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The James Bond films are the most successful films in history as far as box office goes, and yet at a time when pop culture is getting all kinds of critical and scholarly scrutiny, they've been overlooked. Why do you think that is?

Also Today Best of Bond Ian Fleming's 007 is often most memorable when he's most offensive. By Emily Jenkins The sensitive Bond Even as a preteen girl, I knew that Ian Fleming's James Bond was a vulnerable guy -- and his creator, an equal-opportunity voyeur. By Emily Jenkins Book Information Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films By James Chapman Columbia University Press, 315 pages Nonfiction

You're right that popular culture is now starting to get more serious attention from historians and cultural theorists, but I still think there is resistance to taking seriously things that seem to be about pure entertainment or escapism. A lot of the interest in film as a medium is on realist films -- films which seem to have some sort of social or moral worth or purpose, films about real life. But that's meant the marginalization of genre films, like the Bond films, which have been hugely popular with audiences and which don't on the surface seem to have any social relevance or message.

Is there something particular about Bond that has caused this resistance?

In the '80s, when film scholars started to look at British popular genres, they claimed them as being interesting because they were somehow transgressive, sexually or otherwise. Like the Gainsborough melodramas of the 1940s -- "The Wicked Lady," I suppose, is the most famous. It's about a respectable woman who becomes a highway robber and takes on this life of crime. Of course she dies in the end, she's punished, but she has a hell of a good time along the way.

Now the Bond films don't seem especially transgressive. Nothing about them pushes the boundaries of what's permissible socially or morally. They're really sort of conservative, particularly in their representations of national identity, and in some respects they're actually quite reactionary. In the early '60s, when they first came out, they were tapped as being sexist and, to a degree, racist. I think this is the reason historians haven't come along to reclaim them, to start taking them seriously.

You'd think academics would like what the films did with the Ian Fleming novels -- taking a conservative, establishment figure and turning him into a sort of classless hero.

You'd think so, and it's quite interesting how the films take the class connotations out of Fleming's character. Partly it's due to the time in which the films are being made -- the Sean Connery films are very much a product of the '60s, but they're recasting '50s material. Fleming was writing before the '60s' "cultural revolution" -- he's an old gentleman, an Etonian. By the '60s, some of the ethos of Fleming's Bond character is already a little out of date.

Fleming's Bond was in some ways the last of the great British imperial heroes. He's got a whole lineage going back to Sherlock Holmes, Richard Hannay, Bulldog Drummond, Dick Barton, popular fictional heroes. Bond was the last in that line. By the time the films are being made, the British empire is being dismantled at a pretty rapid pace. And Bond becomes this anachronism -- this imperial hero in a post-imperial age. I think the films are very successful in adapting this imperial hero into an icon of the new society emerging in the 1960s, with the emphasis on youth, on modernity, on classlessness.

I think in the casting of Sean Connery, Bond does become effectively classless. He has the good manners, the elegant tailoring, of the traditional English gentleman, but Connery's performance is almost in the style of American leading men -- Clark Gable, Gary Cooper -- more earthy, with that machismo, rather different from the traditional Englishness of David Niven, who'd been Fleming's preferred choice for Bond. Also, Connery's accent -- that soft Edinburgh accent -- it's regional. There's not an obvious difference between upper class, middle class and so on with Scottish accents. I think this works in the films' favor. All of the critics -- even in Britain -- couldn't place Sean Connery's accent when "Dr. No" first came out; they decried it as sounding Irish-American.

Next page | Was Ian Fleming gay?