UK: James Bond is sexy: official

An academic has stated what many women would call the bleedin' obvious: a Leicester University professor has decreed that Daniel Craig, the latest embodiment of James Bond, is more sexually charged than any previous portrayal of the fictional agent. With impeccable (or opportunistic) timing as Quantum of Solace opened last Friday, the researcher announced that the Bond franchise capitalised on the sex appeal of the spy in a way it had never done before.

Writing in the university's on-line magazine, James Chapman, from the university's department of history of art and film, said in Craig's debut as Bond in Casino Royale, his body was presented as much as an erotic object as the women's bodies - with gratuitous shots of the actor in his swimming trunks, suggesting the producers were thinking about their female viewers as well as the male audience.

Chapman, author of a book on the history of Bond films, said: "Fleming's Bond is not particularly presented as a sexual object; the emphasis in the books is very much on male desire rather than female desire, with the sole exception of The Spy who Loved Me, in which Fleming experimented with writing from the perspective of a woman who encounters James Bond."

He said Casino Royale was a revisionist movie as it reinvented the franchise showing Bond's first mission and his assignment of double-O status, as if the events of the previous 20 films hadn't taken place. The latest film was in the same vein.

The portrayal in this case was in some ways closer to Fleming's character. "Craig is obviously a lot more physical, even brutish, than previous Bond actors. He plays Bond as a 'blunt instrument': he's not yet the polished article, he's still rough around the edges.

"Craig's Bond doesn't do the one-liners that others have done. In that respect - but that respect only - he's closer to the Bond of the books, who doesn't crack jokes and is a rather humourless character. But in other respects Craig's Bond is very unlike Fleming's Bond. Fleming's Bond did not enjoy killing; Craig's Bond seems almost to relish it."

Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films by James Chapman is published by I.B. Tauris, London


diane.spencer@uw-news.com