McCarthy Does 007

(& Nobody Does It Better)

The classic 1965 Thunderball poster artwork by Frank McCarthy and Robert E. McGinnis.

Saving the best for last? Not in my estimation — but there’s no getting around the fact that McCarthy’s best-known movie ballyhoo art is by far his work on the United Artists 007 films of the 1960s.

McCarthy worked on the campaign art for only three of the Ian Fleming adaptations, Thunderball (1965), You Only Live Twice (1967), and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), but he certainly left his mark, establishing an orientation to the character and franchise that was much imitated in its day.

It’s instructive to look at what came before, if only to establish the context for McCarthy’s participation in promoting this centerpiece of 1960s international pop culture.

Many artists had been tapped for the previous 007 campaigns, prominent among them R. (Renato) Fratini — see above (that’s Fratini’s artwork) — whose lush illustrative paintings for one of the From Russia With Love (1963) campaigns were and remain a seductively eye-catcher, evoking the allure of the Bond mystique with style.

Still, the studio art departments tended to go with ad art that combined bits of illustrative imagery with manipulated stills from the films themselves and staged photos (like the ‘golden girl’ of Goldfinger) to concoct the one-sheets and pressbook ad art. 

As the effective but comparative lackluster (but no less iconic for that) one-sheet poster for the 1964 007 blockbuster Goldfinger proved (see left), something more was needed to adequately capture and communicate the scope of the bigger-budget Bonds that followed.

Given the initial successes of Dr. No (1962), From Russia With Love and especially Goldfinger, and the re-release double-bills that followed to further promote the spy-action franchise, Bond producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli and studio United Artists decided they’d get more bang for their Bond boxoffice if they commissioned not one but two top-notch promo artists to forge an exciting new look for their new Bond movie campaigns.

They settled on the combo of Frank McCarthy and Robert E. McGinnis, giving McCarthy the more explosive action and gadget-oriented setpieces to bring to larger-than-life illustrations. The classic one-sheet poster featuring both artists is visible at the top of this post.

For me, it was the original soundtrack album’s use of one of the central images from McCarthy’s part of the ad campaign — the celebrated underwater battle scene — that afforded me my first close study of McCarthy’s skills. I spent hours studying and even more time vainly copying this painting from the LP cover! 

McCarthy painted this scene, as he did the Bond-with-jetpack image. The rest was by McGinnis, and the studio mixed-and-matched the McCarthy and McGinnis images as they saw fit for the various ad mats and such.

Now, there’s a vast online community of James Bond fans and fanatics that offer unprecedented access to the advertising art related to all the Bond films, Thunderball quite prominent among the movie ad art dissected and showcased.

The marvelous Illustrated 007 website has even reconstructed the McCarthy painting for the underwater battle (click this link for the details!), yielding the image posted here, below.

It’s the work of 007 fan and scholar Peter Lorenz, and its a beauty:

Peter has dedicated considerable attention to McCarthy’s Bond movie art, and I urge any of you interested in finding out waaaaaaaay more to click the link and explore Peter’s late-night Bondian labors, which include a breakdown of who did what in the McCarthy/McGinnis ad art.

I found plenty of other sites offering additional graphics and material, but Peter’s was by far the best informed and most intensive.

Ryan Brennan’s review of the James Bond Sourcebook by Kevin McClory at the website The Thunder Child offers further peeks at the original McCarthy ad art, including (with permission) a key image from the American Art Archives,

which indeed boasts a pretty terrific McCarthy art gallery (click this link to see it).

Having scored high marks with their work on Thunderball, McCarthy and McGinnis next collaborated on the expansive ad campaign for the subsequent Bond film in the series, You Only Live Twice.

At this point, there had to have been a lot of cooks in the kitchen — massive boxoffice always prompts more studio chefs to insist upon adding to the recipe — and I think that’s pretty obvious when you take even a cursory look at the ad art for You Only Live Twice.

While there were plenty of exploitable elements in this then-latest Bond adventure, the series was also beginning to show some wear and tear: star Sean Connery was rather public about his growing disenchantment with the series, and the involvement of new creative talent in the credits was evidence of both the appetite for new blood and growing turmoil within the Saltzman/Broccoli camps.

While the entry of Roald Dahl as screenwriter and a new director — Lewis Gilbert (The 7th Dawn, Alfie, Friends, etc.) — promised much, You Only Live Twice was a surprising flaccid, forced affair. Still, there was considerable fun to be had, and part of that fun fueled the ad campaigns.

As I say, too many cooks was a factor, and there’s a crazyquilt aspect to the promotional art that evidences more than just indecision over whether to focus on McCarthy’s or McGinnis’s respective strengths in the final ad campaign. I must say, McGinnis’s imagery seemed to have suffered less in the process.

Still, within each artist’s contribution, there’s some pretty wonky imagery. This is why I don’t count McCarthy’s Bond paintings among his best movie advertising work. It would appear the studio reps or art directors were insisting upon the patented ‘Bond-with-one-hand-on-arm-and-other-holding-his-Walther PPK’ being incorporated into all McCarthy’s paintings, however absurd the aloof pose in the context of an otherwise furious action scene.

In the famed Thunderball jet-pack painting, there is a cool wit in the way ‘Bond-with-one-hand-on-arm-and-other-holding-his-Walther PPK’ is literally rocketing out of the scene toward the viewer. It is believable as an action scene and consistent with the Bond persona. McCarthy also painted the pose in proper perspective, which adds to the impact of the image and Bond’s unflappable nonchalance. But that pose would have been worse than ridiculous if carried into the underwater battle painting, wherein Bond looks like the man of action he was/is in the film (not to mention the correctness of supplanting his customary Walther PPK with that speargun, which Bond afficianados identify as either a Nemrod Commando compressed-air speargun or Technisub Jaguar speargun). In 1965, McCarthy’s experience and wisdom of how to best depict an action scene incorporating Bond held sway; such was not the case with the promo art for the next film.

In the You Only Live Twice paintings, he simply looks foolish: the “Look Ma no hands” flying of the Little Nellie (how is he firing the missiles sans hands on the controls? Using his feet? His potent Bond penis?) and the gravity-defying stance over Bloefeld’s volcano lair were and are technically impressive paintings undone by the way Bond doesn’t even appear to be in the scene. He’s like a cardboard cut-out of Bond clumsily positioned within an otherwise fantastic McCarthy action painting, the imposition of an inflexible trademark persona supplanting completely the man of action Bond was in the Thunderball art. It’s childish and humorless in ways the Thunderball art wasn’t, further evidence of how completely the franchise was losing its way.

McCarthy’s paintings are nevertheless entertaining and stylishly executed, but the witless absurdity of the You Only Live Twice art certainly reflects why McCarthy eventually abandoned the commercial art field to turn his talents to more naturalistic western scenes for the autumn years of his life. Smart man.

Consider, for instance, the rather wooden look of Connery’s Bond sitting in the film’s much-publicized new gadget, the one-man hi-tech helicoptor ‘Little Nellie.’ However convincingly-stage and rendered the action erupting around Little Nellie and Bond remains, it was a mistake to prop Bond like a plastic toy spy in his trademarked pose in the cockpit. It looked mighty dopey to me at age 12, and it looks even dopier to me now that I’m past the half-century mark:

What could be worse? Well, uh, consider that ludicrous ‘walking upside down’ pose McCarthy no doubt had imposed upon him for the otherwise spectacular volcano base painting below.

If the trademark-posed-Bond looked risible fixed like a plastic object into the Nellie cockpit, he looked even sillier defying gravity, apparently walking upside-down-sidewise with his feet hooked beneath the ladder rungs in this key promo art.

McCarthy’s masterful abilities to convincingly paint even the most stylized human figure in extreme action poses had been amply demonstrated in a plethora of magazine covers, illustrations and movie ad campaigns prior to You Only Live Twice — but even a master like McCarthy couldn’t ’sell’ this clumsy conceit:

Above is one of the solo McGinnis images for You Only Live Twice. As I say, I think McGinnis’s contribution to the campaign holds up better. His brand of stylization better melds with the studio’s increasing insistence on using the ‘trademark’ Bond poses, stiff though they may be, and the stiffy Bond inherently ‘fits’ with those McGinnis stylized ‘good girls’ with more grace than it ever would amid apocalyptic action and weapons of mass destruction. If nothing else, the illusion of Bond actually being an unquenchable erection fits the milieu oh so well. 

Robert McGinnis deserves accolades for his many stellar 1960s and ’70s movie campaign creations, including the promo paintings that adorned the one-sheets and ad campaigns for the Bond films Casino Royale (the bungled 1967 original, which wasn’t a Saltzman/Broccoli franchise entry but a weird satiric mess), Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die, and The Man With the Golden Gun. McGinnis had also painted the images associated with such iconic films as Breakast at Tiffany’s, Barbarella, Sleeper, etc. and even a 1968 Elvis Presley vehicle Stay Away, Joe. McGinnis art also helped promote lesser-known films like How to Steal a Million, Run for Your Wife, The Biggest Bundle of Them All, Jack of Diamonds, Scorpio, The Honkers, Semi-Tough, Day of the Dolphin, Gator, The Optimists, etc. The list goes on and on.

My personal favorite of all McGinnis movie ballyhoo paintings graced United Artists “how do we sell this movie?” campaigns for Duck, You Sucker aka A Fistful of Dynamite (1972, below). It didn’t save the movie’s poor boxoffice showing, but it sure captured the film’s stars and flavor in spades.

Frank McCarthy had one more Bond ad campaign in him — sans Connery, whose exhaustion with the whole Bond franchise resulted in his bolting, leaving it to George Lazenby to take over for my favorite of all the 1960s Bond films, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Alas, Lazenby’s presence (he gave a decent performance, but just couldn’t possibly inhabit the role as Connery had) undercut the otherwise superior production. Connery was sorely missed by the camera and the fanbase, and as a result On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was much villified and sadly underrated. It’s a terrific adventure film and dramatically the best of all the post-Goldfinger Bond films.

McCarthy’s campaign art, though, was spectacular. Nevertheless, there’s the patented ‘Bond-with-one-hand-on-arm-and-other-holding-his-Walther PPK’ pose grounding all the electricity out of the action scene: Bond as man of inaction, smirking at any hint of a threat. No wonder the producers ended up gravitating to Roger Moore as the next Bond after Connery abandoned the Saltzman/Broccoli Bond franchise for good with the lackluster Diamonds are Forever (1971). Note that Connery did come back a decade later as Bond for the ‘fuck you’ of the non-franchise renegade Never Say Never Again (1983) — but McCarthy was done as of the Lazenby Bond opus.

Like Connery, McCarthy was growing tired of the formulaic aspects of the Bond campaigns, and increasingly restless with the whole movie art field.

Of course, the studios clamored for McCarthy to work similar magic on their sub-Bond spy thrillers. Next to his art for the American ad campaign for Mario Bava’s terrific Danger: Diabolik (which Paramount Pictures certainly tried to market as a variation on the spy cycle, having none of the fumetti cultural associations to work with that had made the film a success in Europe), my favorite McCarthy painting of the lesser 1960s spy films McCarthy painted the ad art for was his lavish The Venetian Affair (1967) promo art, which made this Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV spinoff look like it offered more than it really did (even for U.N.C.L.E. fans).

But McCarthy saved his best for his most beloved genre.

It’s fitting that among his final ad campaigns was this rousing painting for Sergio Leone’s magnificent Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Paramount botched the release, but McCarthy clearly gave it his all, utilizing the concluding seconds of the film’s extended opening sequence as the one-sheet’s central image.

Well, pardners, that’s it for my Frank McCarthy retrospective. I hope you enjoyed this four-parter, and I’ll cook up something different for next week’s Myrant offerings…

 

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