Barry McCann looks back at Warhead, the best 007 movie we never had, and one which may well have starred Richard Burton, Rod Taylor or Laurence Harvey as James Bond!

Left: Ian Fleming at his Jamaican home, Goldeneye

Main image: Promotional artwork for Thunderball, featuring Bond and Domino

If there is one thing that fans of long running film franchises love more than discussing their favourite entries, it has to be speculating about the planned movies that didn’t make it. The James Bond series certainly has its share of casualties, including among others the Gerry Anderson-sponsored Moonraker proposal that was replaced by Diamonds Are Forever (1971), or Timothy Dalton’s Hong Kong based third adventure that may well have pitted him against Anthony Hopkins and Whoopi Goldberg!

But the most mourned near miss has to be the Kevin McClory project of the mid to late 1970s, a producer who was first at making a serious attempt to bring James Bond to the big screen only to see that ship sail with the EON flag flying from its mast. And if Cubby Broccoli had not got his way, 1977 would have seen The Spy Who Loved Me with Roger Moore up against Warhead… Starring Sean Connery!

“The Battle of the Bonds” became the much used headline during 1976 as newspapers and magazines enthusiastically reported on the prospect of not one but two new James Bond films being set up for release against each other, the latest entry in the legitimate EON series going head to head with a rival by Thunderball producer Kevin McClory. But the story of how that situation evolved starts back in 1959.

Kevin McClory was an independent Irish film producer who had just completed his debut feature, The Boy and the Bridge, and now looking for a follow up project. Meanwhile, Ian Fleming had been seeking to get his Bond novels filmed following the 1954 American TV version of Casino Royale. He subsequently sold its movie rights to Gregory Ratoff, with options on Live and Let Die to Alexander Korda and Moonraker to Rank, but none of these came to fruition.

McClory also recognised the screen potential of James Bond, but not necessarily the existing novels.

He approached Fleming with the proposition of composing an original 007 screenplay tailored more specifically to cinema audiences, and thus the project James Bond, Secret Agent was initiated.

Being a keen scuba diver, McClory suggested the story should involve underwater action and be set in the Bahamas where he planned to set up a film studio that could be rented out for other productions. He also wanted the plot to revolve around a stolen nuclear bomb hidden beneath the sea, Bond’s mission to recover it.

Ian Fleming’s American friend Ernest Cuneo was invited on board to compose a story memo in which Bond uncovers a plot by agents from behind the Iron Curtain to detonate a nuclear device on an American military base. The Bahamas would serve as the location of transfer for the bomb, and climax in an underwater battle between frogmen on both sides which really got McClory excited.

Fleming then worked this up into a fuller screen treatment for which he substituted the Mafia as the antagonists, arguing that in the two years it would take the film to be made, the world political stage may change and the Russians no longer the bad guys! He devised a Mafiosi head, Henrico Largo, who operates under the cover of his own nightclub outside Epping Forest where he plans to snatch an atomic bomb from a nearby airbase, and transfer it to Nassau using his 500 ton yacht ‘The Virginian.’