007>>50
007 50
reaches on film
F
orget the Olympics and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. For some people the big celebration of 2012 will surround the release of the 23rd James Bond film, Skyfall, exactly 50 years after Agent 007 first appeared on the big screen in Dr No. It is difficult to think of another modern fictional character that has been so analysed and re-analysed as James Bond. The files on him (and on his creator Ian Fleming) put together by Bondites worldwide outweigh anything that the agents of SPECTRE and SMERSH may have compiled within the novels and short stories. There are plenty of websites devoted only to minute investigation of Commander Bond’s wristwatch choices. They make for an intriguing mixture of fact and speculation.
Since 1995 and GoldenEye, an Omega Seamaster has been the familiar timepiece for Bond
always been a Rolex man. The Swiss brand is the only one
actually quoted in Fleming’s twelve novels and two short stories, which were published between 1953 and 1966. (Fleming died in 1964, so of his Bond output The Man With the Golden Gun and the short stories Octopussy and The Living Daylights were published posthumously.) There is a passing reference to Rolex in Chapter XIX of his second novel Live and Let Die (published 1954). The brand gets no fewer than seven mentions as 007’s own purchase in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (published 1963). Bond looks at the ‘big luminous numerals” of his chronometer, which Fleming describes as ‘a heavy Rolex Oyster Perpetual on an expanding metal bracelet.’ In Chapter 16 our hero sees the potential for the watch as a knuckle duster: “…Gillette through the fingers of the left hand and the Rolex transferred to his
FOR THE FILMING OF DR NO, ROLEX, AS USUAL, DECLINED TO SUPPLY A WATCH FOR FREE. AS THE MOVIE BUDGET DID NOT RUN TO BUYING ONE, CO-PRODUCER CUBBY BROCCOLI SPORTINGLY HANDED OVER FOR CONNERY’S USE HIS OWN SUBMARINER 6538
(thanks to a formal sponsorship deal between the Swatch Group and the Bond franchise producers). Before that, from 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me to A View to a Kill in 1985, 007 went digital courtesy of a series of Seiko models. Other marques spotted on his wrist include TAG Heuer (The Living Daylights, 1987), Hamilton (Live and Let Die, 1973) and Breitling (Thunderball, 1965). But for some hard-core fans, James Bond has
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right, the bracelet clasped in the palm of his hand and round the fingers so that the face lay across his middle knuckles.”
With behaviour like that, it is no surprise that in correspondence with a fan in 1958 Fleming asserted that Bond’s preference “is, in fact, to use fairly cheap, expendable wrist watches on expanding metal bracelets…”.
Bond watch obsessive Dell Deaton* believes that the Rolex
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