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James Bond and the hat rack
Jan. 3rd, 2015 09:39 pmWorking my way through movies from the James Bond 50th anniversary collector set is an interesting experience. Watching the movies in order, you start to pick up patterns—references from one movie to another, continuity, even running gags you might have missed the first time around. For example, James Bond's hat. I had known he had a proclivity to toss it onto the hat rack like a ring or horseshoe, but I hadn't realized that what he did with it was actually considerably more subtle.
In Dr. No, Bond tossed his hat onto the hat rack in one go. In From Russia with Love, he did it again, only to discover M was in the office with Moneypenny and was not amused. In Goldfinger, Moneypenny tossed the hat onto the rack herself when she was trying to get Bond to go out with her. In Thunderball, Bond starts to toss it, then thinks better of it and just puts it on the rack—then it’s gone when he comes back for it, and Bond never wears a hat as a fashion statement again for the rest of the series (except at the beginning of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, apparently, though I haven't gotten that far yet).
So they launched a running gag, took it as far as it could go with a different variation each time round, then quite literally took it out of the picture so they didn't have to keep trying to top themselves. Pretty clever.
You might even call it a "hat trick."
(Update: And then they still found a way to play with the running gag in You Only Live Twice, with Bond tossing his naval uniform hat onto the rack in the office aboard the sub. Clever.)
In Dr. No, Bond tossed his hat onto the hat rack in one go. In From Russia with Love, he did it again, only to discover M was in the office with Moneypenny and was not amused. In Goldfinger, Moneypenny tossed the hat onto the rack herself when she was trying to get Bond to go out with her. In Thunderball, Bond starts to toss it, then thinks better of it and just puts it on the rack—then it’s gone when he comes back for it, and Bond never wears a hat as a fashion statement again for the rest of the series (except at the beginning of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, apparently, though I haven't gotten that far yet).
So they launched a running gag, took it as far as it could go with a different variation each time round, then quite literally took it out of the picture so they didn't have to keep trying to top themselves. Pretty clever.
You might even call it a "hat trick."
(Update: And then they still found a way to play with the running gag in You Only Live Twice, with Bond tossing his naval uniform hat onto the rack in the office aboard the sub. Clever.)
