Is there anything more British than turning on the telly at 11pm and finding an old Bond film on ITV? There’s an opening that I probably couldn’t get away with on any other major games site, hey. But, really: that moment of channel-hopping and catching the smirking visage of Sean Connery, Roger Moore, or Pierce Brosnan as a bit of late-night terrestrial TV filler is as British as fish and chips, smashing up your shiny new alloy on a pothole, and needing to do a blood sacrifice for his majesty’s government in order to send a DM on social media.
Anyway, the other night I had that classic experience. I was meant to be getting ready for bed but channel-hopped, as if that’s something anyone under fifty still does – and there he was. Sean Connery. Greying, undoubtedly phoning it in, but still brilliant. A mega ropey theme song played out over footage of his Bond on a training exercise without a psychedelic title sequence in sight. It’s Never Say Never Again, then – the redheaded stepchild of the Bond franchise.
Never Say Never Again is honestly rather rubbish, but it’s also fascinating. Even a crap Bond film has something about it – that Bondian stickiness – to draw you in. And with IO Interactive’s 007: First Light weighing heavily on my mind, I ended up rewatching the whole thing. Right through ‘til nearly 1am. Doh.
As noted, this film is bewitching in its mix of vague crapness and true directorial flair from Irvin Kershner (at this time fresh off directing a little independent film called The Empire Strikes Back). Also compelling is its status in legal purgatory, and how it thereby has to differentiate itself from the ‘main’ franchise. That last point is how this all tenuously connects to video games, which I’ll come to in a moment.
First, it’s important to understand why this film exists. If you’re not a Bond aficionado, an extremely truncated summary is this: there were several years where Bond’s literary adventures were a hot ticket. It wasn’t a question of if a movie would be made, but when. In the late fifties and early sixties but before Dr. No entered production, Bond creator Ian Fleming worked with a Hollywood writer and producer on a screenplay, and then later adapted that story into a novel, Thunderball. That screenplay struggled to gain traction, and in the end Fleming started making Bond movies with a different company. Cue legal limbo.
The co-writing producer in question, Kevin McClory, claimed partial rights to Thunderball. He was involved with the film of the same name, but then fell out with Bond’s producers. Lawsuits flew back and forth, and in the eighties McClory was able to mount an assault on the Bond franchise by making his own rival movie. Thus Never Say Never Again, the unlicensed Bond film that went head-to-head with Roger Moore’s Octopussy. In many ways it is Bond from Temu, except it stars the original Bond, with Connery returning to the role out of what appears to be an equally balanced thirst for a paycheck and a healthy dose of spite, as Connery too had fallen out with those behind the ‘official’ franchise.
Even if you’re not a Bond fan, it’s a truly gripping and amusing tale of Hollywood nonsense – there’ve been books written about these legal wranglings, and McClory’s exploits were directly responsible for many twists in the Bond film franchise. Why did the shadowy Spectre organization and Bond arch-enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld disappear from the narrative? Being present in Thunderball, they were characters McClory could lay a legal claim to. Why did Timothy Dalton’s tenure as the agent sputter out after just two films? Legal battles with McClory