Inspired by someone's passing comment on M's office in the James Bond
films having a "green baize door", which I was fairly sure was wrong,
I thought I'd go and check.
Generally this has been implied to be a double door, presumably
for sound insulation. In the early days it was red buttoned leather,
and had entrance lights outside. Dr. No (1962):
From Russia with Love (1963):
A couple of years later the lights had moved but the door looked the
same. (I assume the set was rebuilt for each film.) Goldfinger
(1964):
Thunderball (1965):
Because I'm being a completist, one of the two notable exceptions, an
unnamed submarine in You Only Live Twice (1967):
Back to the leather door for the next film, On Her Majesty's Secret
Service (1969).
Then they tried to change things up a bit; in Diamonds Are Forever
the briefing is in a different office, and Live and Let Die it's in
Bond's flat. But we're back to the red leather in The Man with the
Golden Gun (1974).
The first major change to the office comes along in The Spy Who Loved
Me (1977); I call this version the "overstuffed sausage casing". This
is the first time we get a good look through the door; presumably
before this M's office and Moneypenny's antechamber were separate
sets, but this one seems to have been constructed with an eye to
allowing more variety of camera angles. Leather on the inside, wood
panel on the outside:
Moonraker (1979):
M was left out of For Your Eyes Only (1981) because of the death of
Bernard Lee, and there's a temporary extra office for the Minister,
but it's the usual setup when Bond is brought in.
Octopussy (1983) (new M, played by Robert Brown who'd had a small
part as Admiral Hargreaves in Spy, but same office):
Never Say Never Again (1983) obviously didn't have access to the
standard sets, but they really don't seem to have tried very hard.
(And the visual grammar is wrong: M's office is on the left, it's
the launch point for the story, and Bond leaves rightwards to go
first to Moneypenny and then to the outside world.)
Back to the regular set with A View to a Kill (1985):
The other "special", the back of a C-130 in The Living Daylights
(1987).
Licence to Kill (1989) doesn't have much in Whitehall, but there is
this brief shot of what seems like the same outer door, and this seems
to have been the last time this set was used at all.
Then they changed things around again. GoldenEye (1995) starts with
a briefing room:
But while Judi Dench is without doubt the best actor to play M, her
actual office looks like a generic modern hotel room that's been built
on the cheap and is trying to be flashy. Only without the bed,
presumably because you show 007 a bed and he stops being able to think
about anything else.
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) doesn't use the office, but has a
briefing on the move.
Then it's back to the hotel room for The World Is Not Enough (1999)
and Die Another Day (2002).
I haven't seen any of the more recent films, but a quick scan suggests
that the briefing scene isn't part of the template any more.
(I don't spend a lot of time in the James Bond headspace, but I
recently had a very good experience trying out the RPG, and there are
two separate podcasts that have been going through the films with a
modern sensibility: Of Human Bondage, an offshoot of Pex
Lives that has no separate page, and
Kill James Bond, an offshoot
of Trash Future.)
- Posted by Shim at
11:16am on
25 May 2021
One thing about those offices is there's never any obvious reason why they're so big. Presumably just a perk of seniority. The lack of just about everything you see in an office is a bit jarring though. They only ever seem to have a single folder and a pen.
- Posted by RogerBW at
11:36am on
25 May 2021
In my headcanon, the books seen behind M's desk (sometimes with rolling steps for getting at them) are not Jane's or the London Gazette (that's what underlings are for) but the truly timeless references. It's all in Plato, all in Plato…
- Posted by Chris Bell at
11:42am on
25 May 2021
It isn't just the size; it's the fittings.
For reasons I won't go into I once had occasion, many years ago, to make an unusual inquiry of the Ministry of Defence; its nature was such that several juniors didn't know how to deal with it, and I was passed up the chain of command, as it were, until I reached someone with the power unequivocally to say a simple "No".
As I went from one office to the next it became obvious how you told the seniority of someone in that organisation. They went from small rug under feet behind the desk, to larger rug with the whole desk on it, to fitted but poor-quality carpet; and the obligatory potted plant started out as a rather sad rubber-plant with few leaves, to a cheese-plant with few leaves, to a flourishing cheese-plant with healthy, shiny leaves and plenty of them. (I had visions at the time of Minions moving someone's cherished plant into the office of someone of higher grade because it was now unsuitable to his lowly status, and how a junior might mourn the plant he had cared for as he looked sadly at the one his senior had been allowing to die.)
And each desk was less cluttered as I went up the ranks. The last office didn't even have a filing-cabinet in it!
- Posted by RogerBW at
11:44am on
25 May 2021
I assume that, Eric Blair-style, you come in one day to find you have Less Carpet and that's how you learn that you've been demoted…
- Posted by John P at
02:05pm on
25 May 2021
Was that the James Bond RPG by Victory Games?
I've got that somewhere but never actually tried it out.
- Posted by RogerBW at
02:43pm on
25 May 2021
That's the badger. Mike and I talked about it in podcast episode 101: I found it an interesting combination of advanced mechanics and traditional-game baggage.
- Posted by Dr Bob at
03:55pm on
25 May 2021
When I did my "welcome to the civil service" induction day, they did a semi-humorous talk about what our department used to be like in Ye Olden Days (pre 1990s, and possibly pre-1970s). They told us that when you rose to a certain grade you got an office with carpet, and at a more senior level you got to choose the colour of said carpet!
There was also a shriek of "What?!" from an audience member when we were told senior civil servants used to be able to have 1st class rail tickets to go to meetings.
- Posted by Brett Evill at
02:36pm on
26 May 2021
According to the text of the novel Moonraker there is a green baize door at the top of the steps that lead to the basement in the MI6 headquarters building, and another on the ninth floor "that led to the offices of M. and his personal staff". Bond "pushed through the green door and walked into the last room but one along the passage". That got him into a room when Moneypenny sat at her typewriter, with another door leading on into M's office.
The text is available here: https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/flemingi-moonraker/flemingi-moonraker-01-h.html
- Posted by RogerBW at
02:41pm on
26 May 2021
Fascinating! Fleming would certainly have been aware of the symbolism, though whether he's deliberately trying to make a point, copying a detail from his own time at the Admiralty, or simply making stuff up, is probably not resolvable at this distance.
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