Wade’s entrance into the scene shouldn’t feel as disruptive as it is. After all, Bond has often teamed with Americans to complete his missions. The most famous example is CIA agent Felix Leiter, a character from the Fleming novels who made his cinematic debut in the first Eon Bond film, Dr. No (1962), and appeared in eight more movies, most recently as played by Jeffery Wright in the Craig era. Bond has even been stuck with outsized American personalities, most infamously the Southern-fried Sheriff J.W. Pepper (Clifton James), who encounters Bond in the Louisiana-set Live and Let Die, but somehow shows up in Thailand one year later in The Man With the Golden Gun.
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Wade feels like something different. He’s not incompetent like Pepper, as he provides Bond with necessary connections. However, he’s not a smooth professional like Leiter. In fact, he dismisses Bond’s attempts to hold to spycraft procedure. “One of these days you guys are gonna learn just to drop it,” he gripes about the Brits.
With that line, Wade reveals his purpose in GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). He represents America as the winner of the Cold War, happy and safe, but not always aware. We viewers are like him, but we don’t entirely believe that he’s protecting the free world.
Much of the character’s success can be attributed to the man who plays him, Joe Don Baker, who recently passed at the age of 89. Best known by some as the subject of the classic Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes Mitchell! and Final Justice, Baker was a reliable character actor. He brought his Texan charm to his hitman in Don Siegel’s Charley Varrick (1973), a sleazy private eye in Cape Fear (1991), and even to the lead role of a no-nonsense sheriff in the hicksploitation great Walking Tall (1973).
Baker excelled at being likable and capable, even when untrustworthy, skills that served him well as Wade and in his previous Bond outing, playing an unrelated, and absurd, arms dealer in The Living Daylights. In the Dalton movie, Baker played a dangerous oaf, a man with no military experience who cosplays as a general to sell his weapons. The relaxed Wade almost serves as a rejoinder to that character, insisting that such absurd threats are no longer real since the wall came down. We can all take it easy now. We are in, as some Americans smugly thought in the 1990s, “the end of history.”
Of course Bond rejects that premise and Bond is proven right, implying that America might be going soft in its end of history dominance, but England remains on guard.