007 auction to cause a stir
2005-11-16 13:31
London - Nothing says "glamour" like 007, and London auction house Bonhams is banking on Bond, James Bond, to fetch quintuple-0 figures at an auction of film memorabilia on Wednesday.
With the 21st Bond film Casino Royale - starring British actor Daniel Craig (aka 'the blond Bond') - scheduled to start shooting in January 2006, Bonhams felt the timing was right.
The core of the two-day sale, which also includes rock-'n'-roll collectibles from The Beatles and The Who, is a vast array of 007 props, clothing, autographs, posters, toys and assorted Bond miscellany.
"No other character beside Sherlock Holmes has ever made such a successful crossover from literature to film. Agent 007 has captured the imagination of every generation since the 1950s," said Adrian Cowdry, Bonhams's Film memorabilia consultant, who got hooked himself at age five when he saw Goldfinger (1964).
Ian Fleming, author of the thrillers that launched the film series, "created a character with whom both lower and upper classes could identify", Cowdry commented.
Bonhams estimates the whole sale will net upwards of £750 000, with the Bond memorabilia yielding £175 000.
Bonds' devoted followers
For many fans, Sean Connery remains the quintessential Bond. But happily for auctioneers with a plethora of items spanning five decades, each of the other four 007 alumni - George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan - has his own devoted following.
Lazenby, for example, commands sheer novelty value, as On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) was the only Bond film in which he appeared.
The replica Walther PPK gun with faux cherry wood grips he wields in OHMSS (as the film is known to fans) is expected to fetch over £4 000, even if it is "well-used" and missing a few bits.
Bond geeks know that the all-but-unwatchable 1967 version of Casino Royale, starring Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, David Niven and Orson Welles, was nothing more than a royal spoof. But that does not make Lot 523 - a 30 x 40-inch framed poster of the film - any less desirable.
Because the majority of advertising material was discarded once a film stopped showing, posters and items in good condition, even from abroad, are particularly valuable. The older the film, the more collectible.
Auction for all budgets
While this is Bonhams' first large-scale Bond memorabilia sale, it is not the auctioneer's first foray into 007 territory.
In May 2003, they auctioned the tungsten-silver Aston Martin V12 Vanquish driven by Brosnan in Die Another Day (2002) for £210 000. The car is now in the Cars of the Stars Museum in Keswick, England.
An earlier Bond-mobile driven by Sean Connery in Goldfinger (1964) and Thunderball (1965) - an Aston Martin DB5 roadster equipped with ever-so-useful passenger-side ejection seat, machine guns and a bullet-proof rear window - was famously stolen in 1997 from the Florida airport hangar where it was stored by its owner, Anthony Pugliese, who had bought it at auction at Sotheby's in 1986.
The car has never been recovered.
The Bonhams sale will offer something for every budget, including well-used Corgi toy cars marked by playground dents-and-dings or canine teeth marks starting at 20 pounds. The same toys in pristine condition are likely to fetch 10 times as much.
"Who doesn't like James Bond?" said potential bidder Steven Frank, a retail consultant from the United States.
"It's a formula that appeals to people from everywhere: 'Guy gets girl. Guy saves world'."