BY EDDY FRIEDFELD
If you’re
wondering whether the original Aston Martin DB5 from “Goldfingerâ€
is as beautiful in person as it is on screen, wonder no more: it is a pristine specimen, a preserved and
likely restored testament to not only the greatest franchise in film history,
but a metaphor for ingenuity and quality living.
Displayed
prominently recently at New York’s Sotheby’s Auction House on Manhattan’s Upper
East Side, I took pictures through the plate glass window, over the course of a
few days, once to see the car with the bullet-proof plate raised over the trunk
of the car, only to find it lowered back into the car the next day (I assumed
that any shooting had stopped) and found the spike protruding from the hub of
the rear wheels, which was designed to shred a pursuing car’s tires.
Now if you ask me
what it was like to drive what is arguably the most famous car in world history
(with the possible exception of the 1966 Batmobile, which I had the privilege
of driving), I cannot help you. When I went
back for a private media event and asked if it were possible to drive the car,
I was politely dismissed by the event’s host and eyed carefully by a powerfully
built security guard whose eyes send me a clear message: if I touched the car I would be both shaken
and stirred.
The car, one of
four James Bond 007 DB5 models built for the two films, of which only three
survive, is schedule to be auctioned off this week, August 15, at the Monterey
Conference Center in Monterrey, California. Estimate pre-sale for the auction is between four and six million
dollars. According to the sleek auction
catalog: “Both car and gadgetry have been fully restored by Roos Engineering in
Switzerland, ensuring all gadgetry functions as Q intended.â€
I am a few weeks
away from my 20th anniversary as a film and entertainment journalist
and of the hundreds of articles and reviews that I have written, the most often
quoted back to me is the following:
“Mounted
on the dashboard of my black convertible are two plastic switches,
"Grenade Launcher" and "Ejector Seat." They amuse friends
and concern wary parking lot attendants. I own high tech gadgets ranging from a
big screen television that can do virtually everything except fly, an IBM
laptop with a Celeron processor (I do not know what that is either), to the
George Foreman Grill, on which I can broil a steak in eight minutes. But I have never disarmed a thermonuclear
device with seven seconds left to detonation, and I have never killed or
otherwise disabled a dozen enemy agents while skiing backwards down the Swiss
Alps. I have never devised a creative escape from a windowless room as the two
opposite, spike-laden walls were closing in on me, and I have never had an arch
enemy with plans for world conquest. But
not unlike most men, regardless of race, religion, or age, I cannot look at
myself in a mirror in a tuxedo without smiling wryly and thinking: "Bond,
James Bond."
007 survived the Cold War, eleven sitting presidents, and
after almost 60 years, still amasses millions of new fans each year, who watch
the same movies over and over, and who quote dialogue like gospel. Bond has
become the most enduring movie franchise in history. The signature theme
punctuated by the four note riff that plays at the beginning of every Bond entry,
where 007 walks to the center of the gun barrel, turns and shoots, is arguably
the most recognizable movie theme and opening in history.
To anyone growing up in the 1960s and 70s, it was hard to
escape the cultural influence and lure of James Bond and his imitators and
progeny, ranging from Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin, The Men from U.N.C.L.E
to Maxell Smart and Agent 99 from “Get Smart†to Jay Bondrock from “The
Flintstones†and “The Beverly Hillbilliesâ€â€™ Jethro Bodine, who after seeing
“Goldfingerâ€, decided he was going to be a “double-naught spy.†At least once a
year for the last 20 years I ask my still good friend and now editor, Lee
Pfeiffer to walk the streets of Upper East Side near the United Nations in
search of Del Florias’s Tailor Shop, where pulling the hook in the fitting room
opens the secret entrance to U.N.C.L.E headquarters, New York.. While he politely declines each year,
I remain hopeful despite the fact I realize the tailor shop was located on
MGM’s back lot.
Bond is still a powerful archetype–a blend of escapism
and the need to put order to an otherwise disorderly world. The real enemies in
Bond's world are boredom, frustration, and complacency. Bond was and is the
rebel within the system: he “gets the job done.†He is a “closer.†In his world
there are no complicated decisions or murky choices, no mortgage payments, or
unavailable baby sitters. Megalomaniacs are not the people you want to work for,
as they get sucked out of airplanes at 30,000 feet or get tossed off their own
space platforms. Someone who cuts you off on the highway can be dispatched with
a wing machine gun or a laser beam activated from a control panel concealed
beneath the armrest and bad dates (despite the fact that they carry guns and
scalpels) get killed by hulking silent adversaries with no necks or get dropped
into tanks filled with piranha.
Bond was created and nurtured in the hopeful era when it
was believed that one intelligent, passionate, and resourceful person could
change the world for the better. President John F. Kennedy said “I wish I had
James Bond on my staff.â€
Ian Fleming created Bond as "an interesting man to
whom extraordinary things happen." He appropriated the name "James
Bond" from the author of Birds of the West Indies (which he pulled off his
shelf) because he felt the name suitably "dull" and
"anonymous." The prescient Fleming’s early insight about
globalization was that it would be non-states and stateless organizations, not
other countries, that would become villains and antagonists in an increasingly
globalized world. In a way, Fleming predicted Google and Facebook having the
influence they have today.
The James Bond Aston Martin DB5 represents the enduring
legacy of 007 not only as quality entertainment but also as an iconic character
of hope and progress. To borrow from another classic icon, “The Maltese
Falconâ€, “it is the stuff that dreams are made of.â€
Cinema Retro contributor Eddy Friedfeld
teaches film classes at NYU and Yale, including the history of James Bond
(For additional information about the Aston Martin that is up for auction, click here.)
“THE
FUTURE IS NOWâ€
BY RAYMOND BENSON
If
you’re familiar with the work of that French New Wave revolutionary, Jean-Luc
Godard, you may not think that he was the type of filmmaker who would make a
science fiction film. He did, though, in 1965, and he merged the genre with
that of film noir to create a unique hybrid that also contains many of
the jarring stylistic elements with which Godard loves to bombard his
audiences.
Godard
was the “bad boy†of the French New Wave. He seemed to take pleasure in
angering viewers and being controversial by choice (unlike, say, Truffaut,
whose films were decidedly more commercial and accessible). That said, though,
there is much in Godard’s canon that can be not only shocking and challenging,
but truly wonderful.
Such
is the case with Alphaville.
Western
audiences may not be familiar with the character of Lemmy Caution. He’s a
private investigator of the Philip Marlowe/Sam Spade type, an American, created
by British writer Peter Cheyney, and featured in nine novels published in the
1940s as pulp P.I. mysteries. The character also appeared in approximately
fifteen motion pictures, made mostly in France, and were never on the radar of
English-speaking viewers. American tough-guy actor Eddie Constantine moved to
France after he found that he couldn’t get work in Hollywood, and there he
enjoyed a career playing the kinds of roles one might associate with Robert
Mitchum or Dennis O’Keefe. Constantine played the role of Lemmy Caution in seven
French pictures, made as hard-boiled crime dramas, before Jean-Luc Godard made
his version of a Lemmy Caution movie (how Godard obtained the rights to
the character to make an art film that turns the detective genre on its head is
also a mystery!).
Alphaville
takes
place in an unspecified dystopian future—Alphaville, the city, looks like
Paris, and maybe it is, but now it’s run in an Orwellian-style aristocratic
fashion. A computer known as Alpha 60 runs everything (and narrates the film),
and people are not allowed to show emotion of any kind. Lemmy comes to
Alphaville to destroy Alpha 60 and its creator, a shadowy scientist named
“Professor von Braun†(is the similarity to Werner von Braun
intentional?—probably!). Lemmy meets up with von Braun’s daughter, Natacha
(Anna Karina) and, with an uneasy partnership, sets out on his convoluted
mission.
The
picture uses many traits of classic film noir (expressionistic lighting,
trench coats, fedoras, handgun violence, a femme fatale, and good old
cynicism and angst) with the paranoia and highly regulated environment of the dystopian
future urban setting. The “futuristic†effect was accomplished by filming on
location at “modern†buildings (for the time), providing the movie an added
thematic aspect that we are already “living in the future.†Godard continues to
rely on his signature radical editing techniques that can be discordant, but
here it all works. In fact, Alphaville is one of the more enjoyable
Godard films from the 1960s, albeit not something that would play well in
Peoria, Illinois.
Kino
Lorber Classics has released a restored 1920x1080p transfer that looks
remarkably good, and it also features an audio commentary by noted film
historian Tim Lucas. Extras include a Colin McCabe introduction to the picture,
an interesting interview with Anna Karina (who was married to Godard during the
director’s first five years of filmmaking), and the theatrical trailer.
Alphaville
is a
striking, oddball of a film that gets better with each successive viewing.
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