Orchestral manoeuvres in the dark

Picture: Francois Duhamel/Danjaq, LLC, United Artists, Columbia Pictures, all rights reserved

If there had been any any doubt before, the opening of the envelope first thing on the morning of my birthday this year proved how well my wife knows me. Inside were tickets to a screening of Skyfall at the Royal Albert Hall, accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra performing Thomas Newman’s score in sync with the film. One of my favourite Bond films, with live music, in the majestic setting of one of the world’s greatest performance venues. I couldn’t have asked for a better present.

Shown as part of a series of such screenings celebrating the 60th anniversary of the 007 franchise, the evening was introduced by Sir Sam Mendes, Skyfall’s director, who elaborated on how a director, highly regarded beforehand for his theatre work, came to helm cinema’s longest-running action franchise. Evidently, running into Daniel Craig at a party in New York, the actor suggested that Mendes should direct his third outing as Bond. Mendes agreed, although he later realised it wasn’t in Craig’s gift to offer the job. The next day, sober, Mendes contacted executive producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson to see if they’d be interested. Wisely, they said yes, and one of the best films in the-then 50-year history of the series was set in train.

Every Bond fan will have their own favourites, and every Bond fan will have their reasons. Every film will have its memorable moments, every film its great lines, every film its naff bits. It’s why we love Bond, let’s face it. Rugged action with the occasional Carry On element thrown in for larks. Under Mendes, Skyfall added another dimension, developing out some of the darkness in Bond’s backstory (namely how he became an orphan), but played out through a cinemascope the series had rarely delivered with its lively cartoonism of characters, stunts, gadgets and glamour. 

Bond films have always reconfigured Ian Fleming’s original ideas with a more contemporary twist (though the rush to make Moonraker a Bond for the Star Wars era was patently flawed), but with Skyfall, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan’s story addressed spycraft’s very real transition from Cold War adversariality to cyber threats (“I can do more damage on my laptop sitting in my pyjamas before my first cup of Earl Grey than you can do in a year in the field,” Ben Whishaw’s newly-appointed Q informs Bond on their first encounter, to which the agent retorts: “So why do you need me?”. “Every now and then a trigger has to be pulled,” comes the reply).

Few at the time would have realised that Skyfall was the apex of an arc that would conclude with No Time To Die, but there was an enrichingly downbeat nature to the film, built around Javier Bardem’s delightfully camp villain Silva seeking revenge on M (Dame Judi Dench) by attacking MI6 itself. Yes, it didn’t veer too far from the established mad superbaddie formula, but - and here’s where the difference was made for me - there was a noticeably different cinematic quality about Skyfall. 

Picture: Francois Duhamel/Danjaq, LLC, United Artists, Columbia Pictures, all rights reserved

Part of that is indebted to Mendes’s use of Sir Roger Deakins as cinematographer. The scenes in Shanghai, especially the tower block fight between Bond and assassin Rapice - are some of the most stunningly-photographed moments I’ve seen this side of a Michael Mann production, capturing the Chinese city’s LED sophistication and BladeRunner-esque futurism. But, equally, are the scenes shot in Scotland, as Bond and M attempt to get ahead of Silva by driving the famous Aston Martin DB5 up to the titular Skyfall ancestral home, amid breathtaking - and cold - moorland scenery.

Growing up watching Bond films on television as Christmas and Easter holiday treats, I absorbed their escapism. Never did I process the body count, or the many moral ambiguities the films presented, not least of which the inherent sexism. To me, Bond was glamour: dressing up in one of my dad’s suit jackets made me Bond, purely for the myopic belief that it looked more like a tuxedo than a school blazer. Skyfall, for me, reset the franchise as a storytelling venture, albeit one with elements of Bond tradition and familiarity. And knowingly so: back to that first encounter between Bond and Q, in which the quartermaster hands over a ticket to Shanghai, a Walther PPK (with a palm-print encoder in the grip) and a tiny little radio device. “A gun and a radio. It’s not exactly Christmas, is it?“, the somewhat entitled secret agent remarks icily. “What, were you expecting an exploding pen?” says Q. “We don't really go in for that anymore.”

While Mendes would next helm the somewhat flawed Spectre, the fourth Daniel Craig outing before his finale in No Time To Die, the knight-director can take pride in making a Bond film that will forever be a high benchmark in the 25-film canon to date. Naturally, a few weren’t too fond of Skyfall, because it was too wrought, or because it suggested an ageing Bond, though this last gripe completely ignores the preposterous sight of Roger Moore at 58 in A View To A Kill (though having read that, having just turned 55, I’m increasingly sympathetic…). 

In Skyfall, Bond bleeds, he gets shot - twice (including once by Miss Moneypenny) - he drinks to excess, fails his physical and psychological tests, and ultimately loses the maternal figure that Dench’s M is portrayed as. For once, or at least the first time since George Lazenby shed a tear at the death of his new bride in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Bond is made vulnerable amid the existential threat Silva poses to MI6. While he ultimately comes through, as has always been the outcome, Skyfall’s emotional heft - brought to bear by Mendes - combined with its stunning visual complexion. Last night it was a joy to see it again on a big screen.

© Simon Poulter 2022

I shouldn’t ignore, either, the experience of watching it with a live orchestra. Such are the perfect acoustics of the Royal Albert Hall that if there hadn’t been almost a hundred musicians and conductor Anthony Gabriele waving his baton at them below us, you would have thought you were listening to the original recorded score. 

Deservedly, though, the ensemble generated impromptu applause after playing the film’s title song, Adele’s vocal presumably isolated for playback over the live orchestra. But the greatest ripple was reserved for The James Bond Theme, Monty Norman’s twanging guitar riff, which lasered through the 5,000-odd seated punters as a reminder of the most iconic piece of theme music in film history. We weren’t introduced to any of the individual performers, but whoever the job fell to play that riff should know that the reverence in the audience was akin to that reserved for David Gilmour performing the Comfortably Numb solo, or Jimmy Page wigging out on Stairway To Heaven. Hard to remember this was a film we were still watching. But what an experience.