adapted from the popular Destroyer series of paperback Men's Adventure novels by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy, the Fred Ward/Joel Grey movie was sadly not successful enough to ever make good on the promise of its title, and we never got to see the adventure continue. But Wood brought to the table all of the fun of his Seventies Bond movies, and the results are enormously entertaining.

Wood continued to work throughout the Nineties and early 2000s as a screenwriter (writing scripts for Roger Corman) and novelist (including the well-received autobiographical showbiz satire California, Here I Am, which was praised on its publication by future Bond novelist William Boyd). Wood's final published work was a 2006 memoir of his time spent with Agent 007, entitled James Bond, The Spy I Loved. Candid, humorous, and informative (though direly in need of a better proof-reader!), it's a must-read for any fan of Seventies James Bond, and a fitting celebration of the indelible mark that Christopher Wood left on the world of 007.

R.I.P. James Horner

The Hollywood Reporter reports that film composer extraordinaire James Horner died yesterday in a plane crash. This is tragic news. Horner was among that dying breed of great orchestral composers who wrote grand, hummable themes, in an industry that seems to be relying more and more on non-distinctive electronic compositions that blend together. Horner seemed to score everything in the 1990s, and that included the decade's biggest spy franchise, based on Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan character. Horner scored both of Harrison Ford's outings as Ryan, Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger (a score that defines the Nineties spy sound for me). He also provided the jazzy score for another Nineties spy classic, Sneakers, and added great suspense with his music to the paranoid spy chases in A Beautiful Mind.

But the Nineties weren't a decade especially known for spy movies, nor was Horner a composer readily associated with that genre. He's probably best known for his epics like Titanic (still one of the bestselling soundtrack albums of all time, propelled by the Celine Dion song "My Heart Will Go On" for which Horner won an Oscar), Braveheart, Glory, Field of Dreams, and my personal favorite, Legends of the Fall. Composed in the same year as Clear and Present Danger, Legends of the Fall is one of the all-time great film scores. That music still moves me whenever I hear it, and that album very clearly formed the soundtrack of my junior year of high school along with (and every bit as much as) Tom Petty's Wildflowers and the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. Other favorite Horner scores of mine include Disney's rollicking comic book blast The Rocketeer (with Timothy Dalton), and his fantasy scores for Krull, Willow and Battle Beyond the Stars, though I think of the latter more for the other New Concorde movies Roger Corman reused it in, like Barbarian Queen, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom and Deathstalker IV. And, speaking of Battle Beyond the Stars, there's no denying the huge impact Horner had on science fiction, with unforgettable scores for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Aliens and Avatar. More recently he'd become choosier about his work and consequently less prolific, but still created memorable, distinctive music for films like The Amazing Spider-man and the forthcoming Wolf Totem and Southpaw.

It's a real shame we never got a chance to hear Horner's take on a Bond score. He was reportedly offered Never Say Never Again, but turned it down, perhaps for fear of displeasing potential future employers at EON.

But what music he did create! James Horner leaves behind a body of work that will continue to move film fans for generations to come. Now I'm going to go put on Legends of the Fall and be transported to the fading West,WWI, and Prohibition... and simultaneously to another time in my own life. Thank you, Mr. Horner, for the memories.

Remembering the Great Christopher Lee

According to numerous outlets including The New York Times, Sir Christopher Lee has died at the age of 93. I find that hard to accept. Obviously 93 years on this earth is an incredibly good run for anyone, and especially for someone who has managed to pack those years with careers as an airman, a spy, a musician, a writer, a scholar, and, certainly not least, an actor with over 250 credits in film and television, including among them work with some of the biggest directors of all time and in several of the biggest franchises ever. But even in his nineties, and even after an on-set injury left him less mobile and reliant on a cane, Christopher Frank Carandini Lee had shown no signs of slowing down. He continued acting right up until the end, reprising his iconic role as the wizard Saruman in last year's The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies, and celebrated this past Christmas by releasing an EP of heavy metal carols. I had fully expected him to keep going strong for another decade still. So it was with shock more than sadness that I awoke this morning to this terrible news. Because such a full life of so many accomplishments is one to be celebrated rather than mourned.

My first exposure to Christopher Lee was in the James Bond movie The Man With the Golden Gun, opposite Roger Moore. For me, Christopher Lee was the greatest Bond villain ever. The Man With the Golden Gun was certainly not the best movie (though it was my favorite as a kid), but Lee was fantastic as the titular assassin Francisco Scaramanga, transforming a character who was basically a common thug in his step-cousin Ian Fleming's novel into a much more interesting thug who has cloaked himself in a veneer of charm and sophistication. Scaramanga was the first, and most successful, of several attempts over the course of the series to create a villain who was a dark reflection of 007 himself, an equal in his deadly skills, and thus a truly worthy adversary. Lee brilliantly delivered what's probably my favorite villain monologue in the whole series when Scaramanga shares his personal history with Bond while seated next to him in a kickboxing arena. While keeping the tone conversational and even jovial, Lee subtly conveys tragedy, pathos, and eventually sadism and psychosis by the time he concludes his story of seeking revenge for the mistreatment and death of a beloved elephant with the line, "You see, Mr. Bond, I always thought I loved animals. Then I discovered that I enjoyed killing people even more."

While Lee is of course most associated with the horror genre (a genre he did a lot to elevate), and it's no accident that EON and George Lucas looked to a quintessential Dracula actor for their respective spy and sci-fi villains, he worked across all genres over the course of his career, and actually racked up quite a few spy roles. One of his earliest parts was an uncredited role as a KGB agent in the 1952 Oskar Homolka spy comedy Top Secret. He was probably able to rely to some degree on his harrowing real-life role in wartime military intelligence for his role as a Nazi commandant in the resistance thriller Missiles From Hell (1958). One of his surprisingly few forays into Eurospydom came very early in the cycle, in 1962's Cold War thriller The Devil's Agent. His only other Eurospy movie came six years later, with a villainous cameo in Five Golden Dragons. His ridiculously fun Sixties Fu Manchu movies all have an espionage flavor, as do the horror movies Scream and Scream Again (1970), The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973, in which the Count takes on MI5), and Raw Meat (also '73, in which Lee himself has a small role as an MI5 agent). He also brought horror to spydom with a cameo as Dracula in the Sammy Davis, Jr./Peter Lawford spy spoof sequel One More Time (1970). One of his best roles was as Mycroft Holmes in Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), a film that very much plays up Mycroft's espionage activities. (Lee also played Sherlock Holmes himself on two separate occasions, once in 1962 in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, and again in two miniseries in the early 1990s collectively known as Sherlock Holmes: The Golden Years.) He was a popular villain in TV spy movies including Once Upon a Spy (1980), Captain America II: Death Too Soon (1979) and Detonator (1993), the latter opposite Pierce Brosnan. Lee's guest appearances on spy television series included an episode of O.S.S. (1958), two episodes of The Avengers opposite his grammar school classmate Patrick Macnee ("Never, Never Say Die," with Diana Rigg, and "The Interrogators," with Linda Thorson) and a spy-themed episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles ("Austria, 1917"). It's also notable that over the course of his career, he acted opposite three James Bond actors: Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig (in The Golden Compass).

His real life spy adventures are not so well documented, as he always adhered strictly to the secrecy expected of him. While in Air Force Intelligence, he was attached to the SAS and SOE, but when pressed for details in a 2011 interview with The Telegraph, he enigmatically (and typically) responded, "Let’s just say I was in Special Forces and leave it at that. People can read in to that what they like." The wartime stories he recounted in his autobiography Lord of Misrule (an updated version of Tall, Dark and Gruesome) were mostly humorous anecdotes about things like awful commanding officers ("some people are just bastards") making him empty latrines in the desert. But when I was working on behind-the-scenes documentaries for The Lord of the Rings, I remember a moment caught on camera (though I don't recall if it made it into one of the documentaries) where Peter Jackson was attempting to demonstrate to Lee how Saruman should cut the throat of his hapless lackey Wormtongue (Brad Dourif). Lee took the knife from Jackson in exasperation and told him, in that inimitable baritone, something to the effect of, "no, this is how it's done." An awed and bemused Jackson then whispered to the camera, confessing his embarrassment at trying to direct a former commando how to cut a throat. So maybe it's best to follow Lee's advice and "leave it at that."

During his final months of service, according to his autobiography, Lee served with the multinational Central Registry of War Crimes and Security Suspects, investigating and apprehending fugitive Nazi war criminals. These investigations took him to a number of concentrations camps, the all too real horrors of which left him completely inured to the greasepaint horrors of the movies he would later star in.

Lee's horror filmography is the stuff of legend. His performances as Frankenstein's monster and Count Dracula in Hammer Studios' Curse of Frankenstin (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958), respectively, helped launch the genre into the color era—and Lee to stardom. His Dracula, while terrifying, had a carnal sexuality absent from Bela Lugosi's earlier portrayal. Both of those Hammer gothics were directed by Terrence Fisher, with whom Lee would work many times over the course of his career, and both co-starred Peter Cushing. Cushing and Lee had both previously appeared in Lawrence Olivier's Hamlet (1948, in which an uncredited Lee played a spear carrier) and John Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952), but it was their twenty horror and fantasy movies together, many for either Hammer or Amicus, for which the pair became famous. Lee and Cushing starred together in the Hammer classics The Mummy (1959), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), The Gorgon (1964, a must-see), and the camp-fantastic Dracula 1972 AD, among others. Without Hammer, they made more great horror movies with unforgettable titles like Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965), The Skull (1965), Island of the Burning Damned (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1971), The Creeping Flesh (1973), Nothing But the Night (1973), The House of Long Shadows (1983), and my personal favorite, Horror Express (1972, and another must-see), as well as fantasies like She (1965) and Arabian Adventure (1979).

Without Cushing, Lee made more excellent Hammer movies (The Two Faces of Dr. Jeckyll, Scream of Fear, The Devil Rides Out) and excellent non-Hammer horrors, including two collaborations with Mario Bava, The Whip and the Body (1963) and the phantasmagorically awesome Hercules in the Haunted World (1961). He also made two off-brand Dracula movies, Jess Franco's Count Dracula (1970), a Dracula movie that aimed to, but didn't quite succeed at, sticking closer to Stoker than the Hammer interpretations, and the under-seen, under-appreciated and unfortunately poorly dubbed French comedy Dracula, Father and Son (1976). In 1973, he made what he (and many others) considered to be his best horror movie, Robin Hardy's cult classic The Wicker Man, opposite Edward Woodward. I think I would say it's his best film, and one fully deserving of all the praise that's been heaped on it over the years.

I discovered Lee's horror movies a little late in the game, in college, but it quickly became an obsession tracking down even the most obscure. Because his presence assured a good time, even on the occasions the movies themselves were not good. Christopher Lee was the sort of actor who elevated any material. I couldn't hazard a guess as to what percentage of my own DVD library is Christopher Lee movies, but it's not small.

In recent years, Lee enjoyed a real renaissance. He became a good luck charm for Tim Burton, appearing in the director's 1999 Hammer homage Sleepy Hollow as well as The Corpse Bride (2005), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Dark Shadows (2012). Martin Scorsese cast him in Hugo (2011), George Lucas cast him as the villainous Sith Lord Count Dooku in two Star Wars prequels, and of course Peter Jackson cast him as Saruman, a once great wizard turned villainous in his Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies. That was a dream role for Lee, who was a lifelong devotee of J.R.R. Tolkien, and read the books on a yearly basis. I suspect he knew more about Tolkien than anyone else involved in those productions. (He also knew more about Bram Stoker than anyone else involved in his Dracula movies, and often insisted on line changes or cuts to reflect the author's intentions.)

Apparently, there were few subjects in which Christopher Lee wasn't an expert! He was also a polyglot. In his autobiography, My Word is My Bond, Roger Moore recalls working on an episode of Ivanhoe with Lee in which Lee played Otto the Hun. Moore was fighting a duel with him for the freedom of a serf, played by a child actor. Lee uttered a phrase of German, and the boy asked if he spoke it fluently. "Without pausing for breath," Moore writes, "Christopher said, 'Yes, and Portuguese, French, Italian, three dialects of Urdu, Swahili...' He went on and on - and yes, he does speak all these languages." Maud Adams recalled that on the set of The Man With the Golden Gun, she and Britt Ekland used to speak Swedish to gossip about all the other people in the cast and crew, thinking they were doing so in complete privacy. One day they made the mistake of doing it in the presence of Lee, who turned around and surprised them by joining the conversation, much to their shared embarrassment.

That mastery of languages, literature, and pretty much all things is part of Lee's legend. He was the total sum of the vast and varied parts of his extraordinary life. When he spoke, everyone listened. On those Lord of the Rings documentaries, we always knew that if we were ever stuck for a crucial line of narration, all we had to do was go back to the Christopher Lee interview, which occupied far more tapes than anyone else's. He provided erudite commentary on any aspect of Tolkien or Ring lore you could wish for, as well as the production. And he did so in such a commanding voice!

I seriously regret never meeting Christopher Lee in person, despite several close calls and feeling like I knew him through those tapes. But I did see him once in traffic, driving the most appropriate vehicle imaginable. After fifteen years of living in Los Angeles, where you see a star almost every week, that moment remains my favorite star sighting ever. I was stopped at a traffic light in the left turn lane at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica in Beverly Hills around the time Star Wars: Attack of the Clones was due to be released. I glanced in my rear view mirror and saw a vintage, mustard colored Rolls Royce drawing near in the next lane over. It pulled even with me, and I glanced over and did a double take. At the wheel was Christopher Lee, in his Eighties but driving himself, and his wife Gitte was seated next to him. Both were, of course, impeccably dressed. I couldn't believe it. Now that he's gone, I'll cherish that memory even more. As I'll cherish the immense and astounding body of work he leaves behind.

What a life! What a star! Sir Christopher Lee was undeniably one of a kind.

R.I.P. Richard Johnson

Richard Johnson has passed away at age 87, according to the BBC and other sources. A RADA-trained founder member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Johnson starred in a number of spy movies and was reportedly considered for the part of James Bond. Most importantly, however, he starred in the greatest Bond knock-off ever made, 1967's Deadlier Than the Male. (Read my review here.) While Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina stole the show as the titular femme fatales, Johnson more than held his own as hero Bulldog Drummond. Sapper's famous character was re-imagined for the 007 age, and Johnson (who actually began his film career in 1951 with a bit part in Calling Bulldog Drummond, starring Walter Pidgeon) played him suavely and with great charm. Charm was never a given with leading men in Eurospy movies, and it was Johnson's easy appeal that put him ahead of all the other wannabe Bonds of the Eurospy scene. He reprised the role two years later in a more comedic sequel, Some Girls Do. Other notable spy-related roles for Johnson included an appearance on one of ITC's early adventure shows, The Four Just Men, the all-star WWII espionage thriller Operation Crossbow (opposite Tom Courtenay, George Peppard, Anthony Quayle and Sophia Loren), a tough-as-nails performance as super-agent Jonas Wilde in Amicus's sole foray into Sixties spydom, Danger Route (another fantastic Eurospy movie that really, really needs to be on DVD!) A Twist of Sand (opposite Honor Blackman), the hard-hitting IRA thriller Hennessy, an episode of the Quiller TV show, playing Richard Sorge on an episode of BBC's fact-based series Spy!, as a Brigadier on a couple of spy-themed episodes of Magnum, P.I., an episode of Mr. Palfrey of Westminster, Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming, and a recurring role on the seventh season of Spooks (MI-5). His more famous non-spy credits include The Haunting (1963), Khartoum (opposite Charlton Heston), Lucio Fulci's seminal 1979 gore-fest Zombie, Dr. Watson to Heston's Holmes in Crucifer of Blood, and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (both co-starring Daniel Craig). Never as well known as he deserved to be, Richard Johnson was a titan of the spy genre and will always be remembered in circles where Deadlier Than the Male and Danger Route (which Quentin Tarantino slotted in a personally curated cable programming block a decade ago) are recognized as the absolute classics they are. Rest in peace, Bulldog Drummond.

In what turns out to be a fitting tribute, Deadlier Than the Male will be released on Blu-ray in the UK this week by Network.

R.I.P. Leonard Nimoy: We'll Always Have Paris

Another IMF team member has completed his mission. The great Leonard Nimoy, who joined the cast of Mission: Impossible in Season 4 and stayed through Season 5, passed away yesterday at the age of 83. I have such a deep emotional connection to this series that I'm always profoundly saddened to lose one of its stars. As with Peter Graves before him, Nimoy's passing dashes the hopes I held that he might pop up in one of the Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible movies reprising his TV role as Paris. (Unless he filmed a cameo in secret for this summer's Mission: Impossible 5...? We can only hope.)

A replacement for the departed Martin Landau, Nimoy's Paris was a former stage magician (he performed as "The Great Paris," but rarely utilized his magic skills as part of his missions) and master of disguise. Despite being well into his thirties, Nimoy brought a youthful flair to the series (though not quite youthful enough to successfully pull off masquerading as a student protester in "The Martyr..."), wrapped up in natty mod fashions. His clothes, often including cravats and bright, colorful, patterned shirts, stood in stark contrast to the government-issue suits favored at the time by his teammates and predecessors. I've said before that Seventies fashions snuck into the series on Nimoy's back (even though he joined the team in the late Sixties) and slowly spread to the other agents until Jim (Graves) sported orange turtlenecks and Barney dressed like Shaft. But they weren't the only thing he brought to the show. Nimoy also introduced a twinge of humor to what had always been a very serious spy show. Paris was quick with a quip, and Nimoy always had a twinkle in his eye. He clearly relished the opportunity to play so many different types of roles (old and young, mustachioed, bearded and clean-shaven, even Latino and Japanese) in Paris's many disguises, which he leaped into with all the gusto of Landau before him. All of this added to the show. It's a common fallacy that the early years were its best, but personally I enjoyed Mission: Impossible more and more thanks to the subtle changes brought on via Paris.

Some of Nimoy's best episodes include Season 5's "My Enemy, My Friend," in which Paris is brainwashed to kill Jim Phelps and the character's past is delved into, and "The Merchant," in which Paris gambles life or death poker stakes against George Sanders' evil arms dealer, and Season 4's "Lovers' Knot" (which I selected to watch last night in honor of the late star), in which Paris displays very un-Spock-like emotions and allows himself to fall in love with a beautiful enemy agent, and "The Falcon," a 3-parter that allows Paris (and Nimoy) to show off his magician's talent. Besides Mission: Impossible, Nimoy's other spy roles included a pre-Star Trek pairing with William Shatner on one of the best episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., the surprisingly Mission: Impossible-like "The Project Strigas Affair" and as the gadget-toting KAOS assassin Stryker in the first season Get Smart classic "The Dead Spy Scrawls."

Leonard Nimoy may not be an actor immediately associated with spies because he was, quite rightly, most readily associated with science fiction thanks to his timeless performance as Mr. Spock on Star Trek (a role it was a joy to see him reprise in J.J. Abrams' 2009 franchise reboot). But his legacy in the pantheon of great TV spies should be equally assured. His tenure on Mission: Impossible covered some of the show's very best episodes, and he himself contributed immeasurably to their success. Mission accomplished, Mr. Nimoy. We'll always have Paris.

Read my review of Mission: Impossible: The Fourth TV Season here.
Read my review of Mission: Impossible: The Fifth TV Season here.

R.I.P. Tom Clancy

Numerous outlets, including Deadline and The New York Times, are reporting the death of author Tom Clancy at the age of 66 following a brief illness. Clancy was one of the biggest names in spy fiction—certainly one of the genre’s bestsellers in the Eighties and Nineties. He was also one of the indisputable founding fathers of the modern genre dubbed the “techno-thriller,” well-researched page turners based on cutting edge technological concepts. (The techno-thriller and spy thriller genres often dovetail, as they did in Clancy’s books.) Clancy was the creator of one of the most recognizable spy franchise characters of modern times, CIA analyst Jack Ryan. Ryan first appeared in Clancy’s 1984 Cold War classic The Hunt for Red October, the first work of contemporary fiction ever to be published by the Naval Institute Press. (The initial print run was just 5,000 copies, and in the mid-Nineties, this was one of the most desirable modern first editions out there.) Part of what made the book such a success was its impressively accurate technical details, which won the author many fans among the U.S. military and intelligence establishment. Like Ian Fleming before him, Clancy got a huge boost in sales when an American president endorsed his work. Ronald Reagan told White House reporters that he was losing sleep because he couldn’t put down The Hunt for Red October, calling it “my kind of yarn.”

Red October was followed by other thick Jack Ryan thrillers, including Patriot Games, The Cardinal of the Kremlin (my favorite), Clear and Present Danger and The Sum of All Fears. These giant, daunting literary bricks were such a part of Eighties and Nineties pop culture that it’s impossible to imagine a Waldenbooks or B. Dalton of my childhood without picturing them prominently displayed in the front of the store. They were intrinsic to my own discovery of the spy genre when I was in middle school. Many hundreds of pages long and often weighing more than all my textbooks combined (in hardcover, anyway), each new Clancy book I read was a challenge to be conquered. Yet despite their dense technological details, they moved quickly and (in those days) always proved a rewarding read. The dense technical data was never boring, because Clancy made it exciting! Reading a Clancy novel, I always felt like I was privy to fascinating top secret information about high-tech weaponry and the inner workings of our military and intelligence services. Honestly, learning about submarine warfare and sniper skills and satellite technology was as thrilling and sometimes even as suspenseful as the roller coaster plots that Clancy concocted. (Some of those plots proved harrowingly prescient, particularly terrorists’ use of airliners to attack America in Debt of Honor.) I loved those novels, and I find it hard to believe that now all three of my favorite thriller writers of my youth are dead before their time: Ludlum, Crichton and now Clancy.

Tom Clancy’s cultural impact was not limited to the bestseller lists. He was also a trailblazer in videogames. His second novel, Red Storm Rising (chronicling WWIII), formed the basis for a war game the author was actively involved in developing, and in the Nineties he co-founded his own videogame company, Red Storm Entertainment (subsequently subsumed by Ubisoft). Clancy lent his name and expertise to three extremely successful Ubisoft series, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. As in his fiction, he insisted on a high level of technical accuracy in these games, and reportedly that realism led to the military actually using some of them in training.

Clancy also made his mark on film and television. The Hunt for Red October was made into a superb movie by John McTiernan in 1990 starring Sean Connery as Soviet sub captain Marko Ramius and Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan. With James Bond out of commission for half the decade, Jack Ryan became the cinematic spy hero of the Nineties, played by Harrison Ford in two further films (both directed by Philip Noyce), Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. The latter Ford film also introduced movie audiences to Clancy’s other primary hero, Black Ops mastermind John Clark, played by Willem Dafoe. The series was rebooted in the early 2000s with Ben Affleck playing a younger Ryan at the start of his career in The Sum of All Fears, and will be rebooted again later this year with Chris Pine playing Ryan at an even earlier point in his career, if that makes sense. I enjoyed the movies (well, except for Sum), but as a teenager felt frustrated that they never seemed to do the books justice. (How could they, cramming that many pages into a standard theatrical running time?) Clancy himself was often the most outspoken critic of the movies based on his books.

Even though miniseries would seem the perfect medium to adapt Clancy’s books, only two were made: Tom Clancy’s OP Center (1995), starring Harry Hamlin, and Tom Clancy’s NetForce (1999), starring Scott Bakula. It was reported in late 2011 that Clancy was working on a new TV series about Homeland Security. I was excited by the prospect, and I hope it might still see the light of day.

The most controversial way in which Clancy impacted the publishing industry was by turning his name into a brand, and that brand into a cottage industry. He lent his name to numerous series of paperback originals (some of which were tied in with videogames or miniseries), including Tom Clancy’s Net Force, Tom Clancy’s Op-Center, Tom Clancy’s Power Plays, and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. But despite his name being by far the largest thing on the cover, the actual books were written by other authors. While some of those authors were quite talented in their own right (including James Bond continuation author Raymond Benson), it seemed a bit disingenuous to market their books as something they weren’t. But there’s no arguing with the financial success of the model. While consumers might have the right to gripe, publishers loved the results. Soon, Robert Ludlum, Clive Cussler, James Patterson and others were following the same formula. (It’s proven very lucrative for the Ludlum estate, enabling them to keep publishing new material with the late author’s name splashed across the cover for more than a decade after his death, and will no doubt do the same for Clancy’s heirs.) In later years, Clancy even started turning over his signature Jack Ryan series to ghost writers, co-writing recent novels with Grant Blackwood and Mark Greaney. (There’s much debate among fans over how much co-writing Clancy actually did, as the author’s signature attention to detail certainly dwindled. It certainly seemed as if his heart was no longer in it, even in the last books he wrote on his own.)

Even without his numerous spin-off series, Tom Clancy’s legacy is assured. His early Jack Ryan books are bona fide classics of the genre, and Ryan himself will live on for as long as spy novels are read. This December will see the publication of a new Jack Ryan novel co-wrtitten with Greaney, Command Authority, as well as the long-awaited cinematic reboot of the character in Kenneth Brannagh’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (Deadline’s obituary is the first place I’ve seen that title), starring Chris Pine. (Though there are rumors that Paramount may push the movie to next spring.) But beyond Jack Ryan, Clancy’s impact will be forever felt in the works of new authors and screenwriters he inspired. Like Ian Fleming and John le Carré, Tom Clancy forever changed the genre, and every techno-thriller author to come will owe him a debt of honor.

R.I.P. Steve Forrest

Steve Forrest, the two-fisted, square-jawed star of ITC's The Baron, has passed away. He was 87. Forrest was one of the American actors imported to star on Sixties adventure shows for Lew Grade's UK production company ITC in order to make the series more appealing to the U.S. market. (To some degree, that worked; The Baron aired on ABC in the United States.) While he never seemed completely comfortable in the role of urbane antiques dealer-cum-sometime secret agent John Mannering, Forrest (who was the brother of film noir and Eurospy star Dana Andrews) used his American-ness to full advantage to stand out in the crowded ITC stable that included suave stars like Roger Moore, Patrick McGoohan and Peter Wyngarde. As the Baron, he also got to drive one of the cooler cars on an ITC series, a snazzy Jensen CV8 MkII. Forrest had the distinction of being one of the few TV spy stars to cross over between the UK's televised espionage factory ITC and the American spy shows of the era when he guest starred on a memorable sixth season episode of Mission: Impossible and on the episode of Burke's Law that introduced Honey West, America's answer to Cathy Gale. In most circles, he was probably more famous for his non-spy roles, including appearances in The Longest Day (with Sean Connery), The Manions of America (with Pierce Brosnan), Dallas and, most notably, as the star of the 1975-76 ABC cop show S.W.A.T. (His final screen appearance was a cameo in the 2003 movie version of that series, starring Samuel L. Jackson.) But he returned to the spy genre in the Eighties as General Sline in the Chevy Chase send-up Spies Like Us. The Baron also spawned a movie in certain territories, The Man in the Looking Glass, but it was simply a two-parter from the TV show spliced together for theatrical release, a common ITC practice. For spy fans, however, Steve Forrest will always be remembered as a genuine ITC hero--The Baron. He will be missed.

Read my review of The Baron here.

R.I.P. Marvin Hamlisch

Numerous outlets today are reporting the death of film composer Marvin Hamlisch at the age of 68 following a short illness. Hamlisch is the only composer to date to receive a Best Original Score Oscar nomination for his work on a James Bond movie. In fact, 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me earned Hamlisch two nominations at the '78 awards—Best Score and Best Song (along with lyricist Carole Bayer Sager) for the Carly Simon classic "Nobody Does It Better." Both were also nominated for Golden Globes that year, and his score earned Grammy and BAFTA nods as well. (Hamlisch won the Oscar in 1974 for The Way We Were.) Looking back, it's a little hard to see how the music in The Spy Who Loved Me garnered all those accolades when none of John Barry's more timeless Bond scores were ever Oscar-nominated, but Hamlisch achieved exactly what he set out to do with the music for that film: he created a more contemporary sound for 007. Personally, I love his disco take on the famous James Bond Theme in "Bond '77." However, what was cutting edge contemporary in 1977 now sounds awfully dated compared to Barry's scores. But can you imagine The Spy Who Loved Me without its iconic music? I can't. "Journey to Atlantis," in fact, is probably one of my favorite individual cues in the entire series. It's playing in my head right now, and no doubt will be for at least the rest of the day.

While he only did one Bond film, that wasn't the end of Hamlisch's association with spy music. In 1989, he penned an equally of-its-time but far less memorable score for the John Travolta spy comedy The Experts. Twenty years later he made a triumphant comeback by providing an absolutely perfect score for Steven Soderbergh's Matt Damon spy comedy The Informant!, this time not by harnessing a contemporary sound but by revisiting the Seventies sound that earned him all those accolades for The Spy Who Loved Me. Deadline reports that the composer was set to re-team with Soderbergh on the HBO Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra.

Hamlisch created a unique score for one of the very best James Bond movies. He also wrote the music for one of the best songs, which provides a fitting epithet which I suspect we'll see used today in many obituaries. Because when it came to that specific sound, nobody did it better. Marvin Hamlisch will be missed, but always remembered his unforgettable contribution to the James Bond legacy.

R.I.P. John Barry

There are certain obituaries that I've dreaded having to write ever since starting this blog, and making the decision to pay tribute to fallen heroes of screen spydom.  This is one of them.  Five time Academy Award-winning composer John Barry, the man who almost single-handedly defined the sound of the whole genre this blog is devoted to, has died of a heart attack at the age of 77, reports Reuters.  Current James Bond composer and Barry acolyte David Arnold revealed the sad news in a somber post on his Twitter feed this morning. He later told BBC Radio, "I think James Bond would have been far less cool without John Barry holding his hand," and he's absolutely right.

Although he didn't begin scoring the Bond films until the second one, From Russia With Love, Barry was certainly involved with Dr. No, adding so much to Monty Norman's James Bond Theme in his arrangement that it's been suggested he deserved a writing credit.* But even if you put the famous theme aside, it's Barry who shaped the soundscape associated with 007, and with the spy genre at large.  His role in creating the screen version of James Bond simply cannot be overstated.  I'd rate John Barry an equal collaborator with Terrence Young, Cubby Broccoli, Harry Saltzman, Ken Adam and Sean Connery in defining 007 for cinema audiences. For me, the music in those Sixties Bond films played as large a role in making me a life-long fan as the cars, the gadgets and the girls.  Apologies and credit where it's due to Miles Davis, but Barry's music was the Sound of Cool. 

It's impossible for me to even imagine 007's greatest cinematic moments without John Barry's distinctive score music accompanying them. The ski chase in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (featuring my favorite Barry Bond theme) comes instantly to mind, but the same can be said of the climactic underwater battle in Thunderball, Goldfinger's dawn raid on Fort Knox, SPECTRE's capsule-swallowing spaceship and Moonraker's thrilling river chase (a terrific setpiece too often overlooked because it comes in a less than terrific movie), not to mention countless iconic Maurice Binder title sequences unspooling to Barry's many equally iconic theme songs. Simply put, the Bond of the movies would be nothing without his soundtrack.

The other day, BBC America was playing Thunderball and I'd hit upon it while channel surfing, which of course meant I stayed on it, despite having the film in commercial-free versions on Blu-ray and who knows how many different DVD releases in my apartment. That's just the way it is. If you're reading this blog, then you know! Anyway, I was in the kitchen, making dinner, and couldn't see the screen. But I could hear the music, and I knew exactly what was happening in that big underwater battle. I smiled to myself as the movie played out in my mind, conjured by nothing more than John Barry's thrilling, distinctive chords.  Even if that music had never been attached to any film print, it would have told a story as exciting as anything that ever sprang from the mind of Ian Fleming. Barry's music works beautifully in the movie, in conjunction with Young's direction and Ted Moore's cinematography and John Stears' amazing visual effects, but it also works just as brilliantly on its own. To me, that is the mark of a master film composer. (Indeed, one of my favorite Barry records is a non-film album, The Beyondness of Things,** which tells a million stories all its own.)

John Barry's spy career, of course, went well beyond Bond--and his career at large went well beyond spies. As I recently noted while discussing John Powell's music for Fair Game, Barry defined the sound of spying at both ends of the spectrum in the Sixties: the action and adventure of 007, and the moody, introspective jazz of The IPCRESS File, "the thinking man's Goldfinger." Harry Palmer's theme, "A Man Alone," screams SPY just as loudly as the blaring trumpets of "Goldfinger," but in such a different way. As Barry explored new territory within the Bond series (such as perfecting lounge-core in Diamonds Are Forever or introducing electronica into spy music in The Living Daylights a full decade before it became de rigeur), he continued pushing the envelope of the more serious side of the genre in scores like The Quiller Memorandum or one of his final film scores, Enigma. These scores were as identifiably individual from each other as "007" is from "The Persuaders!" (another favorite Barry spy theme of mine; oh how I love it!), but they're all very clearly spy.  Honestly, I can't think of another composer who so single-handedly shaped an entire genre.  (Sure, John Williams re-wrote the book on adventure in the late Seventies, but he was building on a rich musical history that John Barry didn't have to rely on in the espionage genre. Sixties spy movies were an entirely different breed from those that had come before them, and so was their music.) 

And of course Barry's career wasn't limited to spy themes.  I honestly can't decide what I'll put on for my drive in to work tomorrow morning to commemorate the great man's passing.  It could just as easily be "John Dunbar's Theme" from Dances With Wolves or the sweeping love theme from Out of Africa or the discordantly contemplative jazz of Richard Lester's Swinging London romp The Knack and How to Get It. Or even Starcrash, which I just rewatched last weekend. I've had Barry's theme stuck in my head ever since, a theme so majestic that it elevates every campy, low-budget special effect  in the movie to the level the director clearly saw in his own head.  John Barry dabbled in every genre there is, and in doing so created at least a few masterpieces in every one of those genres.  He was a titan, as attested to by his five Oscars.

This being a spy blog, however, I have to come back to that genre that Barry affected more than any other.  He really did create the sound of spy music.  In fact, I can't think of any other single person who made quite so large a mark across the entire genre.  Sure, Ian Fleming and John Le Carre both defined their respective niches, and their influence is undeniable.  But they never ventured out of their clearly marked corners of the genre.  Barry, on the other hand, straddled the entire genre.  Without John Barry, the spy genre as we know it would not exist.  I'm incredibly saddened by his death, and by the fact that I can no longer hold out that hope I always clung to that the great man would one day return for one last Bond score.  (I love David Arnold's work, but I'd bet anything he, too, secretly pined for one last Barry score!)  But while that will never happen, never has a legacy been more assured.  Barry, in fact, enjoyed the rare opportunity to witness his legacy in his own lifetime.  When someone wanted a quick musical shorthand for "spy," they always went for Barry-esque horns.  Whether it was spoofs, like the Austin Powers movies, or loving homages, like Michael Giacchino's fantastically Barryesque Incredibles score, or even mainstream pop music (I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the entire late Nineties musical genre known as trip-hop was inspired by Barry!), Barry's influence was in plain sight.  And it always will be, for as long as the genre lives on.

Rest in peace, John Barry. All spy fans and all music fans owe you a tremendous debt of gratitude.

*I think it's clear listening to earlier pieces by both composers that the theme as we know it is the result of a perfect collaboration, even if the two didn't work together directly and the authorship has been the source of debate too bitter to go into in a memorial post.

**Yes, I'm aware much of this music began its life as a rejected score, but it took on a whole new life of its own as a standalone work.