A history of stylish screen killers from Bond to Blondie to Bonnie

Extreme violence as a form of cinematic entertainment began, as with sexual intercourse, “between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP” – which was just in time for me. 

Of course, there had been endless on-screen nastiness before Dr No’s 1962 release – Warner Brothers’ 1930s gangster movies, endless WWII films, noirthrillers and Westerns up the wazoo.  But, in almost every one of these films, the violence was of two kinds: shocking, because it was there to make a point, or so ineptly staged as not to have any real effect on the audience’s sensibilities. An example of the former would be Lee Marvin throwing  boiling coffee in Gloria Grahame’s face in The Big Heat (she returns the favour towards the end of the film). We are not meant to enjoy this (at least, I hope we’re not): it’s there to show us just how evil Marvin’s gangster is – and, no doubt, to act as a warning to young ladies tempted by the superficial glamour of the gangster milieu. 

For examples of inept, meaningless violence, watch almost any “oater” (I exempt the work of geniuses such as John Ford and Anthony Mann) from the silent era until 1964, when the Spaghetti Western splattered into life. Guns which are no more convincing than the ones I played with as a child are wielded limply by actors who habitually discharge them while they’re pointed at the floor or the sky: if they’d contained live ammunition, the other actors would have been perfectly safe, but the film crew and a sizable segment of the local bird population would have been wiped out. 

The same goes for crime films: as with hopelessly unconvincing backdrops and ridiculous fight sequences, the lack of realism just doesn’t seem to have worried directors at the time. Guns are discharged and characters killed simply to advance the plot. The killings have no style. In fact, male actors paid far more attention to how they smoked a cigarette than to how they discharged their weapon (as it were).

Then along came Sean Connery in Dr No. Bond sits in the darkened room where he has earlier made love to the female spy who was part of the plot to kill him (knowingly bonking someone who wants you dead represents another new twist). Bond is waiting for the man who is to assassinate him while he supposedly sleeps the sleep of the sexually satiated. The door opens. The assassin fires several rounds into what he imagines to be Bond’s sleeping form. Bond flicks the lights on, and, with a bored, insolent expression, accentuated by the languid cigarette drooping from the corner of his mouth, calmly, and with minimum effort, shoots his would-be killer dead. 

It is deliberately casual. His manner suggests he does this sort of thing all the time. We are meant to relish Bond’s ruthlessness. We are supposed lo laugh at his lack of any discernible shred of compassion. (And we do!) His effortless mastery of his tediously predictabe opponent is so absolute that Bond is bored. Here we have – really for the first time – a hero who kills with genuinestyle. Before Bond, only villains were allowed to possess a cool killing style. When Jack Palance’s “low-down, lyin’ Yankee” gunslinger murdered Elisha Cook Jn in Shane, or when Richard Widmark’s Tommy Udo pushed an old lady in a wheelchair down a steep flight of stairs in Kiss of Death, we were meant to be horrified: after Bond, we were meant to chortle. 

But Bond, at least, is still fighting for something worthwhile – for the West, Democracy, Queen and Country. After all, he is formally “licensed to kill”. The fact that he enjoys his work is a bonus. Spaghetti Westerns changed all that. Clint Eastwood - known as “Blondie” or “The Man With No Name” -represents nothing and no one apart from himself: he is neither a good man, nor does he represent a good cause. He is a selfish sociopath who kills expertly, and with style. I’ve always been bemused by the title, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: Eli Wallach’s no oil painting, but who’s supposed to be Good? (I was going to suggest that Ralph Meeker’s Mike Hammer in 1955’s Kiss Me Deadly was a precursor, but Meeker’s character is utterly charmless – it’s an interesting movie, but we really don’t care whether he dies or not: with Eastwood, oddly, we do.)

Although A Fistful of Dollars was made in 1964, Sergio Leone’s bloodfests didn’t appear in the US and the UK until 1967, a year which also saw the release of The Dirty Dozen – a celebration of psychopathic violence in a good cause – and Bonnie & Clyde, that repellent hymn to political violence. 

Bonnie and Clyde, of course, were two of the dumbest, most inadequate and most sadistic incompetents who ever toted a tommy-gun, but Arthur Penn’s account of their revolting criminal careers painted them as revolutionaries, whose violence was a form of revenge on polite society for what it had done to poor farmers during the Depression. This was the cinematic equivalent of filming a sympathetic portrait of Adolph and Eva - their world was crashing down around them, but those crazy kids still had each other. Lefties could sit back and enjoy the gore, safe in the knowledge that innocent people were being slaughtered in the armed struggle against The Man. The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther actually lost his job after questioning the morality of the film. Now, while Crowther was a fairly insufferable character, in this instance he was dead right: it’s a vile, evil movie. (The details of Crowther’s downfall are included in Mark Harris’s brilliant book, Scenes From a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood.)

So, cinema audiences were first encouraged to enjoy stylish violence in a good cause, then to enjoy it when it was underpinned by no cause at all, and then, finally, to relish superbly-shot sadism committed by amoral morons who were, in the strange, twisted minds of the liberal left, on the side of the angels.

What a long, strange, blood-soaked trip it’s been for film fans ever since.