Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond is on a mission. He has no time for games. So when his contact in St. Petersburg fails to complete a secret passphrase, Bond’s suspicions are up. 007 follows the man to a car and as soon as the man lets down his guard, Bond springs into action. Bond steals the stranger’s gun and points it at his face, demanding that the phrase be completed. When the man fails to do so to 007’s liking, Bond orders the man to show him a tell-tale sign, known only as “the rose.” After some consternation, the man agrees, dropping his pants to reveal a tattoo of a rose alongside the word… “Muffy.” Muffy?!
“Third wife,” the man moans before thrusting out his hand in introduction. “Jack Wade, CIA.” 007 responds in kind. “James Bond, stuffy-ass Brit.”
To those who primarily know James Bond through the Daniel Craig films, a moment such as this seems unthinkable. But this exchange from the Pierce Brosnan‘s debut Bond film, GoldenEye, represents a lightness missing from the recent run of 007 pictures, a lightness perfectly embodying its time and its performer, the recently-passed character actor Joe Don Baker.
Bond Thaws Out
Created by author Ian Fleming, James Bond is thoroughly a product of the Cold War. He was deliberately designed to be a fantasy tool for England, one that allowed readers to retain some of their imperial pride as the books positioned espionage agency MI6 as the center of the conflicts between the West and the Soviet Union. But even before the Cold War officially ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the formula was sputtering on the screen. The electric Timothy Dalton replaced the doddering Roger Moore as Bond, but he felt contained by the enjoyable, if slight, The Living Daylights in 1987. Dalton was on surer ground in 1989’s Licence to Kill, but the character did not fit a typical ’80s action story, in which Bond goes on a personal vendetta against Latin American drug lords.
In fact, so outdated was Bond when director Martin Campbell brought GoldenEye to theaters in 1994 that the movie courted audience applause by having the new M (Judi Dench) call him “a dinosaur.” Yet by focusing on a personal betrayal linked to old national sins—the movie’s treasonous 006, we learn, is the son of Russian Cossacks who escaped to England after collaborating with Nazis and were sent back to Russia for trial—GoldenEye allowed Bond to be a national player without feeling like a relic. When Bond meets with Zukovsky (Robbie Coltrane), a one-time KGB agent now turned gangster, the movie underscores the new normal while letting the UK via 007 keep its dignity. Zukovsky has become a crass and shabby proponent of everything that the USSR was supposed to oppose. Bond makes England look as cool and in control as ever.
And then, there’s America…
Joe Don Baker on the World Stage
Heading into its final act, GoldenEye indulges in some typical Bond tropes. Set to the syrupy strings of Éric Serra’s score, Bond romances Russian programmer Natalya Simonova (Izabella Scorupco) and then spirits her away to Cuba where they will find Sean Bean’s former 00 and stop him from using the GoldenEye satellite. Riding in an ice blue BMW roadster and still in the afterglow of their tryst, Natalya coos about the beauty of the Caribbean, where there is “not another human in sight.”
No sooner does she say the words than a turboprop flies right over their head and lands in the road in front of them.
“Yo, Jimbo!” Wade shouts as he emerges from the aircraft. “I brought you a little gift from old what’s his name, T?Z?”
“Q,” answers Bond.
Wade’s entrance into the scene shouldn’t feel as disruptive as it is. After all, Bond has often teamed with Americans to complete his missions. The most famous example is CIA agent Felix Leiter, a character from the Fleming novels who made his cinematic debut in the first Eon Bond film, Dr. No (1962), and appeared in eight more movies, most recently as played by Jeffery Wright in the Craig era. Bond has even been stuck with outsized American personalities, most infamously the Southern-fried Sheriff J.W. Pepper (Clifton James), who encounters Bond in the Louisiana-set Live and Let Die, but somehow shows up in Thailand one year later in The Man With the Golden Gun.
Wade feels like something different. He’s not incompetent like Pepper, as he provides Bond with necessary connections. However, he’s not a smooth professional like Leiter. In fact, he dismisses Bond’s attempts to hold to spycraft procedure. “One of these days you guys are gonna learn just to drop it,” he gripes about the Brits.
With that line, Wade reveals his purpose in GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). He represents America as the winner of the Cold War, happy and safe, but not always aware. We viewers are like him, but we don’t entirely believe that he’s protecting the free world.
Much of the character’s success can be attributed to the man who plays him, Joe Don Baker, who recently passed at the age of 89. Best known by some as the subject of the classic Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes Mitchell! and Final Justice, Baker was a reliable character actor. He brought his Texan charm to his hitman in Don Siegel’s Charley Varrick (1973), a sleazy private eye in Cape Fear (1991), and even to the lead role of a no-nonsense sheriff in the hicksploitation great Walking Tall (1973).
Baker excelled at being likable and capable, even when untrustworthy, skills that served him well as Wade and in his previous Bond outing, playing an unrelated, and absurd, arms dealer in The Living Daylights. In the Dalton movie, Baker played a dangerous oaf, a man with no military experience who cosplays as a general to sell his weapons. The relaxed Wade almost serves as a rejoinder to that character, insisting that such absurd threats are no longer real since the wall came down. We can all take it easy now. We are in, as some Americans smugly thought in the 1990s, “the end of history.”
Of course Bond rejects that premise and Bond is proven right, implying that America might be going soft in its end of history dominance, but England remains on guard.
In Memory of MuffyJack Wade
GoldenEye deserves extra attention these days, as the end of Craig’s run and d Eon’s stewardship of the Bond franchise has left the series in turmoil. Like Craig’s debut picture Casino Royale (also directed by Martin Campbell), GoldenEye gave the franchise a fresh start, but it did so while retaining a sense of humor and optimism that the Craig era lacked.
As Bond’s new handlers at Amazon plan 007’s future, they should look to Jack Wade as a model sidekick. They certainly shouldn’t follow Wade’s advice to drop byzantine spycraft, but they should include more good-hearted spies who can make Bond look cool and gesture to real-world concerns without turning the franchise into a realistic bore.
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