Guy Hamilton in Aberdeen
John Drake
On assignmentPosts: 2,564MI6 Agent
{[] Just got a ticket to see Guy Hamilton in Aberdeen as part of the Director's Cut season run by the University. I am really looking forward to seeing one of the great Bond director's in person.
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Let us know how it goes!
"I am not an entrant in the Shakespeare Stakes." - Ian Fleming
"Screw 'em." - Daniel Craig, The Best James Bond EverTM
A review would be greatly appreciated! :007)
Anyways, Hamilton is almost 87 now. Also, Lewis Gilbert is almost 89. I want to know what their secret is. Apparently directing a Bond movie guarantees you longevity. Terence Young made it to 79 and Peter Hunt to 77. It is just so cool to me that the directors of films as old as GF and YOLT are still around. I dread the day when these men pass away and bitter old Sean Connery is the only one left alive who can tell a decent amount of stories about the 1960s Bond movies. Like he would talk about his Bond days anyways.
By Brian Pendreigh
The cold-eyed Chinese killer has a pistol levelled at 007’s head. But James Bond’s finger flicks open the top of the gear stick and presses a red button. The roof flies open and 007’s oriental foe is hurtled into oblivion, along with the now legendary ejector seat.
Guy Hamilton is the man widely credited with perfecting the classic Bond formula of guns, girls and gadgets, exotic locations and darkly humorous one-liners. He directed Goldfinger (1964), with its famous Aston Martin DB5, and three subsequent Bond movies.
But before he became a film-maker, Hamilton had another career, working with real-life secret agents, without any of Q’s technological aids. His gadgets were more basic and in real life they often went wrong.
“In all these things there’s a permanent ****-up,” says the 86-year-old, who now lives on Majorca, but is returning to the UK for a public talk later this month in Aberdeen, one of the bases for his top secret work during the Second World war.
He was one of the men responsible for getting special operatives across the North Sea and English Channel by boat and dropping them off behind enemy lines. He was a young lieutenant on the Royal Navy’s Motor Torpedo Boat 718 and he personally accompanied the rowing boat that would take operatives from open water to the shore.
On one occasion problems with a radio meant Hamilton and his crew simply could not find the mother ship again.
“There was the standard ****-up and I was left behind in France,” he says, making it sound like a minor inconvenience – but he was a Naval officer, involved in covert operations, stranded in Nazi territory. This was James Bond for real.
Hamilton quickly adds, matter-of-factly, that the boat came back and picked him up again a month later. Details of his time on the run from the Gestapo have to be teased out of him.
“They knew we were there and they were running around trying to find us. There was a tremendous French Resistance in Britanny, and I am still in contact with some of these people, because I wouldn’t be here today if they hadn’t looked after us.”
Hamilton and his men were moved from place to place. Once the Gestapo learned exactly where they were hiding. The Germans got a local police officer to show them the way. In the meantime another gendarme took a short cut to warn Hamilton. “By the time they got there we were in the woods,” he says.
Hamilton joined the Navy in 1940 when he was just 18. “I was lucky to eventually join the 15th MTB flotilla and our speciality was dropping and picking up agents in foreign climes,” he says. He sailed out of Dartmouth to France and from Aberdeen to Norway, ferrying operatives to and fro and picking up escaped POWs and shot-down pilots.
On several occasions they found themselves in the same waters as enemy ships. They used signals to fool them into thinking they were on the same side. But they also came under fire. “Let’s not get dramatic,” says Hamilton. “Everybody came under fire... We don’t want to get too heavy about this.”
They were on their way back from a mission when they heard news of VE Day on the radio. “We arrived in Aberdeen and everybody was drunk. There was nobody in the harbour to catch the rope.”
He remembers going into town and the famous music-hall entertainer Will Fyffe singing, of all things, I Belong to Glasgow, from the balcony of one of the main hotels.
A wartime grounding in espionage might seem the perfect preparation for a James Bond, but nothing could be further from the truth, according to Hamilton. ““My wartime experiences have got bugger all to do with Bond,” he says. “James Bond is fantasy land.”
He adds that the secret agents with whom he worked were more like Harry Palmer, who was probably Bond’s main adversary in British espionage movies in the 1960s. Palmer was a very ordinary man, who just happened to be a spy. He was played by the bespectacled Michael Caine and Hamilton directed one of his most successful outings, Funeral in Berlin (1966).
The real agents were brave, but fallible, like Palmer. Hamilton says that agents were strip-searched before voyages because they had a tendency to take odd souvenirs with them, like a ticket stub for the Odeon, Leicester Square, which might be difficult to explain away to Gestapo officers.
“The French were even more awkward. French socks are absolutely awful and they would go to Woolworths and buy a wonderful pair of socks,” he recalls. “These are the sort of things that would give them away.”
After the war Hamilton was assistant director on The Third Man (1949), he wrote and directed the classic war film The Colditz Story (1955) and had the chance to direct the first Bond movie Dr No (1962). But family reasons prevented him from committing to a long location shoot in Jamaica.
Goldfinger was the third Bond movie. Hamilton enjoyed working with Connery, but had a job persuading him that a golf match between Bond and Goldfinger could be exciting. Hamilton says: “Sean had never swung a golf club in his life and thought it was upper-class and not particularly interesting.”
Hamilton was a keen golfer and admits the proximity of golf courses became a factor in deciding locations when they were reunited on Diamonds are Forever (1971). He adds that Connery was the “meanest” golfer he ever played. “He won’t give you a one-foot putt,” he says. “He’s dreadful. There were a lot of arguments.”
Hamilton also directed Roger Moore’s first and best two James Bond films Live and Let Die (1973) and The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), but diplomatically declines to say who he thinks is the best Bond.
“It depends at what age you see your first Bond... I talked to some young kids the other day who thought Daniel Craig was absolutely fantastic. I said ‘What about Sean Connery?’ They said “That’s the bald-headed Scotsman, isn’t it?’ But they didn’t know him from a hole in the ground.”
The first two Bond films had been big hits, but Goldfinger took Bond’s success to a new international level and was one of the highest-grossing films in America in 1965.
One of the elements of the classic Bond formula that Hamilton developed and reinforced in Goldfinger was the idea of Bond girls who were just as tough and independent as 007 himself.
Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) provided a template in Dr No, but Hamilton took it further. Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman) was a worthy adversary. And, when it comes to killing Goldfinger, Bond has a rival in Tilly Masterson (Tania Mallet), whose sister Goldfinger smothered in gold.
While Bond may owe little directly to Hamilton’s wartime experiences, perhaps the Bond girls and the Bond banter owe something to Aberdeen.
“I remember in Aberdeen the fish girls,” says Hamilton. “These girls used to take the rope and pull us in. They were much stronger and bigger and tougher than all of my crew put together. We used to tease them and they teased us. They were rather special ladies.”
Aberdeen University has a thriving film department and Hamilton will be discussing his career at a free public session at King’s College on April 28 (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/directorscut/profiles/hamilton/). It is part of a programme of discussions entitled The Director’s Cut and Radio Scotland is recording the event for broadcast in May.
It will be the first time Hamilton has been back in the city since VE Day.
ends
Until then here's some press coverage.
http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/1193203?UserKey=
http://film-directors.suite101.com/article.cfm/guy_hamilton_directors_cut