SYDNEY Sweeney wants to be the new James Bond, it is reported. For those of you unfamiliar with the name, Sweeney is not the son of John Thaw or Dennis Waterman, but an American actress who was born in Spokane, Washington.
There have been worse ideas.
Miss Sweeney fits the bill in a number of ways. First, she is a fast-rising star, who started getting attention four years ago after a role in The White Lotus, one of the very few TV dramas to come anywhere near its own hype.
She would not play a suffering middle-aged spy struggling against incompetent bullying sexist male colleagues while lumbered with single parent responsibilities and an overdose of angst. Please spare us any more of those.
Miss Sweeney carries a badge of honour for upsetting the left. Earlier this year she appeared in an advert for a clothing company headed ‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’. This undemanding pun, accompanied by a fetching picture of a blonde, blue-eyed white woman, was condemned by activists since obviously it promotes white racial superiority. The advertisers, American Eagle Outfitters, seem happy enough. Sweeney seems to have done for them the opposite of what Dylan Mulvaney did for Bud Light.
She likes big cars. She has a tie-up with Ford and is said to have restored a 1960s pick-up and a Mustang from the same era. I would prefer either to the various Aston Martins used by Bond, although I wouldn’t sneer at the DB2/4 drophead coupé driven fast by Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Also, Ford once owned Aston Martin.
In the same way that Ford bought the British car company in 1987, Amazon MGM bought the Bond franchise in February, apparently for a sum considerably less than the billion-dollar price initially suggested.
I know nothing about film finance. But I do know that the Bond franchise has survived for more than 50 years after it should have been abandoned. It sagged badly after Thunderball in 1965. The withdrawal of Sean Connery stripped it of its highly capable signature star. The replacement of Connery in 1969 with an Australian model picked out of a TV ad for Fry’s chocolate was a disaster.
It could not sustain the early impact of the villainous lairs created by set design genius Sir Ken Adam. Subsequent lead actors were never in the Connery class: Roger Moore was a television-sized star, and I always felt that Daniel Craig had the style and conviction of a school sports coach. Alan Shearer might have brought more life to the role.
Plots disappeared. Instead the films are an endless run of stunts and effects strung around travel documentary footage and Judi Dench.
The early films are still highly watchable, but you can’t easily repeat the menace or the humour. If you read Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, Casino Royale, you find it was dominated by the author’s attempt to offer wealth, luxury and edible food to a British audience still enduring wartime rationing. It’s all a long way out of date.
So are the character names. You can’t call a Korean Oddjob any more. Honey Ryder? Oh no. Pussy Galore? Double oh no. At the time the only serious challenge was to Goldfinger, which upset brutalist architect Erno Goldfinger, the target of Fleming’s satire.
The whole lot reeks of the age of Carry On Up the Khyber and Carry on Camping, both of which, by the way, are much, much better than any modern Bond.
Let’s welcome Sydney Sweeney, who would bring back some glamour and whose Bond would be able to seduce anyone she likes without falling foul of #MeToo. It’s a shame she can’t bring Jack Regan and DS Carter with her.
