SPOILER ALERT!
The Long Good Friday (1980) was a good movie, although it had a lot of characters in it that I had trouble keeping track of, their faces being somewhat ordinary, other than the main stars, Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren. However, there was one actor who, though he had only a small part, stood out: Pierce Brosnan.
This was at a time when we were still suffering from James Bond movies starring Roger Moore. He was handsome enough, so we had no trouble accepting the fact that he had a way with women. But when he got into a fight with the bad guys, it always looked as though they were trying not to hurt him. Of course, we all knew that there would never be another Sean Connery to fill that role, although George Lazenby was good in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), which I liked even better than some of the later movies with Connery. When I saw Pierce Brosnan, I thought to myself that he had the right look to be the next James Bond. Needless to say, a lot of other people thought so as well, and so it was that he eventually got that role. Looking back, however, I have to wonder if Brosnan looked too right for the part, actually making James Bond less believable on that account.
Before that happened, however, he starred in Remington Steele (1982-1987), a television show about a female detective, Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalest), who finds that no one will take her seriously as a private detective because she is a woman. So, she makes up the name “Remington Steele,” with its manly connotations, and pretends that this fictional man is her boss. The ruse works, and business picks up. Through some fortuitous circumstances, however, a man played by Brosnan ends up fleshing out that fictional character. He doesn’t know much about actually being a private detective, but he has seen a lot of movies about private detectives, to which he often refers. This is reminiscent of Don Quixote, a man that tried to become a knight by modeling himself on what he had read in books on knight errantry, to comical effect. Of course, Laura is the one that solves all the mysteries, while pretending only to be helping her “boss.”
The show is partly a romantic comedy, so we are not supposed to take it too seriously. In real life, the name “Remington Steele” would be laughable, an obvious fake, just as Brosnan’s character, in filling that role, is fake. One wonders, if by looking the part too much, just as the name is too much, Brosnan is more suited to playing a phony detective than a real one. Furthermore, it is fitting that his character used to be a thief and a con man, because someone that good-looking would make you suspicious if he were trying to sell you something.
This role captured the essence of Brosnan’s persona, that of someone that looks so right for the role he is playing that we cannot take him seriously. This showed up in the Bond movies he eventually made. As Roger Ebert noted when reviewing GoldenEye (1995), the first Bond movie Brosnan starred in, the formula for a Bond movie was there, but something was different:
So, all of the parts are in place. And yet, in an important way, this James Bond adventure … marks the passing of an era. This is the first Bond film that is self-aware, that has lost its innocence and the simplicity of its world view, and has some understanding of the absurdity and sadness of its hero.
Even though he admits elsewhere that Brosnan makes the best James Bond since Connery, he also acknowledges that, psychologically speaking, there is something different:
Brosnan’s Bond looks at home in the casinos of Monte Carlo, but he’s more knowing, more aware of relationships. I am not sure this is a good thing. Agent 007 should to some degree not be in on the joke.
Once again, we have that Don Quixote effect, as if a man is trying to be James Bond based on all the James Bond movies he’s seen.
Still, in these Bond movies, Brosnan must be the good guy and play it fairly straight. In other movies about espionage, however, he is a shady character, a bit unscrupulous, as in Remington Steele.
A good example is the movie No Escape (2015). This is principally a fantasy film for husbands who are failures. A lot of men feel they have let their wives down, and in this movie, Jack Dwyer (Owen Wilson) has done so in a big way. From the dialogue we learn that he used to be in business for himself, but he eventually had to give that up. So, he takes a job with Cardiff, a water company, requiring that he relocate his family to some unnamed country in Southeast Asia, which means he and his family are strangers in a strange land, where they don’t speak the language and where the food being sold in the marketplace would cause you to lose your appetite. They check into a hotel where the phone doesn’t work, some of the lights don’t come on, and there is nothing but snow on television. And this looks like the best hotel in the whole city. It all proves to be too much for Jack’s wife Annie (Lake Bell), and in the middle of the night he finds her sitting on the floor of the bathroom crying. In other words, if things had proceeded normally from this point, this would have been a movie of misery, probably resulting in Annie’s taking their two children back to the United States before long and filing for divorce.
But then there is a coup, the prime minister is assassinated, everyone in the American embassy is killed, and the police are overrun by mobs of revolutionaries, whose ultimate goal is to slaughter every Caucasian foreigner in the country, especially employees of Cardiff. As horrible as that sounds, it gives Jack a chance to redeem himself, as he leads his family this way and that through one melodramatic situation after another, even to the point of killing a man who was threatening them, which he does in full view of his wife. And she thought her husband was a failure. Hah!
On his own, however, he would never have been able to get his family out of the country. Fortunately, on the plane coming over, they met Hammond, who is played by Pierce Brosnan. Given all the James Bond movies Brosnan has starred in, we are not surprised when he turns out to be a British spy. However, he is dissolute: he drinks too much and frequents strip clubs. Nevertheless, Hammond still has all the requisite lethal skills for a British spy. When Jack and his family are about to be murdered by several rebels, Hammond and another agent, a local named Kenny, are able to intervene and kill all the bad guys.
Hammond tells Jack he knows of a place where they will be safe. It appears to be a combination brothel and opium den. Presumably, Hammond is a regular customer. When they get on the roof, Hammond explains what is going on. It turns out that he is a corrupt version of James Bond. Now that the Cold War is over, his services are put to ends more pecuniary than patriotic. He confesses to being the ultimate cause of the revolution. His job is to get countries to borrow money for projects, such as waterworks, knowing that they will never be able to pay back the loans. Being hopelessly in debt, the countries have no choice but to let corporations like Cardiff come in and make big profits at the expense of the impoverished citizens. Normally, things work out well, and the citizens don’t realize how it all happened. But this time, things did not work out well, and so the people have risen up to take their country back. In other words, Hammond continues, they are trying to protect their families just as Jack is trying to protect his.
Unfortunately, Hammond and Kenny are killed in subsequent fighting, but Jack and his family are eventually able to make it by boat to Vietnam. From there, presumably, they will go back to the United States and stay there. And so, thanks to the revolution caused by Hammond, Jack and Annie will live happily ever after. Without that, he would have been a failure, and she would have divorced him.
However, it is in The Tailor of Panama (2001) that Brosnan’s persona was really put to good use. In that movie, Brosnan plays Andrew Osnard, James Bond’s evil twin, as it were. The movie begins with an establishment shot of MI6 Headquarters. An M-like character informs Osnard that he is being transferred to Panama, or rather, being banished there for his sins: blown cover, gambling debts, and the wives.
The “blown cover” is almost a joke in the James Bond genre. Only in Dr. No (1962) did Bond try to conceal the fact that he was a spy. By the next installment, From Russia with Love (1963), Bond is so well-known as a spy that SPECTRE has an island where men run around wearing James Bond masks so that assassins can practice killing James Bond.
Also starting with Dr. No, but continuing throughout the franchise, Bond always wins when playing chemin de fer, or whatever they play in those European casinos, especially when sitting opposite a beautiful woman. But in The Tailor of Panama, gambling is one of Osnard’s vices, resulting in serious gambling debts, something that cannot be allowed for someone that has access to state secrets, as those debts would make him susceptible to exploitation by foreign governments.
Finally, Bond’s womanizing is typically restricted to single women. Here we gather that Osnard has been fooling around with the wives of men with influence, including his superiors at MI6.
Osnard figures that he is expected to keep his head down, serve out his time in Panama, and retire with a pension. But “M” says Britain has vital interests there and warns him of much danger in what goes on in that country: money laundering, drug trafficking, and corruption. We see Osnard smile at this, figuring he will fit right in. On the plane to Panama, he scrolls through a list of two hundred Brits that are residents there. He takes an interest in a tailor, Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), about whom MI6 apparently has a lot of information.
The scene shifts to the shop of Pendel and Braithwaite, where Harry is promising to help a customer realize the dream of “becoming more than we are” with the proper attire. Harry approves of the suit the customer picks, referring to it as “Connery’s choice,” presumably an inside joke with the audience, suggesting that the suit could make the customer look like the first and best actor to play James Bond. Making appearances triumph over reality is the theme of this movie.
Osnard introduces himself to Harry as a future customer, but soon reveals that he knows the truth, that the business about Braithwaite is phony, that Harry has served time in prison, that his firm was never based in the prestigious Savile Row, and that he is seriously in debt on account of a farm he should never have bought. Osnard promises Harry that he will help him with that debt if he provides Osnard with secret information that might prove useful to him, information that Harry can glean from the powerful men for whom he makes suits.
Harry doesn’t really have anything to tell, but he needs the money, so he makes up stuff about the “Silent Opposition.” Later, when he makes up stuff about the president of Panama selling the canal to the Chinese, Osnard becomes excited, but not because he believes him, saying it’s “a better yarn than Arthur Braithwaite.” When Harry is surprised that Osnard sees through his spiel, Osnard says that the important thing is that “it plays,” something he can report back to MI6.
It all reminds me of Our Man in Havana (1959), where Alec Guiness plays a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, before the revolution. He needs money on account of his daughter, who just bought a horse, which she wants to keep in a stable at the expensive country club, while he wants to send her to finishing school in Switzerland. He is approached by Noël Coward, who is a British Secret Service official, to get him secret information, for which he will pay a lot of money. Guiness is unable to come up with any secret information, but his friend Burl Ives has some encouraging advice: “That sort of information is always easy to give. If it is secret enough, you alone know it. All you need is a little imagination…. There’s something about a secret that makes people believe.” When Guiness says that they want him to recruit agents, Ives tells him to invent them too. And so he does.
Returning to The Tailor of Panama, we find that the story Harry made up, while good enough for London, was not accepted by Washington. So, Osnard puts more pressure on Harry to come up with something that Washington will believe. Harry says that will cost ten million dollars, thinking that will end it, but Osnard is fine with that. Things get crazier and crazier, leading the Americans to launch a military invasion, after paying fifteen million dollars for Osnard’s bogus information.
In the end, Osnard is able to make it out of Panama, on his way to Switzerland, with two suitcases filled with the millions of dollars he was able to extract from Washington, after bribing the British ambassador with just over a million, since he had caught on to what Osnard had been doing. As the two of them walk toward the plane Osnard will be boarding, he says, “Could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?” alluding, of course, to the movie Casablanca (1942), much in the way Brosnan, as Remington Steele, would allude to old movies. On the plane, he flirts with a pretty stewardess, his next conquest. And so it is that James Bond’s evil twin will live happily ever after.
As a final note, early in the movie, Osnard meets Francesca, a beautiful woman that works at the British embassy. He makes a date with her at a place where a band is playing music. At one point in their conversation, he asks her to dance.
“Oh, God, you don’t dance as well, do you?” she asks. Even she realizes that Brosnan’s character is too perfect for the part he is playing.
