In Memory of a Man from U.N.C.L.E.

David McCallum (1933-2023) as Illya Kuryakin 

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-68)

 

 

Thanks to Tom Cruise's big-screen reboot, many people believe that Mission: Impossible was the greatest secret agent series of the sixties. 

 

But it wasn't.

 

At any rate, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was far more fun and whilst I remember pretending to be Napoleon Solo as a child - and obsessively wearing a Man from U.N.C.L.E. flicker ring until it eventually cut into my finger [1] - I don't recall wanting to be Jim Phelps or a member of the IMF. 

 

Obviously, the two shows share certain similarities; both, for example, have implausible (some would say ridiculous) storylines and both have fantastic opening theme tunes [2]. But I preferred The Man from U.N.C.L.E. to Mission: Impossible because it was more lighthearted - or more camp, as Susan Sontag would say [3].

In other words, it didn't seem to take itself too seriously - and that's something I loved as a child and still like today. It's why, for example, I prefer the Monkees to the Beatles; Adam West's Batman to the brooding figure of the Dark Knight as played by Christian Bale; and Roger Moore's Bond over Daniel Craig's 007. 

 

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. also had the advantage of having David McCallum as Illya Kuryakin playing alongside Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo. And that was a big advantage, as the Scottish actor proved to be hugely popular with the viewing public; particularly the younger audience who loved his Beatle-style haircut in contrast to Vaughn's clean-cut appearance and who inundated the actor with adoring fan mail [4].

 

But McCallum wasn't just eye-candy for pre-teen girls; he was an excellent actor and received two Emmy Award nominations in the course of the show's four-year run (1964–'68), for his role as the enigmatic and intelligent Russian-born agent.

 

Sadly, McCallum died yesterday, at a hospital in New York, one week after his 90th birthday. Like a lot of other people - particularly of my generation - I will remember him fondly as someone who, partnered with Robert Vaughn, captured my imagination as a child.  

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I also had a die-cast toy car made by Corgi with figures of Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin which popped in and out of the car windows firing guns when you pressed on a button protruding through the car roof (see the image above at the end of the post).

 

[2] The main theme for Mission: Impossible was composed by Lalo Schifrin and is noted for unusually being in 5/4 time. Click here to play the Season 1 opening titles.

      The theme music for The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was originally written by Jerry Goldsmith, although other scores were produced by other composers and the changing musical style reflected the show's different seasons; some, using brass instruments and martial rhythms, were intended to be dramatic; others, using flutes and bongos, were deliberately more jazzy. Click here for the opening title sequence to the Season 1 episode 'The Giuoco Piano Affair' (Nov 1964), featuring Goldsmith's original theme.

 

[3] See Sontag's famous essay of 1964, 'Notes on Camp', which can be found in her first collection of essays, Against Interpretation (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966). 

 

[4] Originally, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was conceived as a vehicle for Vaughn and McCallum's role was intended to be peripheral. McCallum, however, managed to turn the character of Kuryakin into a pop cultural phenomenon and, recognising his on-screen chemistry with Vaughn, McCallum was given co-star status by the show's producers. Incredibly, while playing Kuryakin, McCallum received more fan mail than any other actor in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's history - including such popular stars as Clark Gable and Elvis Presley.

 

 

Chrysopoeia 1: Goldfinger (He's the Man - the Man with the Midas Touch)

Shirley Eaton as Jill Masterson in Goldfinger (dir. Guy Hamilton, 1964)

 

For a golden girl knows when he's kissed her

It's the kiss of death from

Mister Goldfinger [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Although, personally, I prefer to see Shirley Eaton dressed in a nurse's unform (Carry on Nurse, 1959), or wrapped in a large bath towel (Carry on Constable, 1960), it is as (sacrificial) Bond Girl Jill Masterson in Goldfinger (1964), that she has firmly secured her place in the porno-cultural imagination.

 

I'm referring, of course, to the iconic scene of her lying naked on a bed, painted from head to toe with gold, which, according to Bond, was the cause of her death [2].

 

The fact that this scene is still fondly remembered and recreated today - many decades later [3] - would seem to suggest that quite a few share Goldfinger's perverse love of gold and perhaps secretly dream of having his Midas touch, even though this can only lead to tragedy [4].      

 

 

II. 

 

What can we say about the strange character Auric Goldfinger? 

 

Well, as his name suggests [5] and as Shirley Bassey repeatedly informs us in the film's title song, he loves gold - really loves it. Not merely as a commodity or valuable asset, but as a thing in itself: a brightly coloured alien metal that has come to us from beyond the stars [6]. 

 

Goldfinger isn't greedy for gold in the way some are greedy for money; his vice is lust - he desires it in a perverse (and primitive) sense [7]. As he confesses to Bond at one point: 'All my life I’ve been in love with its colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness.'

 

Not only does Goldfinger sport a perma-tan and dress mostly in golden-coloured clothes, but so too does he drive a gold-plated car and if he does decide to fuck a woman - usually a prostitute - he likes to have them hypnotised and painted gold before sex [8].

If Goldfinger's perversity (and, indeed, Pussy Galore's lesbianism) is more evident in Ian Fleming's 1959 novel [9], than in the 1964 film adaptation, I think the latter still does a good job of indicating that Auric Goldfinger is, to say the very least, a man of unusual tastes.

 

Finally, it is interesting to note that Fleming himself also had something of a gold fetish; not only did he collect Spanish doubloons, but he wrote with a gold-tipped ballpoint pen and possessed a gold-plated typewriter. 

 

German actor Gert Fröbe as Auric Goldfinger 

in Goldfinger (dir. Guy Hamilton, 1964) 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from the song 'Goldfinger', recorded by Shirley Bassey and used for the opening and closing title sequences to the 1964 James Bond film of that title. The music was composed by John Barry. Lyrics were by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley and are © Sony / ATV Music Publishing LLC. To play, audio only, click here. To play and watch scenes from the movie (showing why it is such a great film - and I say that as someone who isn't really a Bond fan), click here.    

 

[2] Bond informs his superior, M, that skin suffocation is a well-known phenomenon amongst cabaret performers who use body paint to disguise their nakedness. Actually, this is fictitious, even if it is now believed to be factual by many people apparently unaware of the fact we breathe through our noses and mouths and not the surface of our bodies, like frogs. 

      Having said that, it is true that the top layer of our skin - the epidermis - gets its oxygen directly from the atmosphere and not via the blood and that clogging the pores of the skin for an extended period can cause heatstroke, which is potentially life-threatening. So perhaps the director of Goldfinger, Guy Hamilton, wasn't being overly cautious or naively buying into the Fleming myth of death-by-gilding by ensuring that a small patch on Eaton's stomach remained paint free and that a doctor was standing by on set just in case.      

 

[3] See for example the American model and actress Elle Evans recreating the Shirley Eaton / Jill Masterson Goldfinger look for Maxim magazine (Sept 2014) in order to celebrate the movie's 50th anniversary: click here. 

[4] Those unfamiliar with the story of Midas and his golden touch are encouraged to read Ovid's Metamorphoses XI: 85-145: click here.  

      In brief, King Midas is granted his wish by the god Dionysos (or Bacchus, as the Romans knew him) that whatever he touch be instantly transformed into gold. As might be imagined, this soon becomes problematic. 

      Indeed, in the version of the myth told by Nathaniel Hawthorne, it has fatal consequences when, reaching out to comfort his young daughter - who is upset that the roses growing in the palace gardens, having been turned to gold, have lost their magnificent scent - Midas inadvertently turns her into a lump of precious - but lifeless - metal. See A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1851): click here.     

[5] Not only is his family name - one of German origin - obviously related to gold, but Auric is also an adjective pertaining to gold. As Jon Burn (of the James Bond blog Not Perfected Yet) reminds us: 

      "Bond makes mention of the queerness of the name Auric Goldfinger, comparing it to a French nail varnish; emasculating Goldfinger by likening him to a feminine product; insinuating femininity in Goldfinger, with the possible implication that Goldfinger sounds like he may be homosexual." 

      See Jon Burn, '"He Loves Only Gold" - sexual 'perversion' in Goldfinger', on the interesting website Licence to Queer: click here. 

 

[6] Gold is thought to have been produced in supernova nucleosynthesis and from the collision of neutron stars and was present in the dust from which the solar system formed. However, because the Earth was originally molten, almost all of the gold present probably sank into the planetary core. Therefore, most of the gold found in the Earth's crust and mantle is believed by some theorists to have been delivered later via asteroid impacts about 4 billion years ago. If this isn't reason to be awe-struck by even the tiniest gold nugget, then I don't know what is. No wonder so many peoples have desired it, worshipped it, and thought it to be of divine origin; the Aztec word for gold - tecuitlatl - literally means excrement of the gods.  

[7] I'm not a theologian, but I assume there is an important difference between greed and lust as cardinal sins, which seems to hinge on the fact that the former is an artificial (or disordered) desire for material goods or things and the latter a desire for sensual pleasures, so at least a striving for natural relationship with one's fellow man made in the image of God. Thus, the latter, whilst usually regarded as less serious, is still deadly; you can still go to hell because of it.  

 

[8] The fact that Goldfinger does, on occasion, choose to penetrate female bodies - even if first painting them gold - is why I would challenge the claim made by Jon Burn that "Goldfinger's perversion is object sexuality, having sexual desire for an inanimate object, specifically to the precious metal gold, and not to a person of any gender, or even any human being." If he was in love, for example, with the Golden Gate Bridge, or with Fort Knox, I would be perfectly happy to accept this argument, but, actually, he loves golden girls, whom he may objectify sexually, but that's not evidence of objectum sexuality. Indeed, one might argue that by denying their humanity "in order to make them into living golden statues", Goldfinger could be characterised as an agalmatophile. 

      See Jon Burn, '"He Loves Only Gold" - sexual 'perversion' in Goldfinger' ... click here. 

 

[9] Goldfinger is the seventh novel in Ian Fleming's James Bond series. Written in 1958, it was published the following year in the UK by Jonathan Cape. It was an immediate best-seller and mostly well received by the critics. The eponymous villain of the work was named after the architect Ernő Goldfinger and, whilst physically very different, there are some similarities between Auric and Ernő Goldfinger. 

      On learning of this, the latter threatened to sue. Whilst the matter was eventually settled out of court, Fleming was still sorely tempted to change the name from Goldfinger to Goldprick, thus anticipating Mike Myer's slightly limper rendition of the name as Goldmember in the 2002 film of that title (dir. Jay Roach).

      (For the record, the character of Auric Goldfinger was probably based on the American gold tycoon Charles W. Engelhard Jr., whom Fleming had met in 1949.) 

 

 

To read the second post in this series - on Ben Jonson's figure of Volpone - click here. 

 

This post is for Torpedo the Ark's very own Bond Girl, Katharina Braun. 

Real Men Wear Gingham

Sean Connery as James Bond and Claudine Auger as Domino 

in Thunderball (dir. Terence Young, 1965)

 

Everyone loves gingham, don't they? 

 

The medium-weight, plain-woven cotton fabric which, although originally striped when imported into Europe in the 17th-century, is now famous for its checked pattern (often in blue and white).

 

The beauty of gingham is not only its extreme versatility, but that it seems to mean whatever people want it to mean. For example, it can signify wholesome innocence when worn by Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939), or it can signify stylish sophistication when worn by English mods and French sex kittens. 

 

It can even signify that one has a licence to kill - did Sean Connery's Bond ever look better than when wearing an unbuttoned camp-collared pink and white gingham short-sleeved shirt (with matching Jantzen shorts and Wayfarer-style sunglasses) on the beach in Thunderball (1965)? 

 

I don't think so ... Unless it's in the blue version of the shirt that he also wears in Thunderball, or, indeed, the long-sleeved gingham shirt that he sports on screen two years earlier in From Russia with Love (1963). 

      

This shirt, which Bond naturally wears in a casual manner - untucked and with the sleeves turned back - is also in cornflower blue and comes with two large square patch hip pockets. It's fastened with distinctive silver-toned metal buttons.   

 

It all just goes to show that real men are unafraid to wear whatever the hell they want and can make anything look masculine ...

Sean Connery as James Bond and Eunice Gayson as Sylvia Trench 

in From Russia with Love (dir. Terence Young, 1963)

 

Last Rat Standing (Darwin and Bond in the Age of Coronavirus)

New York City rat (photo by Christopher Sadowski) 
and Javier Badem as Raoul Silva in Skyfall (2012)

There's a lovely scene in the Bond film Skyfall in which the villain, Raoul Silva, played by brilliant Spanish actor Javier Badem, tells the story of his grandmother's solution to the problem of rats when they infest the tiny island on which she lives:

"They'd come on a fishing boat and gorged themselves on coconut. So how do you get rats off an island, hmm? My grandmother showed me. We buried an oil drum and hinged the lid. Then we wired coconut to the lid as bait. The rats would come for the coconut and they would fall into the drum. And after a month, you've trapped all the rats. But what did you do then? Throw the drum into the ocean? Burn it? No. You just leave it. And they begin to get hungry. Then one by one, they start eating each other, until there are only two left. The two survivors. And then what - do you kill them? No. You take them and release them into the trees. Only now, they don't eat coconut anymore. Now they only eat rat. You have changed their nature."

I thought of this when I read about the plight of rats in NYC (and elsewhere) during the coronavirus pandemic. Thanks to the so-called lockdown, many of their favourite feeding places - such as the bins at the back of restaurants - are no longer viable options, forcing these resilient rodents to resort to desperate measures. Not only are they fighting one another for food, but some have turned cannibalistic and are devouring their own kind.

The fact is, the threat of starvation makes rats - like people - behave in extremely different ways; they effectively change their nature, as Sr. Silva would say.

I suppose, in the end, this will give them an evolutionary kick up the arse and result in a future breed of stronger, more aggressive, more resourceful rats (survival of the fittest being the popular name for the mechanism of natural selection we can witness at work here).    

Notes

Skyfall (2012), dir. Sam Mendes, starring Daniel Craig (as James Bond) and Javier Bardem (as Raoul Silva): click here to watch the scene I mention above.

Golden Girls (with Reference to the Case of Jill Masterson)

Shirley Eaton as Jill Masterson in Goldfinger (1964) 

looking burnished and beautiful 

For many skin fetishists, epidermal eroticisation involves marking the surface of the body; with a tattoo needle, for example. Others look to impose more serious abrasions, lesions, or lacerations and delight in scabs and scar tissue. But there are also those individuals who hate any blemish or disfigurement and dream of a perfectly smooth, gleaming skin designed to produce a reassuring fantasy of impenetrability and becoming-inorganic.

Sometimes the latter achieve this fascinating look with latex or tight leather clothing. But it's perhaps best accomplished with the use of metallic body paint that displays the flesh in the manner of a precious object whilst, at the same time, immaterialising it by reducing the physical body "to the spill and shimmer of light across a surface". 

This is illustrated in the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger (dir. Guy Hamilton), in which the character Jill Masterson, played by Shirley Eaton, is given the kiss of death by Mr Goldfinger, the man with the Midas touch. Seeing her, lying naked on a bed and gilded from head to toe, is one of cinema's most astonishing (and kinkiest) moments.

Amusingly, Bond pseudo-scientifically explains to his superiors that Miss Masterson died of skin suffocation and that this has been known to happen to cabaret dancers with a penchant for performing nude apart from a coat of paint: 'It's alright so long as you leave a small bare patch at the base of the spine to allow the skin to breathe.'

Even more amusing is the fact that the filmmakers seemed to believe their own claptrap and decided to be better safe than sorry by leaving a patch of Miss Eaton's abdomen ungilded. Today, there are still many people who genuinely believe that she risked (or even lost) her life filming this scene. It's an urban legend which, according to Steven Connor, testifies "to a willingness to believe in the skin's capacity to drown or suffocate in its own waste products, to which gold, the radiance of the body, can always revert".

For Connor is convinced that the secret pleasure of fetishistically painting a woman in metallic gold or silver paint is a scatological one rooted in the "extreme ambivalence of images than conjoin the radiance of a skin that is all aura and effulgence with the suggestion of faecal daubing, thus either lifting faeces into the condition of light or lowering light into shit".

Personally, I'm not entirely convinced by this (psychoanalytic) line of argument. I think that the thrill of becoming-mineral and hardening into pure objectivity and brilliant exteriority is far beyond this Freudian game of Gold und Scheiße.


See: Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 53, 176-77. 

On Black Dandyism (With Reference to the Case of Jean-Michel Basquiat)

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 - 1988) 

The New York Times Magazine (10 Feb 1985)

"Being a black man", says Ekow Eshun, "means being subject to the white gaze". 

But if that means becoming an object of prejudice, suspicion and negative stereotype, so also does it mean becoming an object of fascination and, indeed, admiration. Certainly when it comes to the crucial question of style, it would simply be churlish to deny that many black men possess it to a high degree and fully understand its importance as a politics of resistance.

Indeed, without wishing to appear full of self-loathing or a sense of racial inferiority, I know exactly what Adam Ant means in Kings of the Wild Frontier when he says that for those of us with pale skin - even when we're healthy and our colour schemes delight - down below our dandy clothes we remain a shade too white.        

And so, whilst there are plenty of good-looking, very elegantly dressed white men in the world, the dandyism of the black man always seems to have something extra; to be that bit sexier and more provocative; to be invested with attitude (which is why the idea of a black actor playing James Bond isn't as outlandish as some suggest - it could only add a certain frisson to the character). 

This is exemplified in the above photo of Jean-Michel Basquiat on the cover of the New York Times Magazine in 1985; arguably the greatest artist of the late-twentieth century, he was certainly the most fashionable.

Pictured here in one of the Armani suits in which he loved to work, Basquiat knows that dandyism is, at its most interesting, not merely a method of flaunting one's individual beauty, but of flouting social conventions governing ideas of class, race, gender and sexuality; a means of saying fuck me and fuck you at one and the same time. 

To be clear: it's not what he's wearing, but how he's wearing it that matters; with barefoot insouciance, completely unconcerned about the fact that the expensive suit is paint-spattered (for he knows he still looks clean) and "confounding expectations about how black men should look or carry themselves in order to establish a place of personal freedom: a place beyond the white gaze, where the black body is a site of liberation rather than oppression" ...

In other words, black styles matter ...

See: Ekow Eshun, 'The subversive power of the black dandy', The Guardian, (04 July 2016): click here to read online. 

See also: Shantrelle P. Lewis, 'Black Dandyism is Back, and It's Both Oppositional Fashion and Therapy at Once', How We Get to Next (30 Sept 2016): click here. 

To read The New York Times Magazine feature on Basquiat, 'New Art, New Money', by Cathleen McGuigan, click here.  

Note: the first large-scale exhibition in the UK of the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat is currently showing at the Barbican (London) and runs until 28 Jan 2018: click here for details. 

In Memory of Roger Moore and Adam West

    

Roger Moore as 007 and Adam West as Batman

In the same way that many of us subscribe to the view that Roger Moore is the best Bond, so too is it unarguably the case that Adam West is by far the greatest Batman - the camp coolness of his Caped Crusader in the sixties TV show, superior to the brooding menace of more recent cinematic versions: Dark Knight, my arse!  

So it was sad to learn that Adam West has died, aged 88, from leukaemia - just as it was sad to hear the news last month of Moore's passing, aged 89, also from cancer. Both actors were very much part of my childhood and are fully deserving of the place that each has secured within the cultural imagination, as well as the hearts of millions of fans around the world.  

Margaret Nolan: Artist, Actress, Object

Margaret Nolan (IMDB)
Photo © 2011 Silver Screen Collection 
Courtesy of gettyimages.com 

The case of Margaret Nolan, the London-born glamour model turned actress become artist, interests for a number of reasons, not least of all because she is a woman who has struggled to take control of her own image and personally confront the issue of sexual objectification.

Miss Nolan started her career - as many aspiring young actresses do - by stripping for the camera and she soon became a popular pin-up within the amorous imagination of the early 1960s, often featuring in magazines under the name of Vicky Kennedy (her pseudonym serving to disguise her identity, preserve her modesty, and distance her from the industry in which she worked; she wasn't a nude model per se, but merely playing the part of such).

Gradually, her more legitimate acting roles increased in number and importance and she appeared in many theatre productions, films, and television shows, under her real name. This famously included playing a masseuse called Dink in the James Bond movie Goldfinger (1964).*

For some of us, however, Miss Nolan is most fondly remembered for her roles in several of the Carry On films, including Carry on Girls (1973), in which she (predictably) plays the buxom beauty Dawn Brakes and is involved in a rather convincing - and at the time controversial - catfight with the Barbara Windsor character, Hope Springs.

But of course, such scenes are now long behind her. Today, Miss Nolan works as a visual artist, producing interesting (sometimes vaguely disturbing) images assembled from cut-up publicity pictures; a somewhat naive attempt to deconstruct the socio-sexual stereotype she embodied and challenge the male gaze to which she was made subject throughout her modelling and acting career. Naive, but something for which she should nevertheless be applauded.

Margaret Nolan: My Divided Self 

This and other works can be found on her official site: 

margaretnolan.co.uk 

* It might also be noted that it was Miss Nolan - and not Shirley Eaton - who appeared in the film's title-sequence by Robert Brownjohn, wearing a bikini and painted gold. This image immediately became iconic within popular culture, but, unlike some (mostly male) art critics and film theorists, Miss Nolan denies there was - or is - anything liberated or liberating about it. The fact that it served simply to secure her a shoot for Playboy would seem to confirm her view.