James Bond’s garrote watch has a stranglehold on DIY fans

There are many people who find this difficult. The Love of RussiaThe ideal James Bond movie. It’s got the early-1960s vibes that the franchise thrived in, and it catches Sean Connery at perhaps his highest level of comfort with the character before he began a slow dip into aloof boredom. This film has a gaggle of terrorists that are truly bizarre, and it’s antics around the world feel like they have a story behind them instead of being a travel advert. It wouldn’t take long for the Bond series to escalate its fantastical elements, but in Love From Russia, they feel fairly reined in, with the most outlandish thing perhaps being henchman Red Grant’s ability to take a fistful of brass knuckles to the gut and not even flinch.

And it’s with Red Grant that Bond has the best fight scene of the series to date. Grant and Bond are thrown together in the tight quarters of an enclosed room inside a train. Robert Shaw plays Grant with an intense creepiness. Connery did most of the stunts himself. The fight took about three weeks. It rides the line between being highly stylized (cinematographer Ted Moore makes brilliant use of the shadows of the train car contrasting with the lights passing by the window) and brutal, and in the end, Bond prevails by strangling Grant to death with his garrote wire watch — a gadget that has taken on a life of its own in the years since, leading to DIY creations and a lingering cultural status.

It’s a gadget that, like the movie, feels pretty grounded, especially in comparison to what’s to come in the franchise. According to Fangoria editor-in-chief and James Bond superfan Phil Nobile Jr., it’s that borderline tangible relationship with reality that makes it memorable. “A good Bond gadget is a bit of a moving target (since Bond’s world is generally set ‘five minutes from now,’ and real-life tech is frequently catching up to the movies), and a good gadget has to thread the needle of being both fantastical and theoretically possible,” he wrote to Polygon.

It has become a cultural icon that transcends the Bond films. It’s also appeared in films like Brian De Palma’s Blow outEven former president George Bush used the weapon The Simpsons, but its greatest legacy has been perhaps that people don’t just wonder if it could be real, but if it It’s real now. There are homemade ones with questionable efficacy and a cursory Google search will lead you to forum threads of people inquiring about them: “Was this ever really a thing?” “Where can I buy a piano wire watch?” “Is/was garrote wire actually used?” A few pose ethical concerns and perhaps legal ones that… won’t be shared here.

Few weapons from 007’s arsenal and those of his enemies are as materialistic. The series has evolved since then, with all sorts of vehicles and weapons that dazzle the audience. It’s much more realistic to consider what would go into the existence of a garrote wire watch than, for example, the invisible car in Die Another Day.

So wondering if a James Bond gadget has existed isn’t totally unfounded. The series’ creator, Ian Fleming, worked for Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division during World War II, and the real-life espionage knowledge that he obtained there made for gripping fiction when filtered through the hypermasculinity and anything-goes adventures of Bond. Many of the cast members of early 007 movies had been through World War II, and were familiar with the spies-ready climate of Cold War.

Terence Young was a former tank commander. Ted Moore was a cinematographer and Syd CAIN, an art director in the Royal Air Force. Richard Maibaum, the screenwriter of this film, was a Captain in Signal Corps. The Love of RussiaThe real men Fleming was inspired by were those who worked with the technology of World War II. Even the character Bond himself is hinted to have served in World War II, an aspect that ages him a bit, and thus helps provide some generational conflict between Bond and Grant, with the latter constantly riling the spy with accusations of “old man.”

What was the basis of a garrote-wire watch? Alexis Albion, the curator of the International Spy Museum, Washington, D.C., acknowledges that garrotes are a staple in military combat. “Garrotes have been around for centuries,” Albion says. “But where we really see examples of this in relation to the movie is in World War II. There was a special group that was created by Winston Churchill called Special Operations Executive, as he wanted to ‘set Europe ablaze’ by sending operatives behind enemy lines. They would’ve done covert operations and sabotage and anybody who would’ve been trained there would’ve used a garrote.”

It seems that hiding a garrote inside a watch is a fiction. “I have never seen anything where it was a garrote concealed within a watch,” Albion says. “I’ve never seen that personally.” That doesn’t mean that a watch hasn’t been used for espionage, though. “We’ve got a number of watches used for concealment purposes, but not as a weapon,” Albion says. “Mostly as surveillance of some kind, like we’ve got watch cameras and audio devices.”

That also doesn’t mean that a garrote hasn’t been used as a concealed weapon before. It is even a concealed part of an item that has multiple uses. “It was called a Peskett and it was a kind of multipurpose weapon used for close combat. It has three ways of using it as an offensive weapon,” Albion says. “There’s just a dagger. And then on one end, there’s a sort of a large, heavy ball that could be used to bludgeon someone. And the garrote wire was wound up inside the ball and could be pulled out of it.”

By combining the watch, a common but fairly technical device, with a garrote wire, which is about as low-tech as one can get and extremely deadly, we end up with a pop culture weapon that doesn’t just represent The Love of RussiaJames Bond is a popular character for a reason. As Albion says, we like him because we can identify with a human character rather than “something that’s too technology-based.” It’s attainable even if the reality of being a spy is far beyond the reach of most of us. “That’s sort of the appeal of the spy in general, which is the sense that we all have that ordinary exterior, but underneath we could be secretive,” she says.

Shortly, the garrote-wire watch provided the perfect conclusion to Grant’s and Bond’s brawl. “The train sequence is undeniably epic, and 60 years later feels almost punk rock in its execution,” Nobile says about the iconic fight at the end of The Love of Russia. “The ugly, dirty grappling that mainstream audiences had never seen before — it’s all brutal and unexpected. The series has been trying to top this scene for decades, and it never has.”

It is possible that the garrote watch’s fascination lies not in the simplicity of the device. You can also check out our other blog posts.It may not have been real but the fight that ensued had many of the same characteristics as a real life encounter. In the beginning, it is a new cool gadget. But its final use captures the all-too-realistic ugliness of the fight and the realistic scrambling. The gadget is more of an integral part of the action than just a plot device. In a series of gadgets like jetpacks, explosion pens and submarine cars it finds a human touch.