The 1964 scene Daniel Craig called James Bond’s most misogynistic moment: “Then he slaps her arse!”
While it wasn’t completely eliminated during his five-film tenure as the iconic character, Daniel Craig’s James Bond did at least try to stuff the misogynistic genie a little bit back into the bottle.
It wasn’t a clean break by any means, as Gemma Arterton can and has attested, with her Strawberry Fields dropped into Quantum Solace as a minor character with a silly name, one who gets bedded by 007 and then quickly meets her demise, a career move that the actor has long since come to regret.
He also seduced Caterino Murino’s Solange Dimitrios in Casino Royale as a means to extract information, which ends with her being tortured and murdered for spilling the beans to the secret agent, not to mention the questionable moment he steps into the shower with Bérénice Marlohe’s Sévérine when she’s fearing for her life, and she ends up dead, too.
As a largely sexless director, there’s every chance that Denis Villeneuve’s incoming reinvention of the long-running franchise will leave the hero’s more chauvinistic tendencies at the door, but if there’s one thing Craig could point to, it was that his stint as 007 was nowhere near as bad as some of his predecessors.
That’s not saying much, since the series spent its first four decades treating most of its female characters as objects, first and foremost. “He might be chauvinistic occasionally, but the women he likes are strong, intelligent, and are equal to him,” Craig maintained of his interpretation of the suave spy, something that couldn’t be said of the way Sean Connery treated Shirley Eaton’s Jill Masterson in Goldfinger.
In the classic globetrotting adventure, the original vintage dismisses his onscreen paramour’s importance to any conversation he deems important by brushing her off with a blunt, “Run along, dear, man talk.” If that wasn’t bad enough, “And then he slaps her arse!” as Craig so eloquently but not inaccurately put it.
However, he wasn’t against the idea of his Bond doing something similar, but only if there were consequences. “If there was a possibility,” he ruminated. “And I kind of think, ‘Why not?’, he should get a slap back. And I think those things are good to play with, and don’t be afraid of it.”
Is it the most misogynistic moment in 007 history? Depends on who you ask, really. Judi Dench wasn’t strictly lying when she called Pierce Brosnan a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur” in GoldenEye, with Connery and Roger Moore not exactly treating their opposite numbers with the greatest of respect, whether that’s physically or emotionally, but that’s how Bond was back then, and he’s obligated to move with the times.
On the other hand, the casting process continues to use a seduction scene as the deal-breaker in finding the next person to inherit the tux and Walther PPK, so it’s not something that’ll ever be completely eradicated, for better or worse.
