GET SMART ★DIRECTED BY PETER SEGALWRITTEN BY TOM J. ASTLE AND MATT EMBERWITH STEVE CARELL, ANNE HATHAWAY, DWAYNE JOHNSON, ALAN ARKIN, AND TERENCE STAMP
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Over the years that fantasy has suffered some real growing pains. In the postfeminist era, stunning women are still a requisite of the James Bond adventures, but gone are the days when 007 could help himself to sex kittens with such smarmy names as Holly Goodhead and Pussy Galore. Nowadays Bond’s women are more likely to be kicking ass alongside him before they slip into something more comfortable. Even the spoofs have had to reckon with these shifting gender politics, though like the Austin Powers blockbusters, two specimens showing this week—the big-screen remake of Get Smart and the French import OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies—prove that satirizing the Bond formula’s sexism yields a bigger comic payoff than trying to neutralize it.
Watching Get Smart, I often wondered if the filmmakers weren’t trying to fix something that isn’t broken. Alone among the 60s spy spoofs, Get Smart was fairly asexual, partly because network TV was so prudish back then but also because Max was such a prize doofus you could hardly imagine him putting the moves on some Mata Hari type. Though Brooks and Henry gave him a leggy sidekick, Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon), their relationship was more equal than anything in the Bond movies. She always let Max take the lead, alerting him to danger and allowing him to react, but she was also quick to point out his idiotic miscalculations. There was never any doubt that 99 was the brains of the operation, though her tact enabled Max to persist in his smug, vainglorious pronouncements.
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