The new Bond movie with the new blonde Bond guy

1. Daniel Craig: Double oh heaven!
The Bond film is a homage to Daniel Craig's six-pack, but it shows a vulnerability that will have women swooning. Sarah Sands salutes a hard man with a heart

The seminal moment in Casino Royale has James Bond stripped, tied to a chair and about to have his testicles whipped with a length of rope by the villain Le Chiffre. Before he starts, Le Chiffre says to his victim: "You have taken care of your body." Who could argue? This film is an homage to the six-pack, a celebration of musculature. It will be enjoyed by everyone, but above all by gym fetishists.

It is a movie made for men's magazines. The locations are fine - Bahamas, Lake Como, Venice. The female interest, Eva Green, is featured soulfully rather than lustfully in the current GQ. The magazine really loses its head and heart over Daniel Craig's torso.

Rather than interview the director, Martin Campbell, or the frankly-wrong-demographic Dame Judi Dench, the magazine goes for the fitness coach Simon Waterson. His thrilling goal for Craig was "functioning muscle" - "There's no point in having great muscles if they can't be used in a beneficial way like speeding across the ground, climbing, jumping and fighting."

Craig's muscles appear most beneficially in the shower scene. Having completed his jumping and fighting he spots a traumatised Eva Green crouching in the shower, wearing her evening dress. Naturally, he joins her in black tie. His wet shirt quickly becomes transparent; this must be the most homoerotic scene in the history of British cinema. Eva Green is beautiful but nothing like as sexy as the beefcake.

Marines, who pride themselves on being the toughest soldiers, are said to put up pictures of bodybuilders on their walls rather than topless women. Daniel Craig's James Bond is much more Andy McNab than Ian Fleming, so it is right and proper that he should be proud of his pecs. It also takes care of the Bond sexism lobby. Eva Green is allowed to compliment Craig on his "perfectly formed arse", which is not a phrase James Bond could get away with now.

But here is the sly trade-off. When the violence hots up, Craig can say "Get the girl out" and it would be shrewish to complain. This is the updated version of Sean Connery patting the girl on the bottom and telling her to leave him to his man's business.

The latest Bond has dispensed with the Hugh Hefner approach to female casting - one of everything: a blonde, a brunette, a redhead, a Scandinavian-looking one, an Oriental one, etc. There are only three glamorous women on show and none in the opening credits.

The political incorrectness lies instead in the detailed, unconditional depiction of violence. The film shows you what James Bond actually does for a living. People are not dispatched by fabulous technology but by knuckle-to-knuckle fighting. The opening scene, which shows how James Bond got his promotion, is a shocker. The men in my cinema audience enjoyed the flaming trucks and falling buildings but best of all they liked the fact that Bond's guns got bigger during the performance.

I remember David Hare writing a newspaper article, in the aftermath of his play Stuff Happens, about neocon contempt for artistic liberals. Hare said the reason he was thought to lack political authority was that he had never killed anyone. The military men are certainly riding high. President Bush may have lost the trust of Americans for his policy in Iraq, but John McCain can do no wrong because he fought bravely and was tortured in Vietnam.

The real role model for Daniel Craig, however, is Kiefer Sutherland in 24. Not only did he give cultural permission for Daniel Craig to be tough and blond, but he also set the pain bar. Bond, like Sutherland, is capable of physical endurance just short of crucifixion and of inflicting any degree of violence for the sake of "the job". Although Bond is British, Daniel Craig does not refer to patriotic motives. By taking the character out of the class system, the film's producers have removed the assumption that Bond is propelled by school and country. Daniel Craig's Bond is an outsider, apparently an orphan who was bright enough to get to Oxford. Like Kiefer Sutherland, he risks his life outrageously many times a day because that happens to be his job.

There is also an innate SAS ethos that he is testing himself and his perfect body to the limits. Incidentally, if the SAS is his role model, then we must object to his much quoted line in the film: " Well I understand Double-Os have a very short life expectancy." It contains the twin sins of bragging and self-pity. I have, knowingly, met two SAS heroes. The first, who I later discovered had performed astonishing acts of bravery in Iraq, looked a little like Daniel Craig but without the high living and self-reverence. He found everybody else much, much more interesting than himself. His lack of vanity extended to a refusal to be photographed - which also happened to be a statement about self-preservation.

The other SAS leader I met in Afghanistan was so quiet and unassuming that I feared he was shy or stupid. In fact, he had a reputation for unsurpassed toughness. I was not looking at a wallflower but a coiled spring. Judi Dench, as M, asks Daniel Craig if he can stay emotionally detached. As with Kiefer Sutherland, the dramatic tension lies in a tender man showing hardness, or the other way round.

The Craig Bond appeals to men, but women are also bathing in the reflected glory. If I may return to the shower scene; what makes it so charged is that here is a killer, with overpowering muscles, holding a woman's head like a vase. The power and menace are part of the excitement. He could rip her tongue out, but look, he is cradling her instead.

The pre-publicity for this film started early and back in July I saw the short-lived love interest, Caterina Murino, being carried across a Jamaican beach by Richard Branson. (Did Branson's cameo role end up on the cutting-room floor?) At the time, there were huge doubts about the suitability of Daniel Craig for the role. Murino defended him oddly. She said that Craig was the best Bond because you could believe that he would kill someone.

It is true that he has killer sex appeal. He is a post-11 September Bond. As M sighs at one point, oh for the certainties of the Cold War. Daniel Craig knows that the enemy is shadowy and that he means immediate and violent harm. When Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, director general of MI5, announced last week that the secret services had thwarted five major conspiracies since the 7 July attacks, you might have thought she was helping Tony Blair's anti-terror legislation, but of course she was really part of the hype for James Bond.

Manningham-Buller is quite an M character, even though she works for the other service. Doughty and headmistressy, she also has a quick-witted quirkiness about her. I liked M's irritation and admiration when Bond broke into her penthouse. I had a breakfast last year with Manningham-Buller who said she would like to read the newspaper I was then editing but could not get it in her village. I offered to deliver it, if she would just give me her address. She fixed me with direct blue eyes and said: "I don't think so."

The great controversy about Casino Royale is the ditching of Moneypenny. Since Bond's boss has become a woman, there is no need for another office figure and she never made the grade as love interest. I am of the pro-Moneypenny tendency. The obituaries of the East German spy Markus Wolf make clear that targeting of self-sacrificing spinsters is at the heart of spying narratives.

The most important distinction between Daniel Craig and his earlier predecessors is that he has approached the role with the intensity of an actor. Both Sean Connery and Roger Moore regarded the film as mere entertainment.This had advantages and problems for Craig. He is more convincing and three-dimensional in the role. He is both tougher and more sensitive. He shows real tears. But because he is more of an actor than his ancestors, paradoxically, it is harder for the audience to separate him from his role.

I think that he has also fallen into the Ross Kemp trap of identification with his screen character. Someone like Roger Moore was firmly of the it's-only-a-film school of acting. It would be vulgar and ridiculous to go overboard on character. A certain woodenness was more dignified. Craig is more of an actor on set and off it. He has displayed hurt and paranoia over his rough treatment by the press. He has never forgiven the red tops for laughing at him when he turned up to a press launch anxiously hanging on to the rail of a speedboat and wearing a life jacket. No man wants to be described as a big girl's blouse but especially not James Bond.

His outburst in the current Radio Times sounds mildly hysterical: "People hate me. They don't think I'm right for the role. It's a simple as that." Craig said in another interview, only half joking, that he would be happy to use a stuntman in the sex scenes but not for the action. He is endearingly proud of the pain he has endured. "I learned from day one that it was gonna hurt," he says to Empire magazine. "And the whole film really did hurt. Just pain. If you are not getting hurt you are not doing it properly."

You can certainly hear the thud and the cracks during the film. This is the action Bond movie. The credits for stuntmen at the end of the film roll on endlessly. David Walliams's slightly embarrassing fanzine tribute to James Bond on Thursday night, My Life with James Bond, included an interview with Jonathan Ross. The witty metrosexual presenter sighed that Bond was simply the manliest man on the planet.

Each James Bond has been a new incarnation of manliness. Daniel Craig brings us Special Forces hardness. That is why men will love this film. Women will love it because our hero is prepared to give up his vocation for the Bond girl he loves. His line "You have stripped me of my armour. Whatever is left of me, I am yours" had women in the cinema audience collapsing.

Casino Royale is more than a terrific film. It is a rebalancing of the sexes. The feminist revolution is over. It is a rapturous return to Adam and Eve.


2. The Bond bunch: the failed contenders for coveted role
From matinee idol Dirk Bogarde to TV quizmaster Bob Holness, the role of 007 has attracted some unlikely contenders. Andrew Roberts on the ones who got away

"He reminds me rather of Hoagy Carmichael, but there is something cold and ruthless [about him]," was how Ian Fleming's heroine Vesper Lynd described Commander James Bond in Casino Royale. Today, in a world when computer users with too much time on their hands have been logging on to www.danielcraigis notbond.com, it is refreshing to remember that, 44 years ago, another leading actor from British television was not universally warmly received as Bond either.

When Dr No premiered in November 1962, many British cinemagoers would have been chiefly familiar with Sean Connery, thanks to his many starring roles in BBC TV plays, in addition to a varied film career that encompassed a role as a romantic lead opposite Lana Turner in Another Time, Another Place, plus his unique brand of crooning in the 1959 Disney epic Darby O'Gill and the Little People. After Dr No, however, his pre-007 acting career seemed to fade in favour of the "penniless, hitherto unknown lorry driver" that made for much better PR.

Connery's casting followed that now traditional filmic process known as "parallel Bonds". Prior to the shooting of Dr No, it appeared that virtually every cultured British actor was considered for the role. On 5 October 1961, the trade paper Kinematograph Weekly announced that production on Dr No would not now take place until the following year, allowing the producers to concentrate on their search for a star. A national newspaper ran a competition for the ideal screen Bond, although Peter Anthony, the eventual winner, turned out to be a model with no acting experience.

A few years earlier, the rights to Moonraker were owned by the Rank Organisation, which was scrutinising Fleming's work with a view to providing a vehicle for Dirk Bogarde, and in 1958 James Mason was even scheduled to star in a television adaptation of From Russia with Love. EON Productions founded in 1961, started by Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, also considered Mason, for the first Bond movie, Dr No. Cary Grant was in the running too, but was reluctant to commit to a sequel.

Meanwhile, David Niven was seen as too old, and after briefly considering Peter Finch and Trevor Howard, the producers targeted younger actors such as Stephen Boyd and Rod Taylor.

As history relates, the Bond producers even considered an American actor - albeit long based in the UK - Patrick McGoohan. However, ITV's own Danger Man famously spurned both 007 and Simon Templar on the grounds that both characters were "immoral cads".

The square-jawed Rank leading man Michael Craig and B-film smoothie William Franklyn were also briefly considered, while the Shakespearean actor Richard Johnson apparently came the closest to being cast, being screen tested no less than three times by the director Terence Young.

However, as the series progressed, and Connery relaxed into the role of Bond, the actor became indivisible from the part, which did not stop the producer Kevin McClory planning to cast another actor in his own version of Thunderball. At one stage it almost seemed as though the soignée charms of the Lithuanian-born British actor Laurence Harvey, then fresh from his successes in Room at the Top and The Manchurian Candidate, would inherit the part. However, although Harvey was one of the actors mentioned by McClory - the other being Richard Burton - an agreement was reached with EON, leaving fans to speculate that Bond's label snobbery could have been written with Harvey in mind, as indeed could one of the few physical descriptions that Fleming ever issued of his anti-hero - "...something cold and dangerous in that face... Bond knew there was something alien and un-English about himself".

The other plausible British alternative to Connery was Oliver Reed. In 1967, at which point Connery had seemingly left the role of 007, Reed was in the frame and despite Broccoli's subsequent claims that, "...with Reed we would have had a far greater problem to destroy his image and remould him as James Bond. We just didn't have the time or money to do that", the role could have been ideal for him. By the late 1960s, Reed's many B-film roles of teddy boys, beatniks and werewolves were well behind him, thanks to the suave public school-voiced angry young men that he had essayed for Michael Winner in The Jokers and I'll Never Forget What's 'is Name, which leaves the faint suggestion that post-Oliver!, Reed may been dropped on the grounds of cost.

Whether Reed would have made a better 007 than George Lazenby will always be open to debate, but when Broccoli and Saltzman announced that their leading man for Diamonds Are Forever would be than John Gavin, the reaction from United Artists was not entirely favourable. Gavin, then famed for being utterly unmemorable in both Spartacus and Psycho, and a future US Ambassador to Mexico, might well have achieved the prized award as the world's worst-ever Bond, fending off stiff competition from Burt Reynolds.

Fortunately, after being visited by Broccoli, Reynolds refused to believe 007 could be played by an American, leaving the way for Roger Moore to achieve the role of his career in Live and Let Die - otherwise Bond fans would have deprived of one of the greatest-ever camp fests from 1970s British cinema. Live and Let Die might combined safari suits with the sensitivities of Love Thy Neighbour, and Moore might have been older than Connery, but his eyebrow-raising charm was enough to fend off the opposition of Julian Glover, Patrick Mower, Christopher Cazenove and the New Zealand actor David Warbeck over the following 12 years.

By the mid-1980s, once Roger and his stunt doubles were enjoying well earned rest, the role of 007 almost appeared to be a straitjacket for any ambitious young actor. Lewis Collins was once allegedly in the frame, but the failure of his SAS epic, Who Dares Wins, apparently put paid to that notion, while Sam Neill lost the role to Timothy Dalton.

Over the past 20 years, many names have come to the fore, from the plausible (Hugh Jackman), the unlikely (Russell Crowe) and the surreal (John Travolta), to the potentially horrific (Mel Gibson). As for the recent debate concerning Clive Owen, all that need be said is that in The Croupier he does bear a marked resemblance to a young Laurence Harvey. Still, the world was spared more than one appearance of Neil "brother of Sean" Connery as agent 0007 in the 1967 Italian Z-film Operation Kid Brother - just imagine Sean with an Acker Bilk Beard and a dubbed American voice.

Ironically, the original Bond actor has never once been considered to portray 007 on the silver screen. In 1956, Bob Holness was a young actor working for South African radio and, given the fact that television would not arrive there until 1976, the fact that Bob may not have particularly resembled Hoagy Carmichael in appearance was of no consequence. Instead, listeners across the Union thrilled to Bob's cultured tones as he defeated evil master criminals in search of world domination with the same assurance as he would subsequently quell stroppy sixth-formers who were in danger of losing that pony-trekking holiday in the Lake District on television's Blockbusters.

'Casino Royale' opens nationwide on 17 November