Now that Moore, Roger Moore has declared that Craig, Daniel Craig has overtaken Connery, Sean Connery as the best Bond ever, it may be time to reflect upon the whole Bond enterprise and why it has endured for half-a-century.

The evolution of Bond as a cultural icon calls attention to how its progress has paralleled that of the culture as a whole. Bond has gone from Hefner-era swinging-London ’60s liberated male to 21st-century British social realist thug, although the prototype for the latter was itself a product of the ’60s in the plays of John Osborne, among others. Bond has shared the whole time the obsession of most male iconic heroes with maintaining a certain dignity despite the bloody business in which they are involved. Hence the instantly classic image in the current film of Craig as Bond adjusting his cuffs after falling through the destroyed roof of a moving train during the mad chase of a particularly hard-to-catch villain.

The “Bond girls” have evolved too. Starting with Diana Rigg in the first film after Connery, the stereotypical “girls” have had to share the screen with an increasingly independent array of Bond women. One of the ironies of Craig’s Bond-as-thug routine is that he, unlike the suave Connery, would find it appalling to slap any of them around, except as might be necessary in a fair fight to the death.

Which brings us back to Moore’s anointment of Craig as the new best Bond and what SKYFALL might say about that. It is certainly true that Craig has made the character interesting again. After Connery, two of the Bonds, George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton, were indifferent, even if their films were not all that bad; another, Pierce Brosnan, was disappointing, given that he is a talented actor capable of real substance. Moore himself, the only one after Connery and before Craig to make the part his own, did so by pretty much exhausting Bond’s potential as a character. Moore’s performances suggested that the role had shot its wad with Connery and had a future only as twinkly-eyed self-spoofery.

Craig pulled something new out of the martini glass, even to the point, in his first outing, of half-embracing the fanzine conceit that there is not just one Bond played by different people in successive decades, but a series of 007s with the pseudonym attached as a matter of protocol. The new, and thoroughly enjoyable, film torpedoes that notion, and even suggests in a final flourish that the new Bond that Craig represents will revert in the next film to the Bond that Connery taught us.

Maybe that’s the way to resolve the whole Bond project, to go full circle, because my take on it is that Craig is not the best Bond, but the last Bond, just as Connery was the first. Every subsequent Bond was judged by Connery, and now every past Bond is judged by Craig. I can’t help but wonder if they will pop up together in the next film in some grand conclusion to the saga. I rather doubt it, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen, or more important that it shouldn’t.

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