"Bond, not Blond"

Here's the first official publicity shot of actor Daniel Craig as the new James Bond in the upcoming film "Casino Royale." You may notice something different about the blond actor's look when he's playing James Bond: he suddenly has brown hair. James Bond is supposed to be tall, dark, and handsome, but Craig is none of those, so they changed what they could, his hair color.

In contrast, Steven Spielberg cast the naturally blond-haired, blue-eyed Craig as the only one of the Mossad assassins in "Munich" who doesn't suffer moral qualms about killing people. (Must be too much Teutonic blood tainting his ethics, I guess.)

Craig is a fine actor, but his casting as James Bond seems like a money-saving stopgap, especially when Pierce Brosnan isn't quite over the hill yet, but was asking for $30 million. Brosnan's natural heir apparent as James Bond would seem to be Clive Owen, but I suspect that Owen would cost more than Craig.

I like my James Bonds to appear, like Bond, English and upper crust, like Roger Moore. Sean Connery is one of the greatest movie stars of all time, but he was too Scottish and too proletarian to be well-cast as Bond, although he got by on his colossal charisma. My dark horse choice for James Bond would be Hugh Grant, who makes a terrific cad, as in the Bridget Jones movies. I'll have to get by with seeing Hugh as Simon Cowell in "American Dreamz," where he costars with Dennis Quaid as George W. Bush.

The CraigNotBond website proposes some other roles that Daniel Craig would be better suited for, such as playing the rodent-obsessed groundskeeper Carl Spackler (first portrayed by Bill Murray) in a prequel to "Caddyshack."

If you want to learn more about why blonde women and brunet men are most in demand in the media, I reviewed Peter Frost's valuable book "Fair Women, Dark Men" at VDARE.com here.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer