The name's Saltzman, Harry Saltzman

When it comes time to celebrate 50 years of the James Bond franchise on Friday – Dr No was released on 5 October, 1962 – I hope we recall the half-forgotten man of the whole enterprise: the man who, after reading Goldfinger, discerned the potential movie fortune lying dormant in the novels of Ian Fleming; the man who made Sean Connery a star, and sealed Michael Caine's future by giving him his own spy franchise; the man whom one-time producing partner Tony Richardson called "a huckster, a sublime huckster". I hope we remember Harry Saltzman.

Saltzman was, by all accounts, the ultimate caricature of the movie producer: warm, loud, crass, a consummate gambler with the requisite rackety past, a keen eye for the main chance and a tight fist around the purse strings. For all that, Saltzman ended up being behind some of the most important movies in 1960s British cinema.

He was part of the large and largely undocumented influx of creative Canadians that landed in London in the late 1950 and early 60s (culminating with CBC's Sydney Newman's arrival at the BBC's plays department in 1962). Unlike those who arrived direct from Toronto and Montreal – including actors Donald Sutherland and John Vernon, novelist Mordecai Richler and director Ted Kotcheff – Saltzman had stayed on in Europe after the second world war, and had a yen for the theatre, his true love.

As a theatre impresario he was a washout, but in England he joined Woodfall Films, the production outfit of Tony Richardson and John Osborne, then intent upon replicating on the screen their revolutionary achievements in West End theatre. Their Look Back In Anger adaptation was a flop but Saltzman and Woodfall caught the fleeting zeitgeist – and hit paydirt – with Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, making a star of Albert Finney. Saltzman dropped out of Woodfall before its 1963 mega-hit Tom Jones, but James Bond was just over the horizon. Saltzman superintended the writing, sculpting the character and the essence of the franchise – accentuating the Englishness of it all – and pushed for the roughneck Sean Connery as Bond over the effete James Mason-ish toffs mulled by Fleming and producer Cubby Broccoli.

Once Bond got going, Saltzman, ever contradictory, produced his own anti-Bond franchise from Len Deighton's spy novels, starting with The Ipcress File in 1965. Here, the Bond glitz was displaced by Saltzman's other favoured ethos, kitchen sink realism, and some kind of 60s circle was made complete. He also, bless him, backed Welles's Chimes At Midnight.

Saltzman seems to have stepped straight out of one of Mordecai Richler's novels about blazingly nervy and alive Canadian-Jewish bluffers and gamblers. Without him, British cinema of the 1960s – and ever after – would look decidedly different, and be a lot less fun.