Baby boomers had reason to feel slightly more decrepit than usual last week when it was learned that Robert Vaughn, the veteran character actor who played the debonair secret agent Napoleon Solo on the popular television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-68), had died at the age of 83.
Moreover, Vaughn expired from natural causes: He wasn’t struck down by a laser beam, or vaporized in an atomic blast, or betrayed by a sultry brunette in a Manhattan penthouse. And adding insult to injury, Vaughn’s obituaries reminded boomers that the Scottish actor David McCallum, who played his teenybopper-heartthrob partner Illya Kuryakin, still appears on television, also age 83.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was very much a product of its times, the high tide of the Cold War—but with a twist. The popularity of the early James Bond movies had led to a series of knockoffs: the Derek Flint films, starring James Coburn, the Matt Helm movies featuring Dean Martin, and TV shows such as U.N.C.L.E. But like the Bond films, the knockoffs of the 1960s were only half-serious: The villains were identifiably bad guys and usually spoke English with an ominous foreign accent. But their nationalities tended to be indeterminate, and their good-guy adversaries went into battle in black tie (or a slim-fitting gray worsted suit in Napoleon Solo’s case), with perfectly coiffed hair, an abundance of wisecracks, and an entourage of glamorous women.
Only TV’s Get Smart (1965-70), featuring a clueless/incompetent agent played by a stand-up comedian named Don Adams, played the genre exclusively for laughs.
The Scrapbook would argue that in the midst of all the guffaws and gunfire there was an irony at play. The real Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, which was no laughing matter, was going on at the time: The first James Bond movie (Dr. No) was released the same year (1962) as the Cuban Missile Crisis. And yet, with an exception or two, the villains’ identities in these movies and shows were obscure at best. James Bond’s adversaries tended not to be the KGB but power-crazed capitalists in underground complexes; Napoleon Solo’s employer, the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement (U.N.C.L.E.), seemed to be a kind of multinational agency like Interpol.
Indeed, Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin were a Hollywood liberal’s dream come true: two good-looking secret agents—one American, one Russian—joining forces against predatory businessmen and privatized armies. Just as James Bond rarely mentions Moscow, the men from U.N.C.L.E. were cold warriors in a world without a Cold War. So it’s fitting, in a sense, that Robert Vaughn should have died in the same week as the first election in which Democrats discovered that Russians can be the bad guys.
